Winter Bleatings '23: A.D.I.D.A.S.
(All Day I Dream About Shohei)
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The Toronto Blue Jays are on the precipice of either a monumental transformation of their franchise and brand, or shattering heartbreak that will further alienate their fan base, make their offseason goals incredibly more difficult to accomplish, and may ultimately alter the franchise as much in a negative way as the other outcome would be positive. It genuinely feels that stark. Though maybe that’s only because, after yet another whirlwind day of whispers out of Nashville, it doesn’t just seem like the team is merely still in the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes, it feels like they might actually be able to shock the world and win it.
Don’t get me wrong, it remains a long shot. Personally, I’m unwilling to let myself believe otherwise until I have a reason not to. But the longer the Jays stay in this thing—and, after a day of fans tracking down flight data to show private jet movement between Anaheim and Clearwater that matched with Ohtani’s reported Monday visit to Dunedin, Ross Atkins finally acknowledged to reporters what everybody already knew: they’re “being considered”—the harder it gets to not feel one’s hopes rising.
And the easier it gets to notice more and more reasons why the whole crazy scheme might just make perfect sense.
Terrifying, right?
Yes. Absolutely. But since there’s no sense wallowing in fear or pessimism until we actually have to—days like this don’t really ever come along for this franchise, you may be aware—let’s explore some of the reasons why the Jays overcoming the odds has started to almost feel possible.
Toronto
Geography was, by all accounts, pretty central to Ohtani’s first trip through free agency six years ago, but seems to be less important to him now. His willingness to fly to Dunedin this week, after previously only being interested in teams that train in Arizona, speaks volumes about that. But there’s always been more to the geography component with him than just where he trains.
In an appearance on SNY around the noon hour on Tuesday, the New York Post's Jon Heyman revealed some intriguing comments from a clubhouse source: “I spoke to a teammate of his who said that Ohtani said during the season that he did like the idea of Toronto.”
This notion was corroborated in a later piece from Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun.
Citing information from “a highly placed source familiar with the Canadian team's chase of the reigning American League MVP,” Longley tells us that “during the courtship, Ohtani has expressed his affinity for Toronto and in particular has enjoyed a city that is generally calmer and quieter than many bigger U.S. urban areas, including Los Angeles.” (Emphasis mine).
Now, when Heyman wrote about the conversation he'd referenced on SNY in a later piece for the Post, he altered what he said slightly to say that Ohtani had told the source “that he liked the idea of going to at least the Dodgers or Jays if he left the Angels.” But he also reports that Ohtani “specifically said he couldn’t see himself playing in New York”—a sentiment that, he notes, jibes with what we'd heard six years ago, and maybe speaks to the preference for a more laid back locale that Longley is hearing.
Only Ohtani knows for sure, but it is perhaps interesting that the Dodgers—clearly seen as the Jays’ main competition—also didn't have a great time of it during Ohtani's last free agent turn. Andy McCullough of the L.A. Times reported on that process back in 2018 and paints it as a frustrating one for the club (though that was largely because they felt that the player had already made up his mind about going to the American League, because at the time the NL didn't have the DH).
I don't think this tells us anything beyond the fact that L.A. might not necessarily be as much of a slam dunk as we’ve thought all along, but I'll take that! And I'll also point out that California's climate might not be as much of an advantage as expected either. Ohtani grew up in Japan's Iwate Prefecture, which actually has a similar climate to Toronto. Per Wikipedia, both Toronto and the prefecture's capital, Morioka, are classified as having a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfa), and their average high and low temperatures throughout the year track well together.
I know this probably doesn't matter much since he won't be here in the winter anyway, but nevertheless, I think it's worth adding that Ohtani also seems perfectly comfortable living in something similar to our kind of weather. Wikipedia explains:
“As a teenager, Ohtani could have played baseball for any powerhouse high school team in big cities such as Osaka or Yokohama. Instead, he opted to stay local, selecting Hanamaki Higashi High School in Iwate Prefecture, Northern Japan, the same high school as pitcher Yusei Kikuchi, whom he admired.”
ASIDE: We love our number four starter, don’t we?
And there’s something else related to Ohtani’s homeland that could potentially tilt things toward the Blue Jays, and it comes from a Tuesday evening piece by SI’s Tom Verducci:
“The Blue Jays haven’t won a pennant in a generation. If Ohtani wins there, it’s his team. If he wins with the Dodgers, who have won four of the past seven NL pennants, he is Roger Clemens joining the 1999 Yankees.
