Shohei Ohtani is the best-paid and most important player in MLB.
He also is not pitching this season after undergoing Tommy John surgery. He is tied — at minimum as the unwitting moneyman — to the largest gambling story in the sport since Pete Rose. He daily wears the amateurish softball uniforms that apparently no one is responsible for, yet every player must wear. He is part of a union that just warded off one of the most spineless coup d’état attempts in history.
Ohtani is pretty much playing for the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas A’s away from filling the whole Bingo card of baseball malfeasance that has pervaded the first week-plus of the 2024 season.
Just as an aside here, if neither the league nor any of his fellow magnates are going to hold A‘s owner John Fisher to even a modicum of decency and professionalism, can’t they at least demand he wear one of those Nike-designed, Fanatics-manufactured, MLB-sanctioned uniforms so we can see just how much he sweats on those rare occasions when he spins publicly about his bad stewardship? Then, just as a kicker, FanDuel can have set an over/under for how much the sweat-filled jersey and see-through pants weigh after a nonsense-filled press conference.
