Tag Archives: Shohei Ohtani

Ohtani-Mizuhara vs. Rose

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Ippei Mizhuara, Shohei Ohtani

Did Mizuhara steal from Ohtani to cover his gambling debts through an illegal bookie? Did Ohtani naïvely agree to pay Mizhuara’s debts without knowing the legal and MLB trouble he’d see?

Barely a week after I received an advance copy of Keith O’Brien’s Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, there comes a scandal that provokes yet another round of social media demands that Rose be let off the hook for that which does not yet apply incontrovertibly to baseball’s biggest contemporary star.

Barely did the Dodgers come away from their unusual regular-season opening in Korea with a 5-2 win over the Padres when news exploded that the Dodgers handed a pink slip to Shohei Othani’s longtime friend and interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, over accusations involving sports gambling.

The least confusing portion is that Mizuhara used Ohtani’s money to cover gambling debts incurred in California, where sports betting remains illegal. But one moment, Mizuhara claimed Ohtani wired the money to cover before. In another moment, Ohtani’s attorneys claimed Mizhuara somehow stole the money from Ohtani’s account.

What seems to be the unspoken-but-agreed-upon point is that, until now, nobody had Othani on any gambling radar. Right there it should drive the Rose case comparisons away. As O’Brien’s book reminds us, Rose had a gambling habit rooted in childhood excursions to race tracks watching his father bet the horses and matured into gambling with street bookmakers. Gambling that was on his team’s and then his entire sport’s radar long before he graduated to the kind of betting that prompted baseball to investigate him formally and banish him permanently.

Mizuhara may face legal penalties for his sports bettings through an Orange County bookie, but nobody’s yet accusing him of betting on baseball itself—either on his own or on behalf of Ohtani—and making it stick. Everything tumbled out both so quickly and so clumsily that building a timeline must be a chore for those who try.

Rose’s remaining partisans aboard social media (and elsewhere, perhaps) seem to think the foregoing alone should mean re-opening the Rose case and ramming him into the Hall of Fame. To many of them, Rose could shoot someone on Cincinnati’s Vine Street and still not lose sycophants. They seem blissfully devoid of accepting that only one man is responsible for Rose’s continuing status.

I don’t know if O’Brien’s book will change the minds of those who insist, despite that mountain range of evidence, that the Rose case deserves a review whenever any scandalous baseball behaviour—gambling or otherwise—comes to light. More’s the pity. A longtime journalist from the Boston Globe to NPR, O’Brien has provided a deeper look into the wherefores of Rose’s life in and out of baseball than just about any previous volume.

O’Brien is a Cincinnatian himself who admits right out of the gate that he, like most Cincinnatians are presumed to do, has “felt every emotion” about Rose: “[P]ride, disgust, frustration, pity, and confusion. Only one thing hasn’t changed over the years: my fascination with his story. He was Icarus in red stirrup socks and cleats. He was the American dream sliding headfirst into third. He was both a miracle and a disaster, and he still is today.”

It’s arguable that no great player of Rose’s time was quite as self-made, quite as bent to play above and beyond his natural endowments. Maybe no great player was as solipsistically reckless, either. The longer Rose proved and re-proved himself at the plate and on the field as the junkyard dog who could hang with and overthrow those snooty Westminster Kennel Club hounds, the deeper became his belief that he was invulnerable to accountability for his risky, rakish, and reckless off-field pursuits.

His own Reds employers feared for his safety once they began catching the winds that Rose’s gambling habits weren’t just limited to the racetracks. Betting with bookies, betting on sports, gradually betting through a Brooklyn bookie named Michael Bertolini who placed Rose’s bets with other New York bookies and kept meticulous notebooks recording Rose’s baseball betting—including on his own team—at least as early as April 1985, when he was the Reds’ player-manager.

“A manager betting on his own team could harm the game—­even if he was bet-
ting on the team to win,” O’Brien writes, well aware that Rule 21(d) does not distinguish between betting on or against one’s team.

He could overuse a pitcher or refuse to rest a starter in pursuit of his own financial gain, and what he ­ wagered—or didn’t wager—­ could move markets in the underworld. Bertolini’s bookies in New York surely noticed when Berto was betting against Pete. Any bookie in that situation would have been justified to wonder if Berto had inside information that would make it worthwhile to go against the Reds that night. The bookies also surely noticed when Pete didn’t bet on the Reds at all. He wasn’t betting against his team; he just wasn’t betting on them. On multiple days, according the notebook, Pete sat it out, not wagering on the Reds after having done it the day before or earlier that week. It was another thing that could move markets in the underworld. And his debts—­ his mounting debts recorded in the notebook—­were especially troubling. An athlete in arrears to a bookie is an athlete in danger of being owned by that bookie, a kept man, beholden. It was the reason why baseball had its rule against gambling in the first place and the reason why that rule—­Rule 21(d)—­was posted in every clubhouse, including the Reds’ clubhouse at Riverfront Stadium.

