Column: How Shohei Ohtani could snap the Dodgers out of their complacency at the trade deadline
Baseball’s trade deadline is on Tuesday, and the Dodgers are once again in danger of overthinking their way into paralysis.
They’re concerned about downsides of potential trade targets, such as the workload of Chicago White Sox starter Garrett Crochet. They’re bothered by the conditions of the market, which clearly favors sellers. They’re wondering whether they could extract greater returns in the future for their most highly coveted prospects, such as double-A catcher Dalton Rushing.
The worries have mounted to where they are threatening to obscure the Dodgers’ sight of the chance that’s right in front of the team.
This is what happened last year when their most significant trade-deadline pickup was washed-up pitcher Lance Lynn, or the year before when their major summer acquisition was strikeout-prone outfielder Joey Gallo.
On Thursday, Clayton Kershaw will return to the Chavez Ravine mound, set to make his season debut for a Dodgers team that missed him more than it could have ever imagined.
Someone should be speaking up so that something like that doesn’t happen again. Someone should be reminding president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman of how the Dodgers are only a couple of additions away from reclaiming their place as World Series favorites.
Someone like Shohei Ohtani.
Ohtani has a platform. He doesn’t always use it, but when he does, he knows how to.
Take, for example, how he addressed the subject of major leaguers playing in the Olympics. The day before the All-Star Game, Ohtani was asked if he would like to play in the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. He said he would and went on to explain how Major League Baseball releasing its players for an Olympic tournament would benefit the entire sport.
Bryce Harper of the Philadelphia Phillies had addressed the subject, and so had Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees, but Ohtani knew how his voice could affect the conversation and apply public pressure on baseball commissioner Rob Manfred.
On the subject of the trade deadline, Ohtani has maintained a more neutral position.
He hasn’t pushed the front office to make any moves. He doesn’t have any plans to either.
“If I’m asked how a certain player looks from a player’s perspective, I’ll answer, of course,” Ohtani said in Japanese. “But there won’t be anything that I initiate.”
His position is understandable.
Dodgers All-Star Shohei Ohtani wants to play in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, but will MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and team owners make it happen?
Not only is Ohtani from a country in which chains of command are rarely, if ever, subverted — it’s unheard of for players to make demands of management in Nippon Professional Baseball — but the Dodgers did right by him in the winter after they signed him.
They signed outfielder Teoscar Hernández, who could be the steal of the offseason. They traded for Tyler Glasnow and signed him to a contract extension. They signed Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the most lucrative deal ever awarded to a non-Ohtani pitcher.
The billion-dollar offseason was an aberration, however.
The Dodgers are usually more cautious than this, as they typically insist on “winning” every deal, whether it be a trade or free-agent contract. This places them at the mercy of the market. When the market doesn’t present them with generous discounts, they settle for the most marginal of upgrades, which is how they ended up with Gallo as their prize one year and Lynn in another.
Ohtani’s voice can snap the front office out of its complacency.
As the best player on the team, Ohtani has the stature to make Friedman listen to him. As the sport’s No. 1 attraction, he has the leverage to be taken seriously by the team’s corporate overlords at Guggenheim Baseball Management. As a player who is deferring more than 97% of his salary, he has the moral authority to question how the Dodgers are spending the $68 million he is loaning them every year.
If LeBron James can influence the Lakers to draft his son, Ohtani should be able to convince the Dodgers to reinforce their roster.
Whether Ohtani ever decides to exercise his influence could be determined by what the Dodgers do over the next handful of days and how it affects them in October.
Ohtani is smart enough to understand the Dodgers won’t forever be in the position they are now.
Ohtani is 30. Mookie Betts is 31. Freddie Freeman is 34. Will Smith is 29. The Dodgers have each of the four All-Stars signed to long-term deals, but this could be the only season in which the team has all of them in their primes.
And who knows if Hernández will be around beyond this season, considering he is on a one-year contract and has performed well enough to sign a lucrative multiyear deal as a free agent in the winter.
The special collection of talent can be undone by pronounced shortcomings at the top of the rotation and bottom of the lineup.
If the Dodgers betray Ohtani’s trust by reverting to their customary behavior and wasting the opportunity they have now, who’s to say Ohtani wouldn’t speak up next summer?
Shohei Ohtani’s $680-million loan to the Dodgers is why the team was able to reach terms on a 12-year, $325-million deal with Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said he’s noticed how Ohtani’s personality has emerged over the course of this season, particularly after the dismissal of the interpreter who stole more than $16 million from Ohtani to cover his gambling losses.
“It’s been as fast an assimilation to a team as I’ve seen,” Roberts said. “I also feel that I’ve seen him open up, let loose, really show his true personality. He quickly became the person he was meant to be.”
Pointing to how Ohtani often shares his observations of opposing pitchers with teammates, Roberts thinks he could become a clubhouse leader.
Ohtani might have to be more than that if the Dodgers strike out again at the trade deadline. If he wants to win as much as he says he does, he might have to provide the voice that reintroduces common sense to the team’s decision-making process. This wouldn’t just be what’s best for him. This would also be what’s best for the organization.
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