Superstar Shohei Ohtani must love Toronto even more after spectacular Jays courtship

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Dodgers star returns to the city that helped make him even richer

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Published Apr 26, 2024  •  Last updated 13 hours ago  •  4 minute read

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Shohei Ohtani has always been fond of Toronto, some who are familiar with him say, enjoying walking around the city — Yorkville in particular — on previous visits to town as a member of the Los Angeles Angels.

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On those trips, the Japanese superstar likely appreciated a break from the attention he got elsewhere, finding Canada’s biggest city less cumbersome that way and an opportunity to meander in the closest he gets to anonymity.

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But as he returns for a three-game Rogers Centre series against the Jays starting on Friday night as a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers — no flight tracker needed this time — Ohtani has even more reasons to love it here.

We’re talking somewhere in the neighbourhood of US$100 million more that Ohtani helped extract from the Dodgers by brilliantly duping the Jays during a spectacular courtship that likely never had a shot of being consummated in Canada.

It certainly seems in hindsight that Ohtani was never going anywhere but the Dodgers, who announced a US$700 million deal with him a day after the sports world — not to mention this city — was stopped in breathless monitoring of the ultimate hoax: That the generational talent was on a private flight headed for Toronto.

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Surely this meant he was going to become a Blue Jay.

Surely this meant that Toronto GM Ross Atkins was finally going to have an off-season for the ages.

Surely this meant the Jays were finally going to take the needed jump to becoming more than wild-card contenders.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

If the Jays ever had a chance — and four months removed it certainly seems remote now that they ever did — it only adds to the allure of a rare visit from a  legendary legacy franchise with a generational talent in Ohtani who leads the National League with a .358 batting average.

All three games at the downtown dome are expected to be sellouts, played out in front of scores of Japanese media and fans, not to mention a Jays fan base not entirely sure what to make of him. I suppose there will be some booing of the reigning American League MVP  — there are always some — but in this case would they be directed more at the Toronto front office?

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To make matters worse, the Dodgers are coming in hot, winners of four in a row and with 141 runs scored, the second most in Major League Baseball.

The Jays? Not so much. They’ve dropped three in a row and four of their past five and would have returned from Kansas City weary and frustrated after the debacle of the four-game series against the Royals.

After a brief surge, the Jays have regressed back to that murky mediocre middle, at 13-13 a team that is last in the AL East and still trying to find its offensive identity after managing just five runs total in its past three against the Royals.

And perhaps that performance — and the roster makeup — was the freshest evidence of why the Jays were likely never taken too seriously by the Ohtani camp. Considering that there always would have been a preference to stay in California, also high on Ohtani’s wish list after toiling for the non-contending Angels for all of his MLB career would have been to play for a winner.

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Sure, Jays president Mark Shapiro was able to secure enough Rogers Communications coin to go all in on him, but what about the leftovers?

In Los Angeles, it was clear that Dodgers ownership was willing to spend on Ohtani and then spend some more. His trip to Dunedin, his serious talks with the Jays and the creation of a sincere courtship all surely helped squeeze as much as $100 million more from the Dodgers.

The fact that the Jays courtship reached its peak around baseball’s winter meetings — including that cloaked-in-mystery Dunedin trip that took Atkins away from the business at hand in Nashville — also couldn’t have helped.

So now it’s on to the baseball part and the sensation himself. If Ohtani “played” the Jays in the off-season, he pounded them in his previous visit here, including a post-home run viral moment between Toronto third baseman Matt Chapman and manager John Schneider. After destroying a Kevin Gausman offering in the first inning, Ohtani’s third homer in as many at-bats, Chapman confronted the manager wondering “why did we pitch to him? He’s the only (bleeping) guy on the team that can hit.'”

He’s still hitting, of course, in Dodger blue rather than for the Blue Jays. And given the history and histrionics that made it happen, on a big weekend for sports in the city, the Shohei Show may be burning at its brightest.

rlongley@postmedia.com

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