Independent journalist (and former NBC Sports analyst) Craig Calcaterra says there are three possibilities regarding the Mizuhara-Ohtani situation:

Possibility 1) “Mizuhara is a compulsive gambler who got in way, way over his head with a bookie To pay the bookie off, he effected either one or several massive wire transfers from Ohtani’s account without authorization. He got busted, he got fired, and he’s about to be in a world of federal legal trouble and will almost certainly be permanently banned from holding a job in Major League Baseball.” Which is, Calcaterra acknowledges, is the story Ohtani’s legal team presents.

Possibility 2) “These were Mizuhara’s gambling debts and, as per his and the spokesperson’s comments to ESPN, Ohtani felt bad for him, wanted to help him out, and covered his debts by transferring the money to the bookie . . . If this is what happened, Ohtani will be in pretty big trouble both with the feds and with Major League Baseball.” Rule 21(f) gives baseball’s commissioner discretion in punishing a player, manager, coach, clubhouse worker, front-office person who’s gambled or otherwise associated with illegal bookmakers. (Leo Durocher once learned the hard way, when then-commissioner Happy Chandler suspended him for 1947.)

“A player paying a bookie for a team employee’s illegal gambling debts, and doing so via means that represent federal crimes, creates an astounding amount of risk and would seriously damage the game,” Calcaterra writes. “If this were to be born out and Manfred did nothing, he’d basically be [urinating] all over baseball’s single most important off-the-field rule.”

Possibility 3) “These were Ohtani’s gambling debts and Mizuhara is taking a bullet for his patron . . . If this were the case it would be the biggest baseball scandal since the Black Sox, right? Ohtani would not only be in criminal jeopardy for illegal gambling but he’d probably face a permanent ban from the game. It’d be absolutely massive and would upend professional sports for a very, very long time.”

Having presented those three possiblities, Calcaterra thinks of them thus:

1) Too many assumptions must be made to make stick a thought that Mizuhara managed to mulct Ohtani’s money without a proven say-so.

2) It’s the simplest of the three prospects, not to mention it “flows with what we all want to think about Ohtani being a decent guy and a loyal friend which is something none of us know for a fact, obviously, but we’ve never been given reason to doubt it either, all of my usual ‘we don’t know anyone, not that well’ disclaimers notwithstanding.”

3) Highly doubtful, sans evidence. “Again, I know none of us know anyone,” Calcaterra continues, “but nothing we know about Ohtani suggests that he’s reckless, impulsive, or, frankly, stupid enough for this kind of business. It’d be the biggest heel-turn in the history of sports (non-professional wrestling edition), and it just does not compute for me at all.”

Meanwhile, it’s wise to remember that just because MLB has entered into promotional relationships with legal sports betting outfits on and offline, that doesn’t mean players, managers, coaches, clubhouse workers, or front-office personnel can just bet on baseball any old time they choose it. Fans can bet on baseball to their heart’s content, anywhere and any time they want. Baseball personnel can’t.

They can bet on anything else they want, from March Madness to a college fraternity’s cockroach races. But they can’t do it through unauthorised or illegal bookmakers. And Rule 21(d) hasn’t been and won’t likely be superceded or repealed.

I repeat: Nothing credible has emerged to show Mizuhara or Ohtani betting on baseball, even though Ohtani’s partisans (they, too, are legion) know what a terrible look this week’s eruption holds. But the concurrent noise insisting that this, too, is yet another reason Pete Rose deserves a pardon and his plaque in Cooperstown, is just that. Noise.

If Rule 21(d) plus the Hall of Fame’s block on Hall ballot appearances for anyone on MLB’s permanently-ineligible list can’t quell such noise, you’d like to think Mr. O’Brien’s forthcoming book should. Should, but, alas, probably won’t.

Ohtani gets his lucre and his wish

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Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani signs with the Dodgers for a decade, $700 million, and the thing he wants most—better chances to win. Angel fans mourn the absolute waste of the game’s most transcendent talent.

It was almost to laugh. Within an hour of the news breaking and confirmed that Shohei Ohtani signed at last, and with the Dodgers, yet, there also came the news that some Angel fans began holding burnings of one or another kind of Ohtani merchandise. It was to laugh that you wouldn’t weep, of course.

Set aside what Ohtani signed for for the moment. Yes, it’s ten years and $700 million. It’s also no opt-out clauses in the deal. It’s also Ohtani himself deferring a considerable pile of that guaranteed money the better to enable the Dodgers to continue sustaining excellence via the farm and the market.

