Broadway Sho: Ohtani could be even bigger star in NY
Angels designated hitter Shohei Ohtani waves to a fan before the start of the game against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday. Credit: EPA-EFE/Shutterstock/CJ Gunther
Don’t stare too hard if you happen to spot Shohei Ohtani walking down the street when the Angels visit New York starting Tuesday.
Forget the fawning screams, and absolutely don’t do what they did in Boston on Sunday after the game, when a clip of hundreds of people waiting to watch Ohtani step onto the team bus went viral.
Just play it cool, OK?
Embrace the New York nonchalance that comes so easily when you spot Robert De Niro in line at the bodega or Taylor Swift leaving her West Village apartment with her cat in tow.
Save that adoration for when Ohtani is officially in pinstripes or on Steve Cohen’s payroll. Because when he hits free agency after this season, convincing someone as low-key as Ohtani to come to a big-market East Coast team is going to be a tough sell. It’s not an impossible one, though.
Look, any team with the resources would be out of its mind to not pursue Ohtani, who, as the world’s greatest all-around player, could be looking at a record-breaking $500 million contract. Yankees general manager Brian Cashman sure was interested when Ohtani was first cleared to join a major-league team in 2017, but the Yankees didn’t even make his list of finalists. In fact, no East Coast team made the last cut, which reportedly boiled down to the Angels, Padres, Dodgers, Mariners, Giants, Rangers and Cubs. Reports at the time said he had a preference for smaller-market teams and the West Coast lifestyle, and valued his comfort over a specific dollar amount.
None of that bodes particularly well for Cashman or Mets GM Billy Eppler, but there’s at least one thing that could make Ohtani reconsider. For all of his unique properties — top-of-the-rotation stuff with middle-of-the-order power — Ohtani is still a professional athlete, and professional athletes really, really don’t like losing. The fact that the Angels have consistently managed to lose with both Ohtani and Mike Trout is an accomplishment so baffling, you’d think it was happening on purpose.
If you need further proof, you can look to what Ohtani said at the end of last year. That was the season in which the Angels basically defied the laws of nature and managed to lose 14 straight, all while ensuring that their superstar tandem would go a fifth consecutive year without so much as sniffing October.
“August and September in particular felt longer to me than last year,” he said, The Associated Press reported. “I have a rather negative impression of this season.”
Ohtani may be low-key, but that has nothing to do with his competitiveness. This is a guy who wrote out a long list of life goals in high school and is well on his way to accomplishing a lot of them. On that list? Win a World Series. Three times.
That’s where the Mets and Yankees have their bargaining powers. Unlike Angels owner Arte Moreno, Cohen and Hal Steinbrenner begin every season with a championship-or-bust mentality. Neither should so much as blink at the 28-year-old Ohtani angling for 10 years, $500 million — not when Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Aaron Judge own the three highest average annual value contracts in baseball, and Ohtani is basically two stars for the price of one.
And though both teams need to be pursuing October success regardless of Ohtani, a World Series title sure wouldn’t hurt the wooing process. Losing to, say, the Dodgers — a West Coast team that undoubtedly will pursue him this offseason — would be suboptimal. And if the Yankees want to trot out Judge — a low-key superstar in his own right — and use him to convince Ohtani that New York isn’t so bad a place, well, that wouldn’t hurt. If the Mets want Kodai Senga to show him how much fun it could be to have a Japanese teammate, that could work, too.
(Hey, Shohei, did you know there are 48 Japanese restaurants in New York that made the Michelin Guide? Mark Canha is a foodie — we’re sure he can take you.)
As for everyone else: Be on your best behavior for this three-game series at the Stadium, got it? And Mets fans, the same goes for you when the Angels visit Flushing in August.
Having Ohtani play in New York would be good for baseball (and good for New Yorkers). And it would be a blast to have him on the sport’s biggest stage. Now the Yankees or Mets just have to do a good enough job of convincing him of that.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
