by Paul Teetor
Dodger fans had a lot to celebrate this week – and it was all thanks to inept Angels owner Arte Moreno.
The Major League Baseball trade deadline came, and went with Shohei Ohtani still on the Angels roster for what surely will be the last two months of his Angels career. That means the Dodgers didn’t have to trade away all their best prospects to rent Ohtani’s services for two months and get a head-start on signing him to a long-term contract.
Now they can concentrate on wooing him as a free agent this winter by forking over more than half a billion – that’s billion with a B – dollars to lock up his services for the next 10 years without giving up anything to the Angels.
The Angels could have put Ohtani up for auction this week and harvested an incredible haul of elite prospects and draft picks desperately needed to start a much-needed and long-overdue rebuild in Anaheim.
Instead, true to form and consistent with his history of bungling every opportunity that has come his way since he bought the Angels in 2003, Moreno stubbornly clung to the hope a miracle could still happen, rather than trade the best player on the planet to the Dodgers, who were prepared to give up the very best prospects in their best-in-the-business farm system for the Japanese superstar pitcher/slugger.
As if to emphasize just how good he is – and just how bad a mistake Moreno had just made – Ohtani immediately had the greatest day any player has ever had in the more than a century that major league baseball has been played. In a Thursday double header against the Detroit Tigers Ohtani pitched a one-hit shutout to win the first game 6-0 and then hit two home runs in the second game as the Angels crushed the Tigers 11-4.
“We try not to take for granted what we have in him,” Angels Manager Phil Nevin said after the nightcap. “You hate to say that you expect greatness every day, but that’s what we get. It’s awesome to watch.”
The miracle that Moreno is still hoping for: that his team, currently six games out of the last wild-card playoff spot and boasting a five-game losing streak, will put on a late-season surge and make it into the playoffs — and then somehow battle their way into the World Series.
The odds of that happening are slightly better than winning the Mega Millions lottery, but not a whole lot better. Still, win or lose, just making it to the World Series would make it very difficult – but certainly not impossible — for Ohtani to justify leaving the Angels and making the hour-long drive up the 405 to Dodgers Stadium.
That’s because at the end of this season Ohtani will be an unrestricted free agent, free to sign with any team in the World. All Ball predicted two years ago that Ohtani would sign with the Dodgers when he finally got his chance at the open market, and we’re sticking with that forecast.
How can we be so confident that Ohtani will be leaving the Los Angeles Angels for the real Los Angeles this winter?
It’s simple.
Because if he wanted to come back to Anaheim he would have already signed a lucrative extension with the Angels. They are the only team allowed to sign him to a new contract before he becomes a free agent this winter, but he has consistently declined to do so and repeated his mantra over and over: I want to go where I can play for a World Series title every year.
And who can blame him? A huge talent like Ohtani deserves to play in the brightest of lights while he is still in his prime. After all, he is 29 years old.
The Dodgers have everything Ohtani wants and everything Moreno has been unable to give him in the six years since Ohtani stunned the baseball world by signing with the Angels.
At that time, Ohtani – through his ever-present interpreter – made two things clear: that he wanted to play on the West Coast, and that he didn’t feel ready for the bright lights and big city atmosphere of a place like Los Angeles or New York.
In the six years since then, the Angels have failed to make the playoffs even once despite having two of the five best players – Ohtani and outfielder Mike Trout – in the world.
Why? Because Moreno is a terrible owner. He has a fixation on throwing big money at big names – like Albert Pujols, Anthony Rendon, Josh Hamilton and Vernon Wells – whose best years are already behind them instead of investing all that crazy money in a farm system that can produce home-grown stars with their best years ahead of them.
The Dodgers have taken the exact opposite approach and the results are crystal clear: the Dodgers have been in the playoffs each of the last 11 years and are leading the National League West once again. And even though they’ve won only one World Series in all that time – the truncated, 2020 pandemic season championship – the point is that they’re in a position to compete for a championship every year.
It’s no stretch to suggest that the addition of Ohtani – who leads the majors in home runs with 40 and is the best pitcher out there – would have meant at least two or three more World Series titles for the Dodgers over that span.
For the last two years, that has been Ohtani’s main talking point: that he wants to be with a team that wins consistently and has a chance to compete for a World Series title every year.
No team better fits that description than the Dodgers.
They are a West Coast team with stable ownership, a player-friendly manager in Dave Roberts and a smart front office – with the exception of the bizarre, ill-fated-from-the-start Trevor Bauer signing two years ago – and you have a natural fit for both sides.
And now, because of Arte Moreno’s bungling, he will come to a Dodgers team fully loaded with their best prospects coming up from the minor leagues to fill in around Ohtani instead of heading south on the 405.
Thanks Arte.
Lakers sign Anthony Davis to lucrative extension
The Lakers took a huge gamble this week when they signed alleged “superstar” Anthony Davis to a three-year extension of his contract that still had another two years to run. By offering AD a $186 million maximum extension – that’s an astounding $62 million per season – they are gambling that he can stay healthy despite his long injury history.
And they are gambling that he will stay motivated even after LeBron James is no longer around to hound his lazy ass into getting into top physical shape every summer, just like LeBron does.
They are gambling that a player who dislikes contact will be willing to play center in the Lakers fast-paced offense, even though he has said over and over that he does not like playing center and prefers not to go up against other big, brawny centers on a nightly basis.
So why would owner Jeannie Buss and General Manager Rob Pelinka make such a reckless move? Because they essentially had no other choice.
Their only other option was to let AD play out his current contract this upcoming season. The next season, 2024-25, he had a player option. And what if he actually produced to his full potential and exceeded last year’s averages of 26 points, 12 rebounds and two blocks per game.
What then?
They would have had to pay even more to keep him away from other teams. This way they have him locked up for the next five seasons. Considering that he will be 35 at the end of the contract, there is a very real danger that at that point LeBron will be long gone and AD will be a shell of himself.
What then?
Who the hell knows.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow: @paulteetor