Now, consider the abject stupidity of the Angels and some of their fans. You want to burn Ohtani merch because, as a legitimate, lawful free agent, he signed elsewhere at all? Never mind with the beasts just up the freeway? Be my guest—and stand exposed as the fools you are.

The fools who’d rather turn Ohtani merch into burnt ashes than demand better of the team that let him walk with nothing of value in return—while going for broke elsewhere at the trade deadline only to unload two of the pieces they did acquire by way of the waiver wire at September’s beginning . . . just after Ohtani’s elbow took him off the mound for the season without sitting him down as a designated hitter.

The fools who’d rather have kept Ohtani bound to a team whose administration seems clueless about the point that you need a viable team around them to enable Ohtani and whatever might be left of future Hall of Famer Mike Trout to play for chances at championships. The point that one or two players do not a championship contender make, no matter how overendowed in ability and execution they’ve been.

You want to make Ohtani an example instead of holding Angels owner Arte Moreno and his trained seals in the front office accountable for thinking the box office is the thing and if you just so happen to win it’s mere gravy? Be my guest again. And stand exposed further.

For so long as he’s owned the Angels Moreno’s marketing background, the business in which he earned his fortune, has dominated what the Angels put on the field. Whether what they put on the field could play competent or cohesive baseball up and down the lineup seemed secondary to having what George Steinbrenner used to call “name guys who put fannies in the seats.”

It was bad enough that the Angels unearthed the transcendent Trout and saw him build a jaw-dropping Hall of Fame case in his first nine seasons before the injury bug bit into him in too much earnest over the past four. It was worse that Trout showed his loyalty to the team that discovered him and turned him loose on the field by signing a glandular extension only to have too many people wondering if he hadn’t lost his marble for it.

It was worse that Trout got to play with Ohtani, himself an injury bug victim for a couple of years following his Rookie of the Year season, and formed a tandem of transcendence (when Trout could play) that proved nothing more than a two-man supershow in the middle of a sad-sack sideshow.

“Ohtani has said he wanted to win,” writes The Athletic‘s Andy McCullough.

The Dodgers have won their division in ten of the past eleven seasons and tallied more than one hundred victories in five of the past six full seasons . . . [Ohtani] has been never part of a team with a front office capable of regularly rebuilding a pitching staff with excellent results, as Andrew Friedman has often done. And he has never played for an ownership consortium like Mark Walter’s Guggenheim group, who have been willing to invest in facilities, infrastructure and ancillary considerations.

That’s putting things politely. The hottest item at last season’s trade deadline was whether the Angels would wake up, wise up, and trade him for legitimate return value on the field and in the organisation at last. No chance.

Now it’s possible that Trout will return healthy, play like something close enough to the Trout who punched his Cooperstown ticket, stir up speculation on whether the Angels finally deal him to a contender with rich return to offer, and find himself still bound and gagged to an owner who’s willing to invest in his box office alone.

Quit the hemming and hawing over Ohtani’s deal raising an unconscionable ceiling for the free agents to follow him in the current market. Instead of bellowing over the big bad Dodgers handing him what amounts to a Delta Quadrant kingdom plus safe passage through the Cardassian Empire and ownership of Ferengi Enterprises, try bellowing over other owners’ too-entrenched refusal to invest and build in the major league product and the organisation behind it.

The Red Sox unloading Babe Ruth to the Yankees was nothing like this. Then, believe it or not, the Red Sox thought they were unloading a problem child to help relieve their owner’s financial stresses, not all of which was tied to his concurrent theatrical production operation. The Ruth sale helped temporarily.

Ohtani, anything but a problem child, was allowed to walk into free agency eyes wide shut on the part of the Angels. It was perverse fun, too, watching the sports press get their proverbial panties into twists trying to figure out what was in Ohtani’s heart of hearts while he and his agent played things close enough to the vest. I couldn’t resist joining the fun for a moment, outlining a top ten list of what Ohtani was really thinking, feeling, wanting . . .

When Dodger manager Dave Roberts admitted the Dodgers talked to Ohtani and he’d have loved nothing more than to see Ohtani in Dodger silks, panties into twists turned nuclear, they thought Roberts’s honesty might have killed any deal in gestation. So much for that idea.

Too often with Trout injured Ohtani had to provide most of the Angels’ offense. Joining the Dodgers that burden is lifted. He can swing the bat comfortably and not believe every one of nine innings of baseball is on his shoulders. When he recovers from elbow surgery and takes the mound again in 2025, Ohtani has good reason to believe the Dodgers will have remodeled the starting rotation whose dissipation cost them this past postseason.

