AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Brace yourself for the biggest sports contract ever

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/07/2023 (651 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you are the type of sports fan who is interested the salaries today’s modern athletes make, this promises to be one of the most exciting and intriguing years ever.

I think it’s beyond obscene how much money today’s athlete makes. In a world with so much poverty, hunger and sickness it just doesn’t make sense to pay someone tens of millions of dollars to throw a ball, shoot a puck or dunk a basketball when there is so much need all around us.

And yet, no matter how much I believe generations from now – if the planet hasn’t burned up by then – people will look at our time on earth and wonder why our priorities were so incredibly out of whack, I am weirdly and inexplicably interested in what one specific athlete will make at the end of this year.

That one player is debatably the greatest baseball player the sport has ever seen.

Japan’s Shohei Ohtani plays with Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Angels and if you’re a fan of baseball you absolutely have to watch him on TV or better yet, drive down to Minneapolis and see him play in person.

The reason I’m interested in Ohtani is because baseball hasn’t seen anything like him since the era of Babe Ruth, who both pitched and hit 714 home runs.

Ohtani is a two-way player in a sport that doesn’t have any other two-way players. When he pitches, he dominates. And when he’s not pitching, he hits a ton of home runs. (In games he pitches, he is also the Angels’ designated hitter.)

Currently the biggest salary for a hitter is Mike Trout’s annual salary of $46,874,126 (all figures in Canadian funds). For those of who doubt my logic in paragraphs two and three of this column about sports salaries being obscene, if Trout got a pay cheque every two weeks like most people, that would amount to a cheque – twice a month – of $1,802,851.

In what universe is that not perverse and morally wrong?

Back to Ohtani, the highest paid pitcher in baseball is Max Scherzer of the New York Mets. He currently gets paid, $57,150,166 a year or $2,198,083 every two weeks.

Scherzer can’t hit and Trout can’t pitch, while Ohtani doesn’t just hit and pitch, he’s great at both. The very definition of a double threat.

This season Ohtani played his 674th game. At that time he had already hit 160 home runs, which is one more than legendary Babe Ruth had after the same number of games. In other words, Ohtani is on pace to be a better hitter than Babe Ruth.

Ohtani, who will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season and thus able to pick what team he wants to join, is also mighty impressive on the pitching mound. Currently he has the second most strikeouts of any pitcher in baseball and is a guaranteed Cy Young candidate.

So, if Ohtani is one of the best hitters in the game and also one of the best pitchers in the game, he should make what Scherzer gets plus what Trout makes, right?

That, in a nutshell, is the big question and where all the intrigue is focused. How much will a team be willing to pay a dominant offensive and defensive player, someone who just might be the greatest the game has ever seen?

Ohtani is a real-life unicorn. Literally no one in baseball can do what he can do. That is neither hyperbole nor exaggeration – it is a fact. Simply put no one like him exists in baseball.

Owners must be drooling over the prospect of signing Ohtani, who will instantly make that team better by orders of magnitude.

And as Ohtani sits back and waits to see what those offers look like, the mind boggles at what that dollar figure will end up being.