Alexander: The Shohei Ohtani bidding war is about to get serious
The Angels won’t trade him as long as they’re contenders – we think – but their star’s impending free agency is already top of mind wherever they go.
ANAHEIM — Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, with his team about to face Shohei Ohtani on Wednesday night, was asked – twice! – during his pregame briefing if he thought the Angels’ two-way star and upcoming free agent might look good in a certain shade of blue.
No, he was most certainly not going to take the bait.
“I think every manager would say he would look better in their colors, but unfortunately, we got to oppose him tonight,” he told the first questioner. And to the second, he clarified: “Right now he’s an Angel. So I want to get hits off him and I want him to get out four times tonight. That’s what I want.”
Then, when I asked him if he’d prefer to avoid stepping into the minefield of coveting another team’s player, he added:
“I can’t afford tampering charges.”
Thus continues the delicate tap dance that already has transfixed baseball people and will continue to do so, first through the Aug. 1 trade deadline and then after the season ends. We know that Ohtani is going to be offered piles of cash this winter. We know, or at least can assume, that the Angels’ best chance of retaining Baseball’s Unicorn involves not only a whopper of a contract offer but also a demonstration during this season and into October that it is possible to win in Anaheim, to get to the postseason and make some serious noise once there.
Back-to-back 2-0 shutout losses to the Dodgers on Tuesday and Wednesday didn’t help that cause, dropping the Angels a half-game behind Houston in the American League wild-card race. But the Angels are in the hunt at this point, and General Manager Perry Minasian reiterated in a conversation with the beat writers covering the club this week that Ohtani would not be traded as long as they were contenders, though he was just vague enough to give himself some wiggle room.
“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, we like him,” Minasian said, as reported by SCNG’s Jeff Fletcher. “We hope he’s here a long time. So I think it’s pretty self-explanatory with where we’re at.”
That won’t stop the chatter. Or the assumptions, one of the stronger ones being that the Dodgers avoided the free agent market last winter, cut their luxury tax figure from $293.3 million to $250.4 million and deeded playing time to so many lower-paid rookies precisely because they’re preparing to make a serious run at Ohtani this offseason.
Where does the line start? The New York Yankees will almost certainly bid, as will the Mets. So will the Padres, assuming that owner Peter Seidler is not yet dissuaded from offering big contracts by the seeming dysfunction of his current $285.5 million payroll. And then there are the San Francisco Giants, and probably the Philadelphia Phillies, and maybe a surprise suitor or two.
How stratospheric do you think the price would be if Ohtani won both the American League MVP and the Cy Young Award this year? He might be the favorite to win both, and if an Analytics Era triple crown substituted OPS for batting average to go with home runs and RBIs, Ohtani would have a legitimate shot there, too. He leads in homers (24) and OPS (.993) and is tied for the AL lead in RBIs (58). He’s 10th in batting average (.292) after going 0 for 3 with a walk Wednesday night against the Dodger bullpen’s cast of thousands.
But Ohtani’s pitching performance Wednesday night, his first against the Dodgers in the regular season, was what we’ve come to expect. He struck out 12 in seven innings, the most strikeouts ever by an Angels pitcher against their freeway rivals, raising his league-leading total to 117. He gave up five hits, and his only mistake was an 85.4 mph cutter to Freddie Freeman that went out at 105.9 mph and landed just to the left of the center field rocks for a 1-0 Dodgers lead in the fourth.
Some perspective is in order here. Shohei has made the dual role look easy, but Wednesday was particularly challenging against the Dodgers’ cavalcade of relievers (he faced righties Brusdar Graterol and Evan Phillips and lefties Victor González and Alex Vesia).
“I was kind of busy looking at each pitcher (on the tablet) in between each at-bat,” Ohtani said through interpreter Ippie Mizuhara.
“More than the physical aspect, it’s like the mentality of switching from hitter to pitcher. Like today I had bad results at the plate, but I need to forget about that when I go to the mound. The mental part is the harder part than the physical part.”
It might be hard, but Ohtani embraces it. He asked for it in the first place. And those who suggested when Ohtani reached these shores in 2018 that he’d be the first of a wave of two-way players in the major leagues seem to have been hasty. Six years later, he’s still one of a kind.
“He deals with a lot every day,” Angels manager Phil Nevin said. “And that’s probably one of the things that impresses me the most is his routine, his preparation. He’s able to put a lot of things to the side and still be the best player in the world. That’s what impresses me the most … it’s awesome to see, but I get to see it every day. But what’s more impressive to me is away from the field, behind the scenes, how he prepares his body, his mind, even sleep, just to prepare to be the best. And he absolutely is that.”
Best player in the world … yes, he absolutely is.
And he’s about to get paid like it. We’ll know soon enough if Arte Moreno can keep him in Anaheim.
jalexander@scng.com