He didn’t have one millionth of a prayer of seeing that happen if he elected to re-sign with the Angels. Being a guy who makes baseball fun again is one thing. Coming home after yet another losing or short-of-the-postseason season proved something else.

So go ahead, some of you Angel fans. Burn his jerseys, blow up his bobbleheads, use his photos and posters for fish wrap if you must. You’re going to look almost as foolish for it as your team’s owner has looked for having resources unfettered and brains inoperable the entire time Ohtani wore Angels red. Almost.

Angel fans who don’t have coconut juice for brains began flocking to Angel Stadium to mourn within two hours of Ohtani himself scooping the world by announcing his Dodgers deal on Instagram. A crane already began stripping Ohtani’s mural from the side of the stadium. Fans slipped into the stadium’s team store to snap up Ohtani merch before it would disappear forever.

They came to mourn.

And one fan, Sebastian Romero, lifted a page from the books of long-suffering Athletics fans whose owner has stripped the team of credibility only to wrest approval for hijacking them to Las Vegas. Outside the stadium, Romero held up a sign before the Ohtani mural behind him was stripped, as photographed by Athletic writer Sam Blum:

As Blum noted so mournfully, Ohtani’s past three seasons have been three of the greatest the game has ever seen from a single player, on both sides of the ball, yet, with the Angels going 77-85, 73-89 and 73-89. What a waste of Ohtani hitting 124 home runs and striking out 542 batters worth two unanimous Most Valuable Player awards over that span.

A young man of few words for the press, Ohtani is on record as saying that, much as he loved the Angels, “More than that, I want to win. That’s the biggest thing for me. So, I’ll leave it at that.” Nobody can say the Angels weren’t warned. Nobody can say the Dodgers lack the resources or the brains to make that wish come true, either.

Now, I wonder. When Ohtani meets Clayton Kershaw as a Dodger for the first time, will he begin the conversation by saying, “About that All-Star Game pickoff, buddy . . . ?”

The Shoh is on hiatus

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Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout

Ohtani (left) is done for the season, an oblique injury added to his elbow’s now-reinforced UCL tear. He can walk in free agency, but Trout (right) may be entertaining trade thoughts a lot more deeply now . . .

George F. Will once wrote (in Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball) that A. Bartlett Giamatti was to baseball’s commissionership what Sandy Koufax was to the pitcher’s mound, having “the greatest ratio of excellence to longevity.” The Athletic‘s Marc Carig wrote last Satuday of Shohei Ohtani, “singular excellence is no match for collective mediocrity.”

Last Friday, Ohtani’s Angel Stadium locker was empty, and a large duffel containing his equipment and other belongings sat in front of it, after he was placed in the injured list at last—with an oblique strain. “No ceremonial sendoff,” Carig wrote. “No expressions of gratitude. Just a tender oblique and a good old-fashioned Gen Z ghosting. How appropriate. Now the credits roll on a baseball travesty.”

Ohtani has also undergone surgery on his pitching elbow at last. His surgeon, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the same surgeon who performed Ohtani’s prior Tommy John surgery—called the new procedure “reinforcement” of the torn ulnar collateral ligament, not full Tommy John surgery. It means Ohtani won’t pitch again until 2025, but he will suit up as a DH in 2024. For whom, only time and the off-season free agency market to be will tell.

“Thank you very much for everyone’s prayers and kind words,” Ohtani said on Instagram following the Tuesday procedure. “It was very unfortunate that I couldn’t finish out the year on the field, but I will be rooting on the boys until the end. I will work as hard as I can and do my best to come back on the diamond stronger than ever.”

Note that he didn’t say for whom he expects to come back after signing a new deal this winter.

A baseball travesty? The Angels had the two greatest players of their time together in their fatigues for six years, and they couldn’t support the two with a competent, competitive supporting cast who could pick it up when one or both was injured. It was as if the 1962-66 Dodgers had swapped in the ’62-’66 Mets for everyone except Hall of Famers Koufax and Don Drysdale.

Carig called it “sabotage.” You could think of far worse applications. “They did this through general mismanagement and their own brand of incompetence,” Carig continued. “Those sins endured despite their churn of managers and front-office regimes, only further reinforcing that the full credit for this failure falls at the feet of the constant throughout it all: the owner, Arte Moreno.”

It may be wasting breath and writing space to recycle that Moreno brought a marketer’s mentality to a baseball team, aiming once and forever at what George Steinbrenner used to call “name guys who put fannies in the seats,” without stopping first to ponder whether they’d equal a cohering team on the field and at the plate and whether his true baseball people had other such cohering parts in mind. And, whether it was always good for a player’s health.

