UTK Special 11/14/23

Pizza Pizza, Ohtani Ohtani

The crew on Foul Territory talked about this a day after I started making calls, so I swapped around some posts and pushed this out today …

“Call it the Yahoo approach,” said the baseball executive I spoke with as the basis for this article. He had suggested to me that one of the teams looking into signing Shohei Ohtani had an interesting, perhaps unique approach, at least outside of fantasy baseball.

For those of you that don’t play fantasy, the “Ohtani Problem” that occurred when he first came over is that most position players don’t pitch. If they do, it’s an emergency and no one wants weird stats from when Doug Dascenzo takes the mound (instead of Shawon Dunston, dang it.) Yahoo was controversial when they made Ohtani into two players, a pitcher and a player, requiring teams to draft him twice, or more likely splitting the Ohtani riches. I know in more than a few leagues, teams drafted Ohtani 1-2, or pushed deals to where Ohtani could be picked by the same team.

The story I was told is that an AL team is doing something like that, but for the actual Ohtani. Not cloning him or cutting him in half, but essentially preparing to sign him to two contracts. (This is all theoretical and internal, not an actual offer, yet.) His hitter’s contract would be slightly below Aaron Judge, who signed a nine-year deal with a simple $40m per year. Ohtani in this scenario would be offered somewhere between $35-$38m per season with some bonuses for things like MVP and batting titles.