WHY OH WHY WOULD ANYONE SHIP AWAY THE GREATEST SHO IN SPORTS?
Chasing Aaron Judge’s home-run record and still in playoff contention, Shohei Ohtani should be cherished as long as the Angels have him — and owner Arte Moreno would be an all-time fool to trade him
The epicenter of sports needs more than a paint job and a chemical peel. It’s an uninspiring slab of 57-year-old concrete surrounded by every fast-food chain and brewpub known to cholesterol, a suburban-sprawl relic hard by the confluence of three southern California freeways doomed to traffic snarls. Yet, Angel Stadium happens to be the home of Shohei Ohtani.
And when he lasered his 36th home run Sunday, nothing else seemed to matter except the calculators in our heads, which is unusual amid the opening of NFL training camps, the bluster of college football’s Media Days and the awarding of a Claret Jug. From now into October, we will keep wide eyeballs on a chase with far more contemporary gravitas — sorry to Patrick Mahomes, J-E-T-S fans and gamblers — than anything that happens in shoulder pads. The greatest two-way ballplayer of our lifetimes and all other lifetimes, the double-trouble sensation who rendered Babe Ruth irrelevant, has 62 games to hit 27 home runs and one-up Aaron Judge’s power milestone of last season.
He’ll probably fall short given the wear and tear of his side gig on the pitcher’s mound, which will render him human at some point, contrary to appearances and performances. But it will be one hell of a must-watch, if hell can happen in the company of Angels, as well it should. I repeat: Do not trade this slugging-and-hurling miracle, Arte Moreno. An owner would be the fool of all-time fools to ship away Ohtani — even if his team once again proves incapable of a playoff berth — and deprive a suffering fan base of a chance to witness the unprecedented. Never has a baseball player pursued a home-run record — the American League mark, at the least, if not the unofficial title of non-steroids champion (presumably) — while continuing regular rotation work often commanding in its own right, with opponents hitting a major-league-worst .195 against his arsenal.
This is history. You don’t trade history for a bundle of prospects, regardless of their potential. Shohei Ohtani is the most valuable sports commodity ever to set foot in North America. You enjoy him while you have him. You make money while you have him, such as the $20 million in Japan-based advertising signage and the large crowds that will keep venturing to an aging ballpark. You let the world see the Angels logo and red cap as he hunts Judge. You also listen closely when Ohtani says pointedly, as he did the other night: “This is my sixth year. My feelings haven’t changed about wanting to go to the playoffs with this team and win once we’re there.”
The man has spoken. So he stays. Trade him? Are you kidding? The Angels, despite the usual injury curses that have sidelined Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon, somehow remain only four games behind Toronto for the AL’s third and final wild-card berth. They just happen to be playing three games in Toronto this weekend, with Ohtani’s next start pushed back a day so he can pitch Friday against the Blue Jays, after three games in Detroit against the lowly Tigers. Trout and Rendon will be back at some point, as will Brandon Drury and Logan O’Hoppe. Oh, it won’t be easy leapfrogging the Blue Jays, New York Yankees AND Boston Red Sox, but those teams have issues. The Angels have Ohtani.
When he inevitably leaves Anaheim this offseason for the richest contract in sports history — $700 million would qualify, topping Lionel Messi — Moreno, if nothing else, would avoid a place in infamy as The Dope Who Got Rid of the Sho Hey Kid. Should he sign 31 miles up the road with the Los Angeles Dodgers, which might turn Moreno’s long-standing inferiority complex into incurable vomiting fits, at least the onus won’t be on him for trading Ohtani at the 2023 deadline. As it is, Arte The Farte — as some Angels fans call him — has seen a franchise fall into uncommon dysfunction and tragedy on his watch. If he trades Ohtani at the peak of his superpowers, he may as well sell the club and never show his face in Orange County again. You let Ohtani leave of his own volition as a free agent, and that way, he assumes responsibility for his departure.
Until then, you let your jaw slacken and appreciate the phenomenon. “Every day he wakes up thinking about how he can be the best baseball player on the planet," said his manager, Phil Nevin. “Every movement he makes is toward that purpose. Not just at the field but how he eats, how much he sleeps, how he organizes his day. He does whatever it takes to get there.”
Rarely does he let us down. “It feels like every day I come into the press room and someone says, ‘Sho set this record today. Nobody's ever done this, or that,’ ’’ Nevin told ESPN. “I’ve found I need to step back and not take it for granted.”
He already deserves an award, in addition to a probable MVP trophy for the second time, for his ability to deflect distractions. An ever-growing Japanese media corps records his every breath and twitch, speculating about trades to prospect-loaded teams as nearby as the Dodgers or far away as the Tampa Bay Rays or Baltimore Orioles. In the clubhouse, Ohtani chuckles about the hubbub with teammates.
“We kind of a joke around a lot,” he said. “But it’s nothing serious.”
As to whether Moreno and general manager Perry Minasian have approached him about a contract extension, Ohtani only shrugs. “I’ve never really had any sit-down talks like that,” he said through his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, who is something of a celebrity himself. “I see Perry like once a week in the clubhouse, and we’ve never really had conversations about that. We’re in midseason, obviously, and I’m trying to focus on the season and block everything else out. I think we’re in a decent spot to make a playoff run, which is all I’m really focused on at this moment.”
If the Angels crash in the playoff race, the Ohtani drama still keeps the ballpark busy the next two-plus months. One observer thinks he’s capable of hitting 63 or more. His name would be Aaron Judge, and he said the other night in Anaheim, while the Yankees were being swept, “Records are meant to be broken. It'll be exciting for the game if he went out there and got 63-plus. We'll see what happens. It's incredible. It's fun to watch. I don't like watching it in person, when he's playing against us, doing what he's doing, but it's fun when you can turn on the TV and see that he's throwing eight innings, striking out 10 and hitting two homers in a game.”
The media world is still cringing from a remark two years ago by ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, who slipped into xenophobic damnation — when he claims much of the world is racist — by bemoaning Ohtani’s use of an interpreter. Never mind that he knows English but prefers to hear questions in Japanese. Smith again showed why his middle initial stands for Ass.
“The fact that you got a foreign player that doesn't speak English, believe it or not, I think contributes to harming the game to some degree, when that's your box office appeal," Smith said. “It needs to be somebody like Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, those guys. And unfortunately, at this point in time, that's not the case. When you talk about an audience gravitating to the tube, or to the ballpark, to actually watch you, I don't think it helps that the No. 1 face is a dude that needs an interpreter so you can understand what the hell he's saying, in this country. That's what I'm trying to say.”
And the man is still employed.
As usual, Smith will downplay Ohtani discussions on “First Take” this week as he plunges into NFL and NBA talk. Interpret this, Stephen A.: That dude should be the No. 1 face in everything you discuss, front and center until further notice. The broadcast faux pas was glaring enough, but it still could be one-upped in the halls of baseball stupidity.
Imagine if Arte Moreno trades away the Greatest Sho in Sports. And he hits 63 home runs en route to the World Series.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.