Baseball people who did stop to ponder such things didn’t last long under Moreno’s command. Whether by way of the owner’s caprices or by way of their own mistakes turned into impossible-to-ignore disaster, Moreno’s Angels have been the Steinbrenner Yankees of the 1980s as you might have imagined them if The Boss hadn’t been so shamelessly public a nuisance.

Think about this: It took an oblique strain almost four weeks later for the Angels to do what should have been done when Ohtani’s ulnar collateral ligmanent tear took him off the mound but not out of the batter’s box. The adults in the room should have overruled Ohtani’s understandable desire to continue at least with his formidable bat, disabled him entirely, and placed his health at top priority.

You can only imagine the look when last Friday came with Ohtani’s packed duffel in front of his locker. Don’t be shocked at it. If he can’t play the rest of the season, he can come to the park in moral support without having to unpack it or bring it from home.

Someone had to find the adults in the Angel room in the first place. Apparently, there were none to be found. Whether draining the farm at the trade deadline for one more run at it that proved impossible, whether turning right around and waiving most of what they drained the farm for, whether managing the health of their two supermarquee presences, the Angels room remains bereft of adults.

Oft-injured third baseman Anthony Rendon, who’s had little but injury trouble since signing big with the Angels as a free agent, developed a habit of discussing his injuries with a wary sarcasm, until he finally cut the crap and said the shin injury incurred on the Fourth of July wasn’t the mere bone bruise the Angels said it was but, rather, a full-on tibia fracture—and that he only learned it was a fracture in mid-August.

Now, Rendon was asked whether he was actually considering retirement from the game. “I’ve been contemplating it for the last ten years,” he said. If he actually does it, it would give the Angels something other teams would love but might raise fresh alarms in Anaheim: financial flexibility. Just what they need, more room for fannies-in-the-seats guys assembled with no more rhyme, reason, or reality.

Mike Trout, the player of the decade of the 2010s and still formidable when healthy, has been injury riddled the past few seasons. He may not be jeopardising his Hall of Fame resume, but something is badly amiss when he feels compelled to return perhaps a little sooner than he should return, then ends up back in injury drydock yet again after one game.

Once upon a time it was impossible to think of Trout anywhere but Anaheim. But trade speculation and fantasies around him have sprung up now more than in the recent past. Trout himself has dropped hints that he’s exhausted of the team doing either too little or not enough (take your pick) to build a genuinely, sustainingly competitive team around himself and Ohtani.

That’s not what he signed up for when he signed that blockbuster ten-year, $370 million plus extension a year ahead of what would have been his first free agency. That’s not what he signed up for when he showed the world he wasn’t that anxious then to leave the team on which he fashioned and burnished a jaw-dropping Hall of Fame case.

It was Trout, too, who welcomed Ohtani to the Angels with open arms and personal charm, then had to find too many ways to grin and bear it as the pair—when healthy—performed transcendence while surrounded by unimportance. If Trout now questions the Angels’ commitment to competitiveness and their regard for the health of those in their fatigues, pondering himself as well as Ohtani, only fools would blame him.

Most major league teams would kill to have even one such king of kings on their roster. Two of this year’s affirmed division winners (the Braves, the Dodgers) have at least one each. (Ronald Acuna, Jr., Braves; Mookie Betts, Dodgers.) The Angels had the two most singular such kings of kings and blew it higher and wider than the Hiroshima mushroom cloud.

“What remains stunning in all of this,” Carig wrote, “is the level of waste. The Angels have succeeded like nobody else in doing so little with so much.”

Sound organizations create a plan and then follow it. These Angels, not so much. A throughline can be drawn from Albert Pujols to Anthony Rendon, with Ohtani and Trout’s extension in between. What’s clear is that all of these big-ticket transactions weren’t part of some grand plan. Rather, they were the product of a billionaire collecting baubles, just faces to slap on a billboard.

Ohtani’s free agency is still liable to become a bidding war of stakes once thought unfathomable. With or without his recovery time limiting him to a DH role, Ohtani’s going to have suitors unwilling to surrender until he does. Which one will convince him they know what they’re doing to fashion truly competitive teams around him? We’ll know soon enough.

But considering that baseball medicine can still be tried by jury for malpractise, whomever plans to out-romance the Angels for Ohtani and seduce them into a deal for Trout had better come with adults in the room to manage them and their health prudently. There’s no point telling the billionaire with his baubles and billboards to grow up otherwise.

Some of us tried to warn you

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Shohei Ohtani

Torn UCL. Possible Tommy John surgery. Baseball’s unicorn is only human, after all. What will be Ohtani’s most sensible future?

