No matter how inured you are to the absurd money that’s thrown around sports, no matter how much you’d rather see the revenue sports generate given more to the players on the field than the owners in the skyboxes, no matter how much joy one gets from watching Shohei Ohtani play baseball in a way no one on earth has ever played it — his new $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers can’t help but make you gasp.
$700 million. 700. That’s $700 million over 10 years, $70 million a year. That’s actually twice what Jamie Dimon makes! Not only is it the largest contract in baseball history — over $270 million more than the extension Mike Trout signed with the Angels in 2019, and that deal was spread out over 12 years rather than 10 — but it’s the largest contract in the history of sports, edging the one Lionel Messi’s signed with FC Barcelona. The previous highest salary for a single season by a North American athlete was the $60.9 million the Bucks’ Damian Lillard will make in the 2025-26 season. Ohtani is going to beat that by nine million for each of the next nine years. No baseball contract has approached this one. There are reports that the contract is heavily deferred, theoretically devaluing the deal in real dollars down the line, but $700 million is $700 million.
No baseball player has even remotely resembled Shohei Ohtani, either. Comparing him to Babe Ruth isn’t fair … to Ohtani. Ruth never was a star hitter and pitcher at the same time, let alone over multiple seasons like Ohtani. We’ve never seen anything like Ohtani before. He is my favorite athlete in sports right now.
But this contract is insane.
This is not to say that a baseball player shouldn’t make $700 million. As The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal pointed out, that such a contract exists at all is a sign of the general financial health of the sport and, again, if someone’s gonna get that money, you’d rather it be someone actually wearing a uniform. Ohtani isn’t just the best baseball player in the sport, he’s the most famous and the most marketable; the income he’ll generate off the field will be substantial in addition to what he provides on it.
But Ohtani is a far riskier proposition than he is being treated, not just 10 years down the line, but even five. There are certain players, like newest Yankee Juan Soto, who are easy to project future performance on, with a consistent skillset that we have seen in players for generations; Soto gets on base, hits for power and makes solid contact. Barring catastrophic injury, he’ll be doing that five, seven, 10 years from now, particularly because Soto is still so young, only 25 years old. Soto is a safe bet.
Is it being a killjoy to argue that Ohtani is anything but? First off, Ohtani will turn 30 next year, which is obviously not old, but, generally speaking, is when players at least start to show signs of decline. Fun fact: Of the 20 top finishers in MVP voting this year, only three—Marcus Semien, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman — were 30 years or older. This is, and really has always been (with the brief and notable exception of baseball’s Steroid Era), a young man’s sport, like all sports are. Because Ohtani has only really emerged the last three seasons, there is a sense that he is younger than he is. He’s almost 30. By the end of this contract — when he will be making $70 million, or, if the reports about deferrals are true, even more than that — he will be 40. There are only two players currently on MLB rosters over the age of 40. Maybe science will be dramatically different in 2033. But 40 is still 40.
by Will Leitch, Intelligencer | Read more:
[ed. Normally I'd have the same reaction. But that passing mention of a deferred payment schedule is important. $680 million of that $700 million comes after 10 years - ie. when the contract is complete (see: Shohei Ohtani to defer $680m of $700m Dodgers deal to help new club build - Guardian). I've never seen anything like it, and it does wonders for the club's ability to acquire other important players. Crazy money aside, that strikes me as a pretty selfless gesture (given that he could probably have gotten the same amount or close to it without that clause). He's still going to make a ton of money from annual endorsements and a small annual salary, so granted, selfless is a relative term, but still...how many athletes do you see doing something for the greater good of their teams now days (Bobby Wagner and Geno Smith of the Seattle Seahawks are the only ones that immediately spring to mind). Contrast that with John Rahm's hypocritical decision to jump to the Saudi LIV golf league for upwards of half a billion dollars after denying repeatedly that he would in fact ever do that, and stressing over and over the value of tradition and real competition. Now he puts the PGA Tour in an even more compromised position, just because money was/is his primary and overriding metric. I mean, how much do you need, really? So, in the end, I have nothing but the highest respect for Mr. Ohtani and am so gratified to see that money doesn't always rule the day (these days).]
