Shohei Ohtani News: Insider Pegs Dodgers as Favorite to Land Angels Superstar in Free Agency
Angels superstar Shohei Ohtani is heading into his final season under contract before he hits true free agency for the first time. While the Halos are still maintaining at least a posture of hoping to keep Shohei, the consensus around the league is that the 2021 MVP re-signing is a longshot.
Guessing where Ohtani will end up has become nearly a full-time job for a lot of baseball pundits, and our latest example comes from Jon Heyman in the New York Post.
Some folks around baseball see the Dodgers — one of many that will make a play for Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s best player — as the very early favorite for the two-way superstar.
They cut payroll and no one denies Ohtani’s impending free agency is one of the reasons (there seem to be many).
Anyway, the Dodgers offer an enticing combination of pluses: They are perennial winners in a geographically desirable area for him (five of his seven finalists five years ago were on the West Coast), and they obviously have the wherewithal.
There's no doubt that Heyman has sources around the league, but this wording is so vague it's useless. Between "some folks" and "around baseball," this could mean almost anyone. Are we talking about general managers? Agents? Players? Coaches? Peanut vendors? Guys who sell knockoff t-shirts in stadium parking lots? And how many of them?
Okay, it's probably not the peanut guy or the t-shirt guy, but you get the point. The Dodgers are a logical option, for all the reasons Heyman mentions. Let's just not get too excited or upset or any other emotion about a report that, when you break it down, really says nothing we didn't already know.