I was thisclose to dining on a full crow dinner and saying I was wrong two years ago. About what? About the sustained viability of Shohei Ohtani as a two-way player, an above-average pitcher and above-average hitter.

That was then: the New York Post‘s Joel Sherman and MLB Network’s Brian Kenny argued loud enough over Shohei Ohtani’s likely life as a two-way player who was above average in both directions. Kenny said it was time to think of keeping Ohtani in one way (as a hitter) and Sherman went apoplectic.

“Why would you stop him from doing one or the other?” Sherman all but demanded. “[Because] one could damage the other,” answered Kenny, the author of Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution.

“So, you would like one of the fifteen to twenty best starting pitchers in baseball to stop starting because you’re worried about something that could happen?” Sherman rejoined, perhaps bypassing for the moment that Ohtani had already had Tommy John surgery and missed all of 2019 on the mound—and missed the final half of September that year as a designated hitter after surgery on his bipartate patella.

This is now: what could happen has happened. What began with his pitching arm “bothering” him awhile since the All-Star break has turned into a second ulnar collateral ligament tear and a very possible second Tommy John surgery to come. Waiter, cancel that crow dinner. Just bring me a bourbon and Coke Zero, light ice, and a reuben sandwich.

And forget about what Wednesday night’s devastating revelation means for Ohtani’s open market. Forget the babillion dollars he was likely to command in the off-season to come. Maybe that was the season’s biggest story, especially after the Angels rolled a pair of hollowed-out dice and declined to trade him for a rebuilding beginning at this year’s deadline. Now, that story’s on ice. For how long, who knows?

I’ve said it before. The split second you hear about a pitcher dealing with “arm fatigue,” you can bet your mortgage on it being something a lot more serious. Ohtani dealt with it in the preceding few weeks. “[I]t’s possibly fair to second guess whether the Angels should have proactively reined Ohtani in more at times,” writes The Athletic‘s Sam Blum.

“Possibly fair?” People who first-guessed whether the Angels should have reined Ohtani in proactively at times had their heads handed to them. Sherman tried to do that to Kenny. I took a few in the chops myself for my own similar suggestion.

Go ahead, say the “arm fatigue” didn’t stop Ohtani from throwing his first major league shutout at the Tigers on 27 July.  But then you must acknowledge that the Angels pushed it for three straight years. In one way you couldn’t blame them. They had so little else to offer, and had already so wasted the prime of future Hall of Famer Mike Trout, the no-questions-asked best position player of the 2010s, that they couldn’t resist pushing their and baseball’s greatest unicorn to the most outer of his outer limits.

He won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in 2021. He was leading the league in home runs as he went down and the talk kept up that he might be able to bust Aaron Judge’s single-season AL home run record just a year after Judge set it in the first place. On the mound, he kept up his 11.4 strikeouts-per-nine rate and his 3.04 strikeout-to-walk rate.

Let’s not forget, too, that the only one having more fun watching Ohtani has been Ohtani himself having more fun doing it than we’ve had watching it. You’ve heard of a smile that could get a city through a power blackout? Ohtani’s is a smile that could get half the country through one. Even when Clayton Kershaw picked him off almost by mistake in last year’s All-Star Game, Ohtani’s smile out-shone the lights in Dodger Stadium when both he and Kershaw laughed their fool heads off.

Shohei Ohtani

He found love on a two-way street. Will he lose it on the Tommy John highway?

Was it that easy to be blinded by the light? Even allowing that Angels owner Arte Moreno has long been far more concerned with putting fannies in the Angel Stadium seats than putting sensibly-built winning baseball teams on the field in front of those seats, was it that simple to be blinded by the Ohtani light?

All those delicious comparisons of Ohtani to Babe Ruth tended to omit two key elements: 1) Ruth was never a full-time two-way player except in one season (1919); Ohtani’s done it almost his entire major league life. 2) When Ruth was a fuller-time pitcher, it was in an era where hard-throwing pitchers were outliers and Ruth wasn’t exactly the type to try throwing the proverbial lamb chop past the proverbial wolf.

There was always the concurrent risk that Ohtani could be injured at the plate or on the bases, too. Once upon a time, he fouled one off his foot that rebounded to hit his surgically-repaired left knee—on the leg that’s his landing leg when he pitches. Any time Ohtani incurred a bang, a bump, or a cramp on the mound or at the plate, Anaheim, America, and the world lit up.

This isn’t just a bang, a bump, or a cramp. Not even if Ohtani did complain about a few finger cramps in recent days. This is a young man’s career and what remains of his team’s credibility on the line now. This is also a scrambler for the rest of the Show. Teams calculating just how much they could afford to seduce Ohtani this winter and start making their 2024 pennant race plans accordingly now must remake/remodel those calculations.

