Shohei Ohtani to Sign $700 Million Deal With the Los Angeles Dodgers
The Japanese star will become the highest-paid player in U.S. sports history, despite an elbow injury that casts some doubt over his future as a two-way sensation
Shohei Ohtani on Saturday announced that he will join the Los Angeles Dodgers, resolving the biggest mystery in baseball. He is set to sign a contract worth $700 million over the next 10 years that will make him one of the highest-paid athletes in pro sports history.
The move ends Ohtani’s six-year tenure with the Los Angeles Angels, where the 29-year-old Japanese star established himself as a modern-day Babe Ruth. He can pitch, he can hit, and he does both at an elite standard at the highest level of the game.
Ohtani, a two-time American League MVP, hit 44 home runs in 2023, while also making 23 starts as a pitcher until his season was cut short by an elbow injury. The injury will keep him off the mound for at least the 2024 season, but he is expected to be the designated hitter while his elbow heals throughout the year.
The hope is that Ohtani will return as a pitcher for 2025, and soon after regain the ability to be the remarkable two-way player that he was for stretches of his time in Anaheim. The Dodgers will commit an average of $70 million per year to Ohtani with the vision of him pitching and hitting proficiently over the span of his contract.
The majority of the salary will be deferred to lessen the luxury tax burden on the Dodgers, according to a person familiar with Ohtani’s contract structure. It is unclear if there are incentives or benchmarks included for reaching certain pitching or hitting milestones throughout the course of the contract.
By choosing the Dodgers, Ohtani rejected the efforts of some of baseball’s other big-market teams and their efforts to sign the most anticipated free agent of all time. The Angels, who will try to break a 10-year playoff drought this year, will be remembered as the team who lost one of the most remarkable players the sport has ever seen—to the more glamorous team that plays up the road.
The Dodgers, on the other hand, won’t merely be getting one of the greatest talents in baseball history. Ohtani is also an economy in and of himself. The Angels found themselves the beneficiaries of massive Japanese interest during his six years in Anaheim, with the club even advertising Japanese cat food during games late in his tenure.
The process that took Ohtani to Los Angeles was unusually secretive. Teams were warned by Ohtani’s camp that any leaks would rule them out of the running for his signature.
Then again, these were unique circumstances for a unique free agency situation in which the player had almost all of the $700 million leverage. For anyone else, this total contract figure would have been unimaginable. For Ohtani, who will turn 30 years old next season, salary was only the starting point for the financial calculations a team would make in deciding to sign him for what may be the rest of his career.
Through this deal, the Dodgers will challenge the New York Yankees as baseball’s most internationally beloved brand. This will catapult their business and marketing operations into a new semisphere: Where Ohtani goes, Japanese media interest follows.
When it comes to Ohtani’s actual contract, however, the Dodgers organization is working on entirely new ground. His dual abilities as a pitcher and a hitter make him easy to covet, but there were a slew of considerations in how to structure a contract for the truly unprecedented free agent. Hence, the use of deferrals in the megadeal.
Ohtani is unable to pitch for at least the next season following surgery on his torn elbow ligament—his second such procedure—but has indicated that he intends to keep pitching once he is recovered. The questions that will follow Ohtani as his career proceeds will be his ability to maintain his two-way role. What are the chances that Ohtani will make it to the conclusion of his 10-year year contract as a productive pitcher and hitter? Ohtani has already beaten the odds by becoming a two-time MVP while doing both, so the strongest precedent set by this unprecedented player is his ability to accomplish previously unimaginable things.
The Dodgers will now bear the responsibility that the Angels could never achieve: Getting Ohtani to the playoffs, the biggest stage of the game. If competing in meaningful games was Ohtani’s priority in this free agency campaign—as his representatives say is this case—then the Dodgers were his surest bet. Los Angeles has reached the playoffs every year since 2013, including winning the World Series in the shortened 2020 season. For the Dodgers, a deep playoff run isn’t just the expectation each season, but seemingly the minimum.
Ohtani, who played alongside Mike Trout in Anaheim for six seasons without a fruitful push to the playoffs, will now be surrounded by the likes of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Clayton Kershaw. The Dodgers have assembled baseball’s best superteam with Ohtani at the center.