Everybody wants Shohei Ohtani – The Post

These days, the Japanese baseball phenom will decide his next team: The contract he signs could be one of the richest in the history of North American sports.

The North American baseball season ended in November, but the American press and television continue to talk about it insistently, because these days the most exciting and promising player in the league will decide who his next team will be. The player in question is Japanese phenomenon Shohei Ohtani, who arrived in the United States five years ago and now, at the age of 29, is ready to enter the best phase of his career and thus sign a new contract, according to many experts. Be the most profitable in the history of professional baseball.

For the major league, the North American Professional Baseball League, it is a decision so anticipated and influential that it occupies not only a large portion of newspaper and sports news space, but also the official channels of the league itself, with News in real time Which has been updated for at least a week. One of the latest relaunched news stories says that “Ohtani received multiple offers exceeding $500 million”: This contract will be the richest contract ever signed in the history of North American sports, even higher than the ten-year, $450 million contract Location in 2020. By quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

Ohtani has already entered major league history because he brought back with him his so-called character Two-way playerthat is, that player who is not only able to hit and throw both, but does both with very high returns: in Ohtani’s case he is comparable only to the players of Babe Ruth, the legendary player for the New York Yankees and baseball player for the century he does.

Thanks to his unique skills, Ohtani was elected Rookie of the Year in his first season in the United States, a two-time American League Most Valuable Player – one of the two leagues that make up the Major League – and a cover man. the offer, the video game to which baseball is what FIFA (now FC) is to soccer. In the midst of these accolades, he broke records like few others in history: he became the first player to be selected to the All-Star Game as both a baserunner and leadoff hitter, for example, but also the first to have both. His first throw of the season in the same game.

What makes all of this even more significant is that Ohtani has thus far played for a second or even third division team, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Disney’s old team, with whom he has never played a playoff game. So he was always absent from the defining moment of the season, which is also the most watched and relevant, the moment when great players make a name for themselves that can often transcend the sporting dimension.

For Ohtani, choosing his next team will impact his career more than anything else he has done so far. Whoever succeeds in signing him will have in his hands a player with tremendous potential, both in terms of athletic performance and on the commercial side, taking into account that he is already everywhere in Japan. It doesn’t seem to matter that he won’t be able to play until 2025, due to recent elbow surgery that was performed preventatively to ensure his career has as few setbacks as possible.

To analysts and baseball experts interviewed in recent days on television and newspapers, every team in the league with enough ambition and money to sign him is trying to do just that. Moreover, last season, all the major league teams failed, in one form or another: first and foremost, the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and Los Angeles Dodgers, who missed the playoffs. In the case of the Yankees or New York’s other team, the Mets, their massive economic potential does not seem to be of much use in this case, as they are not considered competitive enough to attract Ohtani.

According to the latest news taken from the American League website, it seems that the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, Toronto Blue Jays and San Francisco are the most fortunate teams, but in negotiations and speculation these days it is not excluded that there are other teams. He added. The Dodgers have been named favorites, and the hypothesis that Ohtani is moving from suburban Anaheim to nearby Los Angeles is particularly suggestive, both for the weight the city has in the global sports panorama and for the possibility that the Dodgers could open up a championship series. Long successes, after the three finals held in the past six years.

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