Ohtani’s contract is more than just money and sense.

Ohtani’s contract is more than just money and sense.

Japanese baseball players know how to stay out of the spotlight and let their games do the talking. But Shohei Ohtani was ready to make moves for more than ten years.

He set the goal of being the first Japanese star to go straight into the Major Leagues when he was in high school. He refused to play first base or pitch when he made his professional start in Japan, which is not often done.

After six seasons with the Los Angeles Angels, he kept doing this and won a pair Most Valuable Player awards. He was also known as Shotime and Japan’s Babe Ruth.

Ohtani, who is now 29, broke another record when he signed a $700 million, 10-year deal to play over the Los Angeles Dodgers. At a time if anything seems possible, Ohtani is the only player who can truly amaze.

He signed a deal on Saturday that was as shocking as his tape measure bat and blazing fastball.
It was more than $275 million more than what his Angels teammate Mike Trout made in 2019 and $10 million greater per year than the NBA’s Damian Lillard, who had the highest annual earnings in American professional sports.

Lionel Messi, an Argentine soccer star, makes between $50 million and $60 million a year to play for Inter Miami in Major League Soccer.

Ohtani’s crazy deal shows how complicated the business side of baseball as well as professional sports in general can be.

Networks and companies pay hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to connect their brands with players and teams who perform well can come and go quickly.

Still, on Saturday, we discovered that there was more to discover. Ohtani shocked everyone by signing a deal via the Los Angeles Dodgers that guaranteed him $700 million over 10 years, with a big chunk of that money being paid after the deal is over.

Many people thought the choice was already made: the best player would go to the best team.

The way it happened—with an estimated value of 700 million, which was much higher than anyone expected—gave it the kind of power that goes with Ohtani’s biggest home runs and angriest fastballs.

From L.A. to Tokyo, the most famous athlete living, the one who pushed the limits of what was possible like no one else, got a contract that fit his size. Seven hundred million dollars. 700. Seven hundred million dollars, or seventy million dollars a year.

The deal is the biggest in the history of competitive team sports. It’s almost twice as big as the next biggest free agent deal. It shocked not only baseball fans and sports fans, but everyone in the universe.

It doesn’t matter how used you are to the crazy amounts of money that sports make or how much you’d rather see the money go to the players on the field instead of the owners in the skyboxes.

Shohei Ohtani’s new $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers will still make you gasp.

That’s twice as much as Jamie Dimon makes! Not only is it the biggest deal in baseball history—over $270 million in addition to the extension Mike Trout signed for the Angels in 2019, since the deal was spread out over 12 years instead of 10.

It’s also the biggest deal in sports history, beating out Lionel Messi’s deal with FC Barcelona.

The most money a North American player has ever made in a single season was $60.9 million, which the Bucks’ Damian Lillard will earn in the 2025–26 season. Ohtani plans to beat that with nine million every year for the next nine years.

There has been no other baseball deal like this one. Reports say that the contract puts off payments for a long time, which could make the deal less valuable in real dollars in the future, yet $700 million is still $700 million.