Especially if Ohtani must undergo his second Tommy John surgery. If so, he won’t be seen on the mound all next year as well as the rest of this season. If the Angels have any brain cells left to rub together, they’ll shut him down fully the rest of this year. He can’t afford to do further damage with even one hard swing at the plate or one hard slide on the bases.

I’m not going to deny it. It’s been mad fun watching Ohtani the unicorn doing things even the Babe himself didn’t do, or at least didn’t do quite as well as Ohtani has done them. Until Wednesday night, Ohtani threatened to join Ruth as the only man to set a single-season home run record while pitching full time as well. Ruth did that with the 1919 Red Sox—with 29 home runs. Nobody was really betting against Ohtani hitting maybe 63 this year.

Maybe the most surreal of his uncornery this year was Ohtani receiving four intentional walks as a pitcher. Ruth only ever had that happen twice in a season. (1919.) Schoolboy Row (1947) and Chad Kimsey (1931) are the only other pitchers to get four free passes at the plate in a season. And Ohtani was the first pitcher to get even one free pass at the plate since Hall of Famer Jim Kaat (1970).

On the mound, Ohtani was leading the entire Show with a 5.8 hits-per-nine average and the American League with a 143 ERA+. At the plate, he was leading the entire Show with those 44 bombs and a 183 OPS+, a 1.069 OPS, and a .664 slugging percentage. According to my Real Batting Average (RBA) metric (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearance), Ohtani this year is batting Boeing: .737. That, folks, is Ted Williams territory: the Splinter’s lifetime RBA is .740.

The problem with all that kind of mad fun is that it takes a toll. Either we didn’t really stop to think about it; or, we didn’t give two tinkers’ damns while watching it, dropping our jaws over it, imagining the language on his eventual Hall of Fame plaque over it, you name it. Joe and Jane Fan forget baseball players are only human and not machinery. They thought Ohtani was Superman with an immunity to kryptonite.

The money? Ohtani’s already earned enough in the Show to have no money worries the rest of his life. (When this season ends, it’ll be $39.6 million.) He’s never been about the money, anyway. What he’s been about was the pleasure in overachievement. One way or the other, he’ll get his money when he recovers, even if it may not be as ionospheric as thought before Wednesday. Even if he has to begin with a one-year, Sho-us deal to start over.

But if he has to undergo his second Tommy John surgery, would Ohtani accept a life as a one-way player that might mean a longer baseball career than he might have if he continues his two-way thrust? It may take more time to know that answer than it would take for him to recuperate from the second TJ.

On last year’s Opening Day, I got to watch up front with my son in Angel Stadium when Ohtani launched the season by pitching four-and-two-thirds, one-run, four-hit, one-walk, nine-strikeout (including Astros face José Altuve thrice) ball. I’ve seen enough otherwise on the screen (am I really that old that I almost wrote “the tube?”) to know this guy was a unicorn even among unicorns.

Those of us who feared disaster in the offing should take no pleasure in what’s happened now. No matter how hard we took it up the tailpipes when we warned about it a few years ago. Now we ask just how much of his baseball future Ohtani may have sacrificed on behalf of pitching weekly, batting nightly, for a team whose maladministration didn’t deserve him any more than they deserved Mike Trout’s prime.

Who cares now whether Ohtani will throw a no-hitter and hit four home runs in the same game eventually? He’s already performed a nasty sacrifice on behalf of thrilling the living you-know-what out of us and sustaining what little credibility his team has left.

Shut him down fully the rest of this season. Don’t even let him swing the bat. Let the still-young man (29) regain his health properly. For everything he’s done on behalf of a franchise that doesn’t deserve him, if not a game whose administration doesn’t, Ohtani should get every consideration possible now.

Moreno won’t trade Ohtani? Let it be on his head

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Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani could bring back a trade deadline haul that might push the Angels (and their trading partner, depending) into the postseason at last. But it would serve their owner right for failing to deal him and then letting him walk as a free agent bringing back . . . nothing.

Unless there is something festering in the deep background that nobody can expose, I have a contrarian thought for everyone insisting Angels owner Arte Moreno absolutely must trade Shohei Ohtani. I ask only that you save your ammunition until you read whole.

If Moreno’s that insistent upon keeping Ohtani until that very day when he becomes a free agent for the first time after the season ends, let him.

If Moreno insists upon remaining the kind of owner whose sense of marketing is more acute to the tenth power than his sense of baseball and of his team’s true competitiveness, let him.

If Moreno is that bent upon receiving nothing in return for Ohtani by letting him walk this coming winter, rather than receive the kind of value whose terms his baseball people can all but dictate, considering the prize Ohtani is, let him.

