The Dodgers spent a billion dollars on two Japanese players this offseason. What did they get for all that money (roughly 150,325,000,000 Yen)? A Rickey Henderson in his prime-level steal.
LA Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman is about as smart as they come and his bet on generational (or epochal) Japanese talent isn’t just a LotsofMoneyball investment in dingers and Ks. In essence, Friedman has made the Dodgers, already the 22nd most valuable sports franchise on planet Earth according to Forbes, the preferred brand in arguably baseball’s most fanatical market.
The Dodgers are the best-loved team on the West Coast, and home to former MVPs Mookie Betts, Clayton Kershaw, and Freddie Freeman, but the sports commentariat still collectively wet itself when the team signed hitter/pitcher Shohei Ohtani to a contract worth $700 million over 10 years. (Yes, there’s some funny math here, Ohtani only makes $2 million per season through the end of the deal with deferred payments of $68 million from 2034 to 2043). Biggest contract ever. But also, on some level, strategically justifiable. Ohtani is an elite hitter and pitcher. He is scandal-free and an almost unprecedented talent (the precedent would be Ruth).
Also, he’s BIG IN JAPAN. In November, Japanese economist Katsuhiro Miyamoto of Kansai University estimated that in the 2023 season, when Ohtani played for the lowly Angels, his economic impact was 50.4 billion yen ($342m) which included the 1.2 billion yen ($8m) spent by Japanese fans who came to the States to see Ohtani play and the 1 billion yen ($6.7m) Japanese firms spent to advertise at Angel Stadium.
“For an individual athlete to generate this level of economic impact is unheard of,” says Prof. Miyamoto. He likened Ohtani’s economic impact in Japan as comparable to when a popular team wins the Japanese World Series.
Now for the daffy part. Professor Miyamoto posited that the number goes up to over $431 million if Ohtani ditched the Angels and signed with the Dodgers. Prescient.
Now, remember, though the Dodgers are paying Ohtani an ungodly sum over the course of his contract, they only owe him $2 per season with the deferred money sitting in an account earning interest until after the ten years are up. Which leaves a lot of money left. Friedman did some multiplication and some division and handed out another big contract, this one to 25-year-old phenom Yoshinobu Yamomoto for $325 million over 12 years–the most ever paid to a pitcher.
Two big Japanese stars. One team. One stadium. One jersey on sale in Omotesando.
In 1995, Hideo Nomo became the first Japanese player to relocate to the US to play Major League Baseball permanently. Who signed him? The Dodgers. The team understands the hidden value of an expanded fanbase. Kenta Maeda and Hiroko Kuroda both broke in with the Dodgers. Yu Darvish did a tour of duty, and the Korean pitching star Hyun-Jin Ryu started his American career in Elysian Park as well. The big-money signings are an expansion on a strategy, not a shot in the dark.
And let’s see how it’s going.
According to Fanatics, the Ohtani Dodgers jersey set the all-time record for sales in the first 48 hours after the announcement. As Sports Illustrated put it, “The native from Oshu Iwate, Japan, is the most popular professional athlete in all of sports. Combine that with the fact that he plays for one of the premium franchises in baseball, and you have record-breaking sales numbers.”
Who held the record previously? Another foreign-born superstar suddenly making waves in American sports—a little Inter Miami star named Lionel Messi.
Baseball just got its first Galactico.
