MLB’s original Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes found itself consumed by questions of fit.
In the winter of 2017, as Ohtani embarked on the process that ultimately led him to join the Angels, these questions kept popping up alongside the ordinary queries about what a player wants and where he might go. These felt more existential. How will video games handle a two-way player? Will statisticians do anything different to calculate his WAR? Is it fair to call him a “utility player”—does baseball need a new vocabulary to describe him? How will his team balance his workload? What should be the benchmark for greatness here? Not all of these questions hoped to find answers, exactly. They functioned more as simple reminders: The modern game was not built for a player like Ohtani. To fit, baseball would need to break some of its structures and, in turn, expand its imagination.
Now, these questions seem almost quaint. All of those systems proved accommodating (or accommodating enough). The game figured it out, and the conversation moved on. There isn’t much of a point in marveling at simple novelty here anymore. Ohtani’s talent is a novelty unto itself: Why ponder where he fits in various game structures when you can just watch him? Any individual game might offer a stat line never seen in a box score before. All the questions about how this greatness works have fallen behind those about what it means, where it might find its limits and how lucky we are to watch it at all.
Every once in a while, though, Ohtani finds himself in a situation that again demands a question of fit. He runs into another reminder that modern baseball was not exactly built for him. And this summer has produced the best example in some time: hypothetical trade proposals.
How do you build a package for a player like Ohtani? We have an idea of how to value the top pitcher on the trade market. We have an idea of how to value the top hitter on the market. Yet it feels absurd even just to begin figuring out how to value one player who is both. (And a stolen-base threat, and a talent in every other area of the field, and an instant, tremendous, revenue-generating fan favorite, and …) More than anything in recent years, this seems like those old questions about how he might fit in a video game or where he might be displayed on a leaderboard. It’s a sign of just how far outside the norm he is. How might baseball expand its imagination here?
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Of course, Angels owner Arte Moreno has indicated that he does not want to trade Ohtani. That stands in stark opposition to some powerful incentives. With Ohtani’s contract expiring this year—ready for him to hit free agency this winter—it would be logical to move him for some kind of return instead of just watching him walk in December. And to keep Ohtani for one last hope of a run at October seems to border on fantastical. If the Angels are on the fringes of the playoff picture, that’s only technically so, with postseason odds of just 6.6% entering Monday. Their dreadful skid through late June and July has almost surely counted them out. (That Mike Trout is now sidelined into August after wrist surgery only makes the picture bleaker.) And yet … “Moreno almost certainly doesn’t want to be responsible for trading a player who is the best of our generation, and maybe the best of all-time,” Ken Rosenthal wrote in The Athletic earlier this month. (Whether trading such a player is really any worse than repeatedly failing to build a successful team around him is, I suppose, a matter of taste.) But still the trade rumors persist.
That’s partially because the chatter makes so much sense; to not trade Ohtani now seems just as illogical as any of the ill-fated decisions that brought the Angels to a point where trading him is a good option in the first place. But there’s something else, too. There’s the lure of those questions of fit. It’s fun to feel as if you are on the borders of the game—trying to figure out what previously impossible things might be possible after all. That’s what Ohtani has always offered. And this is a particularly delightful example. How on earth do you build this package?
You start with a top prospect. You add another. Maybe add one more? Or you go the other direction, focusing more on young, major-league-ready players than on speculating with developmental pieces. It sounds a bit delusional—any trade proposal with multiple top 100 prospects for a few months of an individual player has to. It feels like something from a fan message board or the most deranged of sports radio calls, just transparently untethered from the reality of modern player valuations. But that’s the starting point here. You’d have to sound a bit delusional to get anyone to pick up the phone. That’s the power of Ohtani.
It’s true that you can do this kind of analytical wishcasting with his eventual free agency, too. But free agency can feel one-dimensional. Ohtani will almost certainly sign the biggest contract in the history of the sport this winter. Yet the question of by how much is interesting only up to a point. There’s little room for imagination here: If players have all sorts of personal reasons for taking the deals they do, well, there is really only one concrete thing a team can ever offer them. (That would be money, more money, perhaps some acrobatic contract structuring and then more money.) We can forecast an Ohtani deal for $500 million, or $600 million or maybe, somehow, more. But we cannot play around with the same absurd particulars that we can in a hypothetical trade proposal.
We have Moreno’s reported disinterest in trading Ohtani this month. And we have the joy of imagining what might happen if he only would.
