The $700mn financial lure used to persuade Shohei Ohtani — an athlete feted by some as the greatest baseball player of the modern era — to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers is remarkable for many reasons.
As well as being the most valuable contract ever signed in professional US sport, the headline figure is larger than Japan’s projected domestic sales of baseball equipment this year. This is not just a superstar symbolically outgrowing the Japanese game as a player; Ohtani appears, from some angles, to have outgrown it as an economic force.
Or at least, he will have done so a decade from now. By some measures the most striking aspect of the agreement is the structure that he and the club have agreed upon — a Schrodinger’s bat of a deal that is simultaneously the most and least predictable decision Ohtani could have made as a Japanese salaryman about to enter his thirties.