“Leaving a unique legacy is important to Ohtani. It was his manager with the [Nippon Ham] Fighters, Hideki Kuriyama, who challenged Ohtani out of high school when MLB teams such as the Dodgers wanted to sign him, presumably to be a pitcher or hitter. Kuriyama told him, ‘Dare to walk down a path nobody has taken.’ That’s when Ohtani adopted the dream of being a two-way player. In the same vein, Toronto offers Ohtani the chance to define a unique legacy, not add to an existing one.”
Related to the legacy thing is that, amazingly, Ohtani may already have a better idea than most of what it means to be a champion for Canada’s team and in the city of Toronto, thanks to a fascinating quirk of history and MLB’s schedule.
Wild, isn’t it?
I wasn’t sure at first if Zubes was joking here or not, but this is absolutely true. Ohtani and the Angels played the first of a four-game set in Toronto on June 17th, 2019, one of the absolutely craziest days in Canadian sports history. (He went 2-for-5 with a homer off of Edwin Jackson and a double off of Nick Kingham).
We obviously have no idea whether he'd have even known what had been going on a few blocks from the stadium, though it seems impossible anyone couldn't have. And what an impression that might have made!
Money
For some financial fun we go back to Longley’s piece, which despite the quote I used in the section above, was actually an outstanding exclusive about ownership’s role in the Ohtani pursuit, and the lengths they’re willing to go to land him.
“The Blue Jays are all in,” he tells us. And Rogers, his source says, is “putting its best foot forward.”
Specifically, we’re told that “the source suggested the team is willing to go well north of $500 million US (and yes, headed towards a billion Canadian).”
That figure is simultaneously shocking and unsurprising. The Jays wouldn’t have made it this far into the process without knowing they’d have the backing to get Ohtani signed. But still the numbers are absolutely bonkers. At the current exchange rate, $500 million USD is $680 million CAD. If the bidding goes up to $600 million US, now we’re talking $815 million CAD. Unbelievable sums of money.
And this is from, as I’m sure we all recall, a franchise that between A.J. Burnett in December 2005 and Russell Martin in November 2014, didn’t hand out a free agent contract bigger than the $18 million one they gave to Frank Thomas! The team that had five players offer to restructure their contracts just so the GM might scrape together $14.1 million for a one-year deal with Ervin Santana within the past decade!
Ohtani’s contract will be an unprecedented one no matter who he signs with. But if it’s actually the Blue Jays, “unprecedented” won’t even scratch the surface.
As much as I hate to say it, I can’t help but think we probably wouldn’t be here if not for Edward Rogers seizing control of his company’s board of directors from the rest of his family a couple years back. And you know what? If he actually manages to bring Ohtani to Toronto, I’ll never say a bad word about the statue of him they’ll inevitably place outside the SkyDome, next to the one of his father. Hell, I’ll even offer to build it myself.
Facilities
I’ve been saying it a lot, but I really do think the facilities are a very important factor here. Verducci also pointed to this in the piece linked above, quoting a source close to Ohtani as saying that “training and baseball are largely all that he does. He is devoted to the game.”
“Ohtani is fastidious about his high-performance training and loves high-tech methodologies and devices to track it,” Verducci adds. He also points out that “the spring training headquarters for the Angels is an antiquated minor league facility.
High performance, you say? A chance to go from an antiquated complex to the best in the league? That has to have appeal to someone wired like Ohtani.
The Rogers Centre is a factor, too. “Ohtani enjoys playing at Rogers Centre, which very much reminds him of the Sapporo Dome, his home when playing in Japan with the Fighters,” Verducci tells us.
It’s also very worth remembering that he’s just a couple months removed from having surgery to repair an ulnar collateral ligament tear in his pitching arm.
Ohtani’s ever-secretive camp has only labeled the surgery a “procedure,” but when he tore his UCL in 2018 it required Tommy John surgery, which forced him not to pitch in 2019. He also won’t pitch in 2024.
