Angels Continue to Turn a Blind Eye to Improvident Shohei Ohtani Coverage
The Los Angeles Angels and the Los Angeles Dodgers are in the midst of their first freeway series of the 2023 season and the biggest storyline in front of us is undoubtedly Shohei Ohtani taking the mound and playing against a powerhouse franchise that will be after him in free agency.
It's pretty clear that opposing fans will be all over the place at Angels Stadium rocking some custom blue jerseys with Ohtani's name on the back and bring out their best recruiting methods. Even some of the biggest sports media outlets have hopped into the mix and The Athletic dropped a huge poll right before their Tuesday game in which they asked a number of current MLB players where they think that Ohtani will play once this season concludes.
This was one of the biggest questions prior to this season and team owner Arte Moreno confirmed that The Unicorn would not be traded as long as the Halos were still in the playoff hunt. Good news for him as LA is in the midst of a dominant stretch right now as they have won seven of their last ten and even took down the top AL West squad Texas Rangers.
But the results of The Athletic's poll were very interesting as out of the 96 players that participated in it, 57% chose the Dodgers as his next home. It's not super hard to see why... we are not going to sit around and act like we don't know why the Dodgers are an attractive destination.
They have one of the longest winning resumes in all of sports, boast an elite farming system when it comes to developing young pitching talent to help, and they are the closest team in terms of location other than the Angels that he could join.
But the timing of this poll was definitely pre-calculated and it only added more fuel to the fire heading into the series. Even with Mike Trout having a mediocre June thus far, the Halos have a better record than the Dodgers right now but all anybody can talk about is Ohtani potentially getting another look at his next franchise.
This should be nothing new for the Halos though... they are the ones that Ohtani chose when he first entered the league back in 2018 and they have watched develop into one of the biggest stars on Earth. They are in the midst of one of their better starts to the season in recent history and they're having fun while doing so.
Even though LA dropped that first game with some very questionable calls by the officials, they still have today to bounce back. There will be plenty of other stories like The Athletic one that surface but they will have to focus on the bigger goal at mind rather than dwelling on recruiting.