It would serve him right, even if it might serve long-enough-suffering Angel fans not so right.

Remember, this is the owner who was “exploring options” to sell the Angels almost a year ago. When that news broke, the sigh of relief from Angel fans could be felt from the Newport Beach coast to the farthest-planted lighthouse in Maine.

Moreno even let it slip that he had a pair of offers that would have eclipsed what Steve Cohen paid to buy the Mets. The problem was, Moreno let that slip this past March, when he also announced he simply couldn’t bear to part with the Angels just yet. Not while there was (ahem) “unfinished business” to tend.

“[We] feel we can make a positive impact on the future of the team and the fan experience,” he said in a formal statement when announcing his sale plans were done for who knew how long. “This offseason we committed to a franchise record player payroll and still want to accomplish our goal of bringing a World Series championship back to our fans. We are excited about this next chapter of Angels baseball.”

As of this morning, the Angels had gone from a season-opening 18-14 to a dead-even 48-48. The last time they had a four-or-more-games-over-.500 standing was when they were nine games over following a two-out-of-three winning stand against the Royals in mid-June. They’ve been 7-15 since.

The culprits have been the usual ones for this team—inconsistent pitching by one and all not named Ohtani; inconsistent hitting by one and all not named Ohtani (or Mike Trout); and, a near-consistent parade of patients for the injured list. Somehow, the Angels are four and a half games back in the American League wild card race, and nine out of first in the AL West.

That’s close enough for a major trade deadline deal to maybe make a difference, for the wild card hunt if not the division hunt. Right now, the biggest deal of deadline season could be Ohtani for whatever prime enough talent he’ll bring back, even if the acquiring team knows he might be just a rental for the rest of the way. (Even if that means a division, a pennant, maybe even a World Series ring.)

For a contending team loaded in surplus, that rental could still mean a deep postseason dive. For the Angels, it might mean surviving into the postseason, even through the back door, but just enough to give Ohtani (and Trout) a taste of postseason action neither has been granted to see since Ohtani became an Angel in the first place.

No, Ohtani won’t return a whole qualified starting rotation, a whole bullpen full of more than bull, or an entire additional lineup of Ohtanis (or Trouts). But he would return pieces solid enough to keep the Angels in this race and maybe, just maybe, a race or two to come.

“Ohtani is a once in a lifetime player, and moving off of him is akin to trading Babe Ruth,” writes Deadspin‘s Sean Beckwith. “You hold onto that kind of talent for as long as possible, and hope for the best.” And that last part, Beckwith knows, is the most problematic part:

Considering “hoping for the best” is the Angels’ entire organizational strategy — it’s why they’re in this current predicament — they will inevitably be crippled by indecision, or disillusioned by the “LA” on the hat, and stand semi-firm that Ohtani will stand by them.

This is, of course, an asinine strategy, and antithetical to the thinking of front offices, and sports media. The pleas for trade destination slideshows are being heeded everywhere you click, and all the big market teams are tallying their assets to see how much they could offer in a trade, because [general manager Perry] Minasian said he’s not going to trade Ohtani if they’re still in contention.

The thing is, contention is subjective, and four-and-a-half games back of the final wild card spot is more than enough for the Angels to grasp onto the belief that Shohei Ohtani will stay regardless of no tangible reason to do so.

It’s more than enough, too, to prevent Moreno—an owner who thought (erroneously) that his life’s success in marketing qualified him as a baseball man, when it only meant he could put (the old George Steinbrenner creed) “name guys who put fannies in the seats” on the field first and worry about rhyme, reason, cohesion, and performance (an awful lot of which his own capriciousness obstructed) second—from doing the sensible thing. Or, from letting Minasian do the sensible thing.

So let him cling to Ohtani until the two-way unicorn’s Angels deal expires this winter. Let him get less than nothing in return for the unicorn if that’s the way he wants it. Ohtani has been at least as sensational a baseball talent as Mike Trout was before the injuries became a near-annual thing for him. He (and Trout) deserve better than to be kept prisoners to merely hoping for the best.

Let Moreno explain why clinging to his unicorn to the very last was more important than letting his unicorn bring back what just might have pushed the Angels into their first postseason since they were swept out of a division series by the Royals, in the first of Mike Trout’s three Most Valuable Player Award seasons. Nine years ago, if you’re scoring at home.

That explanation should prove the funniest and saddest monologue since the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel first wandered onto the stage of a fleabag nightclub to schpritz about her husband dumping her for his secretary. Mrs. Maisel got laughs and a brilliant career out of it. It would serve Moreno right to get nothing back for the unicorn to whom he sold an illusion.