The Jays have had success with Tommy John recoveries in recent years, including Hyun Jin Ryu making it back this past season after going under the knife for the second time in his career. Of course, as medical technologies advance plenty of teams are getting better TJ outcomes, so I’m not sure that itself is a differentiator. But balancing the work he’ll need to do to get his elbow right and the work he’ll be doing to still be productive at the plate will be a challenge, and the player development complex and new setup coming to Rogers Centre will surely make that process easier and more comfortable than elsewhere. Don’t forget that he’ll be spending a lot of time in the training room.
Ross is built for this
My how the tables have turned! The wackiest part of the Winter Meetings on Monday was easily the ridiculous shroud of secrecy surrounding the whereabouts of Ross Atkins, who addressed reporters during his midday media session via Zoom from parts unknown, and refused to acknowledge the obvious reason why he wasn’t in Nashville.
On Tuesday, it was L.A. manager Dave Roberts’ turn in the hot seat, though nobody from the Dodgers seemed to have told him about the well-known Ohtani-mandated cone of silence that was supposed to be in effect. Because he absolutely talked up a storm, praising Ohtani's “poker face,” claiming that the face-to-face with him went well, at one point using the phrase “not trying to speak for him, but,” and basically discussing the meeting as though it had been with any other free agent.
Making the whole thing weirder—and funnier—though, was that Roberts absolutely was aware of Ohtani’s demands.
“We want to respect Shohei’s wishes as far as being private,” he said at one point. “But obviously people talk.”
And that was far from his only gem on the subject. Here are some others, via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale:
“I would like to be honest, and so we met with Shohei,’’ Roberts said. “I don’t feel like lying is something that I do. I was asked a question, and to be forthright in this situation, we kept it quiet. But I think that it’s going to come out at some point that we met.
“So, I don't think myself or anyone in our organization would want to lie about it.’’
LOL.
“There's a respect of privacy, which I think that we've done that,’’ Roberts said. “There is a foundational integrity part of it I feel, and not necessarily the gamesmanship part of it, which is still plausible and fair.
“For me, it's hard to get a pointed question and then to just give a false answer knowingly. So, I don't think it's disrespect to anybody in Shohei's party or on our side. I think that the details are going to be withheld, which I think they should be, but it's pretty clear he's a priority for us.’’
LMAO.
Poor Dave! But this is truly amazing stuff, particularly given the lengths that the Blue Jays (and Giants) had gone to in order to say as little as possible—and because what would happen next.
Nightengale’s piece was updated at 9:08 PM ET, after initially having been posted at 4:27 PM ET, with the funniest passage getting softened somewhat along the way. I preferred the original. Here’s how it read:
“Roberts spoke freely and relaxed for 20 minutes, but his face became serious as he spent several moments reading a text message on his phone after his session. He immediately huddled with Dodgers’ public relations officials.”
And here’s what happened when Roberts’ bosses met with reporters soon after he went rogue:
Utterly incredible.
Meaningful? I’m not so sure. Probably not. But I don’t think I’d feel great about it if I was a Dodgers fan right now.
And I certainly wouldn’t be as dismissive about it as the self-serving reporters—Dave O’Brien, who called the secrecy “pretentious BS”; Buster Olney, who scolded Ohtani and said it’s “silly”; or Ken Rosenthal, who asked “who cares?” and then stumped for the league to impose a deadline on multiyear contracts to spice up the Winter Meetings, even while acknowledging that the players' union was near-unanimous in opposing such a proposal in 2019 out of fear that “deadlines might squeeze certain players to accept below-market deals”—who seem to be most concerned about feeding the rumour mill.
Ohtani has earned the right to conduct his free agency however he wishes. And if that includes testing prospective employers to see how well they can maintain the privacy he so obviously values and is protective of—which obviously all this really is—there’s nothing wrong with that.
And hopefully on Tuesday the Dodgers flunked the test.
Meanwhile, Ross Atkins confidently went on doing what he absolutely does best: saying many words and yet nothing at all. (Clip via @theHazelMae/Sportsnet)
In his Tuesday evening piece for Sportsnet, Shi Davidi said of the above conversation that by that point in the day “the sense around the industry was that the pitches had been made to Ohtani and unless he had follow-up questions, the time for final deliberations had come.”
Could Wednesday be the day? Are we ready to find out whether Ross will ever have to pay for dinner in this town again? Might they have really pulled it off?
We may not have a choice but to find out. Hold on to your asses.
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Stellar work, Stoets. Stellar.
After reading this my biggest question is ‘Who is Nick Kingham?’