The sports world was turned upside down on Saturday, Dec. 9, when Major League Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani signed a 10-year, $700 million mega contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Yes, you read that right. $700 million.
Ironically, Ohtani will stay in Los Angeles, where he spent the first six years of his career with the Angels.
That’s beside the point, though.
Ohtani’s $700 million contract will make him the highest-paid baseball player of all time by a ridiculously large margin. According to Fox Sports, Mike Trout, a former teammate of Ohtani’s, previously held the title of the highest-paid player in MLB history with a $426.5 million contract he signed in 2019.
However, not only is that deal $273.5 million less than Ohtani’s, Trout’s is a 12-year deal, which means he earns roughly $35.5 million per year. With Ohtani’s mega-deal, he’s making $70 million per year, nearly doubling the contract of his former teammate.
I’ve always had a personal belief that professional athletes are grossly overpaid, and that opinion only grew stronger when news broke of Ohtani’s signing. Although no one else on the planet can throw a 99-mile-per-hour fastball on the corner of the plate and be able to hit a 430-foot home run, I guess in some respects, it’s warranted.
But I just can’t wrap my head around that number.
Seven hundred million.
To put it in perspective, a person does not live their 700 millionth second until they’re roughly two months past their 22nd birthday. This means there are people set to graduate from college in a few weeks who have yet to live 700 million seconds.
Take a minute to reflect on your life. Think about every memorable moment, young or old. If you’re younger than 22 years old, every single one of those moments — no matter how far apart they may seem in the timeline of your life — happened sometime within the first 700 million seconds of your life.
To take it even one step further, 700 million seconds — again, just over 22 years — was roughly Oct. 4, 2001 — less than one month after Sept. 11.
Ohtani is set to earn his $700 million over 10 years, meaning he’ll earn more than two dollars every second for the next decade.
Listen, I understand there is no one else on Earth who can do what this man is doing — he’s already the greatest baseball player of all time, in my opinion — but this is outrageous.
We’ve come to a point as a society where we’re paying people hundreds of millions of dollars to go out every day and play a child’s game. Once upon a time, Detroit Tiger Al Kaline turned down a pay raise of $5,000 ($95,000 to $100,000) because he didn’t feel he deserved it.
It’s absurd. That’s not to say Ohtani doesn’t deserve it. He’s likely put in thousands of hours of work into perfecting his craft, and it’s paying off, literally and figuratively — we haven’t seen a player like him in the game of baseball since Babe Ruth in the early 20th century.
And I haven’t even brought up the fact Ohtani is recovering from an injury, and he won’t even be able to pitch in the 2024 season.
I’m sure the Dodgers will win a World Series in this 10-year span, but will it be worth it?
