What a great day for baseball!

LOL WTF? I don't even follow baseball but I feel like I'd listen to a 2 hour pod on this guys contract

Lol guess I’ll die

wont this set a crazy precedent?

I assume when Ohtani leaves California he won't be subject to their taxes.

I mean in theory it certainly could but you’d have to be a team with a massive payroll and a player who doesn’t give a **** about how much they’re getting paid over the next decade

Curious what the deferred payments come out to. Giving 100 million a year to a guy who isn’t playing for you a decade sucks no matter how much money you have

Probably not. I remember when Vernon Wells got released by the Yankees it actually saved him money. The Jays Angels and Yankees were all paying him but he lived in Florida so no state tax.

yeah i guess no other player makes much off the field and would do something like that

i dunno seems like a bum decision by ohtani

how much does he make off the field?

If accurate that is truly insane backloading. I could see taking "only" $10-15MM per year or something and then Bonilla-ing a huge chunk, but $2MM? For 10 years? That's peanuts.

I'm sure the Dodjas have done the math on how much of their newly-juiced revenue they'll have to set aside to fund that, but with time on their side it might actually work.

I think predictions about the future of sports can be tough to make but who the hell is watching baseball games in 10 years? If I had to expect any leagues revenue to greatly stagnate between now and then, it would be baseball.

70M could be a huge chunk for Dodgers in 10 years, but I get why they wouldn't really care if Ohtani is willing to do defer basically the whole thing

also if he leaves CA in 10 years, how does he avoid state taxes there?

the money was made in CA and the dodgers are a CA employer

The guy doesn't care about the700, that was all his agent's doing. He'll probably just give most to charity.

I read that present value of the deal is $460 million, meaning the luxury tax hit is 46 million per year.

The Athletic posted a story on the contract which stated the "CBA actually provides a rubric for estimating what Ohtani’s deal is arguably worth in light of all those deferrals."

The formula isn't posted but they go on to say, "It’s one way of estimating, when interest rates are taken into consideration, what the contract is actually worth annually. And per people briefed on the deal, that figure is $46 million for Ohtani."

So why not take the $46 million a year if that's what the Dodgers are going to be hit with against the cap anyway?

Because then you don’t get to be the 700 million man

I’m certainly no expert but someone was saying earlier today that it depends on where he goes after the 10 years is up that will dictate his taxes. I don’t know….i guess that makes sense.

I saw a tweet earlier that said the Giants made the same offer the Dodgers did. Not sure about the deferral though.

Well according to Buster Posey, Ohtani picked LA over SF because of the rampant crime and drugs in San Fran. So there’s that.

If you were paid 10K per plate appearances, how many sequential ABs would you take against prime Randy Johnson where you were guaranteed to get hit, but didn't know which pitch?

Ohtani, Betts and Freeman were all in the Yamamoto meeting. That should pretty much lock it up lol.

Ohtani’s press conference lol. 300 media, 200 from Japan.

Sounds like a question I asked when one of my girl friends was visiting. I was making bacon for breakfast and asked her how much she wanted. And she said "All of it."

I wonder if more details will come out re: Ohtani's free agency process, but as far as I can tell, it sounds they didn't try to use leverage at all to get more money at all. Apparently the Angels and the Giants were presented with the exact same deal he signed with the Dodgers and the deal framework came from Ohtani's camp. In other words, Ohtani's camp came up with an extremely team-friendly contract that they were pretty sure would work for any team that was genuinely interested in Ohtani's services (apparently not the Angels), got multiple teams to confirm that, yes of course that would work for us, then forced teams to compete on the basis of what they can offer outside of $$$.

It's almost like Ohtani liked how the process worked for him when he first came to the US (money wasn't an issue because the rules forbid him from being paid properly, so it was entirely about what the team had to offer outside of money) that he wanted to replicate the process while still being paid crazy amounts. Now it's kind of hilarious that Ohtani gets to blow out his elbow during a contract year, sign an extremely team-friendly deal and have the resulting contract still be something that gets non-baseball fans talking about how much money that is.

This is pretty binary - if you get to prepare for this specific scenario, I'm sure you can wear crazy amounts of padding specifically aimed at injury prevention and have this be free money. If you have to present as a normal MLB batter and you get hit more or less like you get hit in a real game, there's no way I'm doing this:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29768041/

HBP injury rate is something like 1/2500, but HBP rate is around 1/100, so basically I'm signing up for an injury every 25 PA (or $250K) and 17% of these injuries are head/face and 5% are concussions. I'm also guessing that MLB hitters are better at taking the pitch where it won't cause a significant injury than I would be. This is certainly not worth the money for me, though if it might be if you're broke and probably better risk/reward than selling your kidney or playing football.

Ohtani makes 45-50 million a year in non-baseball income. I have a feeling the Dodgers are going to offer him some stake in ownership in 10 years to make up for the remaining salary they owe him….if that’s legal.

Wow, watching this special on Ohtani (ESPN now) it sounds like Michael Phelps is lucky Shohei chose baseball over swimming there at one point. Sounds like he'd have all those records of the pool. His story smacks of like Babe Ruth or Bill Clinton who from first grade thought they were going to astound the world, like bigger than life. Clinton was like "Yeah I'll be Prez and I should be friends with JFK right now" as a teen, Ruth just born to shatter the standards, Shohei with like a Wooden Pyramid age 6 then grows into Ruth 2.0. "Like he knew it" or "like something else was speaking thru him so young" ... interviewees are saying. Unreal story.