SHOHEI VISITED DUNEDIN!!

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You know a man isn’t just jerking you around if he’s willing to fly to Dunedin, Florida, for you. And, folks, Shohei Ohtani has reportedly flown to Dunedin, Florida, in order to visit the Toronto Blue Jays’ player development complex!!!

I’ll be honest, when we were all having a chuckle about Ross Atkins checking in with reporters via Zoom from a top secret, very obviously Ohtani-related location on Monday afternoon, I entirely assumed it had something to do with the meetings reportedly held in Los Angeles in over the weekend. Not once did I even dream that they’d already moved into the next phase of negotiations and actually got the two-time MVP to visit them. However, just after midnight here on Tuesday, the Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that Blue Jays “club officials are believed to have met Monday with the Japanese superstar at the team’s spring-training complex in Dunedin.”

Ken calls this “the clearest sign yet of the Blue Jays’ interest” in Ohtani. That’s pretty tough to disagree with, considering they were willing to skip such a huge chunk of the all-important Winter Meetings to do so, and that Atkins would subject himself to such a farce as the now-infamous Zoom call. Hopefully Ohtani took note.

But I think that much, much more importantly, it’s the clearest sign yet of his interest in the Jays. And, perhaps, a signal that there’s something Ohtani might value quite a bit more than a lot of the chatter originating from the United States has considered thus far: facilities.

This is an x-factor that I wrote about back on Friday, and that Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith and Arden Zwelling spoke about extensively on the most recent episode of their At the Letters podcast. Rosenthal notes that Ohtani’s “trademarks include an intense focus on preparation and relentless attention to detail,” and that’s probably even underselling it.

Here’s an anecdote that Arden told during the aforementioned episode:

I did spend some time around him before he came over to MLB, in '16 or '17. I went to see him in Japan, and I wrote a Sportsnet Magazine story on him—for listeners, a magazine is this printed product that they used to have in the stone ages in which there would be words in print; it's pretty incredible, you can look it up at the library. So I went over, and I spent several days with Shohei, and I saw his routine firsthand. And look, this was like six, seven years ago at this point. This was two years before he was even posted by the Nippon Ham Fighters. And even at that point he was somebody who was very intentional, very deliberate, very involved in the way that he trained, in the way that he took care of his body, the way that he ate.

A lot of what we talked about, him and I, were just about the new training methodologies that he was just starting to learn. Because at that point he was, like, very early 20s. And he was even showing the Ham Fighters some things that their strength people—talking to their trainers and to their conditioning folks, they were like, “We learn from Shohei. He brings stuff to the table that he wants to be doing, that he wants us to incorporate into his plan.”

When I saw him it was the offseason, it was winter. I remember it was cold when I went out to their training facility. And he was, like, out on the field, doing a multi-hour routine. A whole ton of training, both indoors and outdoors. Before he even picked up a bat, before he went to throw, this is somebody who was—at that age, and I am sure this has only continued since—just very, very involved in the way that he trains.

I… uh…

I think this a guy who just might appreciate a $100 million training complex that Mark Shapiro called “the best in all of baseball” when unveiling it in 2021.

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I also think this is a guy who will probably appreciate that the Jays, as Arden said in that episode, are right now trying to build out versions of these same state-of-the-art facilities under the hood at Rogers Centre.

“This may be one of the Blue Jays’ biggest advantages over the Dodgers,” explained Ben in his Monday piece for Sportsnet. L.A., he reminds us, shares a spring training facility in Arizona with the Chicago White Sox—Camelback Ranch, opened way back in 2009.

As I noted on Friday, the Dodgers really are the model franchise when it comes to player development, so it would be foolish to think they couldn’t also present some pretty compelling things on this front. But maybe it’s one thing to mould unheralded draft picks into better prospects than average, and another to hand an absolute training freak—a guy who “works out all day, and then goes back to the dorms, and reads about how to work out better tomorrow”—the keys to a truly world class gym.

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that he’s still recovering from elbow surgery that will keep him off the mound until 2025, which means he’s in for a complicated year in terms of balancing rehab and preparation for his ongoing duties as a hitter—something that could also potentially push him in the direction of the Jays and their fancy new digs.

We probably shouldn’t too get ahead of ourselves about that, of course. Or about the meaning of this visit as a whole. On Saturday, Ohtani was reportedly in San Francisco to visit the Giants’ “top decision-makers and recruiters, including Buster Posey and manager Bob Melvin.” It would be unsurprising if we heard reports of visits elsewhere in the coming days as well.

But it at least has given the Jays another chance to impress, and the more of those the get the better.

It has also, presumably, allowed them to tap into some recruiting talent of their own.

Like everything else in this saga, only time will tell whether any of it will work. But, regardless of where it goes from here, this is a huge moment. Not just in the quest for Ohtani, but for the franchise as a whole.

That this team even just got the literal Babe Ruth of the 21st century to take them seriously enough to actually visit Dunedin when deciding which team will have the unimaginably good fortune of paying him the richest contract in the history of the sport has got to be nearly impossible to fathom for anyone who has been following the Jays since Rogers bought the club from Interbrew in 2000. It says so much about where they are, what they want to be—what they can be.

They can’t lie about that any more. There’s no turning back from this.

And while there are going to be nervy moments in this yet. Like I say, we may well hear reports of him visiting another city sometime soon, and we’ll see another fan base light up Twitter with their delight. In the end it may not happen for us. Hell, this very moment may end up being the high point of the damn season and we’ll just have to press on.

But Ohtani was in Dunedin today. Like… holy shit!

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