Shohei Ohtani chase made Jays fans want to believe

Really, what were the odds that Shohei Ohtani was on that private plane from Southern California to Toronto on Friday? There are about seven billion humans on the planet, and one of them is an elite pitcher and hitter in Major League Baseball, so the odds were always a little long. But people in Toronto wanted to believe.

Oh course they did. Ohtani is the greatest baseball player alive, and frankly might be the best baseball player who ever played baseball, and he’s a show. He doesn’t just hit home runs: he hits CINEMATIC home runs. He doesn’t just strike out batters: When he struck out Angels teammate Mike Trout, a fellow god left to rot in the obscurity of Anaheim, for the final out in the World Baseball Classic back in March, it was the coolest baseball moment in years.

Ohtani is a majestic player, and there has never quite been anything like him. He would have changed the face of Toronto Blue Jays baseball forever.

But after a chase that played out almost entirely in private, Shohei Ohtani announced Saturday that he is a Los Angeles Dodger. The contract is reported to be for 10 years and $700 million (U.S.), with extensive deferrals — Ohtani’s idea, apparently — so that the Dodgers can add more talent to their 100-win team. In Canadian dollars that’s nearly a billion dollars, before you include anything involving a luxury tax. Jon Heyman of the New York Post reported the Jays, Angels and Dodgers were the finalists, and no decision was reached until at least late Friday night.

Ohtani wants to win. He spent six fruitless years in the dead-eyed quiet of Anaheim, where it feels like you’re hiding out from the world near a Cheesecake Factory, and the World Baseball Classic is the only glimpse North America has had of Ohtani in games that truly matter. He wanted to win there, too. 

Well, the Dodgers have reached the post-season in 11 straight seasons, winning one World Series and losing two more, and now Ohtani just needs to move from Newport Beach to, say, Beverly Hills or the Hollywood Hills or Santa Monica, wherever. It’s L.A., where you can choose to mingle with the stars or vanish into the constellation. He’s on the West Coast, that much closer to Japan. Toronto has a strong Asian population, but so does Los Angeles, and Ohtani signed the biggest sports contract in North American history. It all makes perfect sense.

Of course that leaves Toronto, and the extra stomach punch of the errant, giddy and jittery free-agent frenzy Friday. It’s frankly bizarre to blame overexcited Jays fans or internet rumours for the idea that Ohtani might be coming: The Dodgers Nation blog’s J.P. Hoornstra, a reporter who covered the Dodgers for Southern California newspapers for the last decade, cited multiple sources that Ohtani had chosen Toronto just before 2 p.m. Friday. Jon Morosi, who works for MLB Network, Fox Sports Radio, and who appears regularly on the Fan 590 in Toronto, reported that Ohtani was “en route to Toronto today,” as fans tracked a private jet. The official MLB account shared that report. So did Sportsnet.

A lot of the rest was the standard, sputtering noise of the internet, but those two reports from BBWAA-accredited journalists were the fuel and the spark, and those reporters own that. Had none of that ever happened then Jays fans could have kept a reasonable level of hope; instead it’s Kawhi Leonard to the Clippers, without the championship first.

Ohtani would have given the Jays a centrepiece that could have lifted all boats. Ohtani was second in the American League in offensive wins above replacement last season and fourth in pitching wins above replacement. He led the AL in home runs and on-base and slugging and on-base-plus-slugging percentage last year, and in strikeouts per nine innings the year before. He’s impossible.

And even though he won’t pitch this year after Tommy John surgery, he still would have given the Jays more than just a bat, and more than just an arm. Last year’s Jays ranked 20th in the majors in OPS with runners in scoring position but it felt like it was worse than that, because it was: Toronto was 25th in OPS with runners in scoring position relative to the usual level of their batters.

You know which team was the worst in those situations? The Angels. You know who was the best Angel in that department, by a mile? Shohei Ohtani, with a 1.078 OPS with runners in scoring position. The year before? 1.213, and the year before that, 1.165. He gets walked a lot in those situations, of course. He’s a god everywhere in baseball, big situations included.

Now the Jays will pivot to something else, but nothing will have the bottom-line business case of bringing Japan and baseball’s biggest star to Toronto, for a franchise whose owner submarined a WNBA team over at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment over money. No, the Jays can chase a lesser mortal or two, and hope that their lineup doesn’t come up small in big situations again, but as regional TV money goes sideways in a lot of places there aren’t that many teams in baseball that are truly trying to win. The Jays should still be one of them.

There is only one Ohtani, though, and Toronto fans can now try to forget the indignation of tracking a private jet that had a freaking "Dragons' Den" personality on it, and can try to transcend the city’s built-in inferiority complex, which is both genuine and a little nuanced depending on the sport. It would have been nice, right? It would have been majestic, really. This? This is something less.