Well, what’s the old saying about the easiest way to make God laugh? Tell Him about your plans?
Yeah. God is guffawing right now.
And look: we have no idea what lurks in Steve Cohen’s heart, or in his mind. Only Cohen knows if he has harbored a plan to flex his financial might to sweep Shohei Ohtani off his feet in a few months, force him to build a reluctant path east to collect hundreds of millions of Cohen’s dollars. It feels like the Mets’ owner is committed to discipline and building the whole of his organization, and not drifting back into the realm of platinum-player trophy signings. He talks that way a lot, anyway.
But he still has more money than (the aforementioned) God burning a hole in his bank account. It seems unlikely that he wouldn’t have at least made a run at seeing if he could give the best baseball player on the planet a half-billion (or so) excellent reasons to plant his flag in Flushing for the next 10 years.
You would think that Cohen may actually have thought twice before shelling out $141.3 million for the Alberto Giacometti statue, or the $165 million he forked over for a Roy Lichtenstein painting that serve as two features of his $1 billion art collection — until he actually wrote the checks. And then he probably felt pretty good about doing it.
We don’t know. We can’t know.
But what we do know is this: suddenly there are warning bells attached to Ohtani. This is cruel news for baseball, as a whole, because Ohtani is the most remarkable ballplayer the game has seen in years, a star fireballer and a star slugger, a two-in-one marvel on the verge of commencing what was to be the most intriguing free-agent runway walk of all time.
And that unofficial kickoff was to begin Friday night at Citi Field. An old college basketball recruiting trick was for coaches to fill field houses with students simply so they could chant a blue-chipper’s name and make him feel the love; maybe Cohen wasn’t prepared to go that far, even if he had decided to make a full-court press.
But it would’ve been a hell of a weekend either way.
Except now, to paraphrase Paul McCartney, today Ohtani isn’t half the man he was yesterday. Or at least half the baseball player. He has a UCL tear. That could mean Tommy John surgery, and he’s already had one of those. So suddenly, whatever suitors line up for Ohtani — and you would think (or hope) that includes the Yankees as well as the Mets — have something to give them pause beyond sticker shock.
What happens now?
Again: Cohen is such a wild card it’s hard to game what he’s thinking even as he has displayed a modicum of patience and adherence to big-picture issues. If Ohtani, 29, does get the surgery, that means he won’t be a full-time, full-season two-way player until 2025, at age 31, at the earliest. At $50 million a year or so, that’s a big difference. Who knows what level of offense he’d be able to bring in the interim, either; his two least-impactful offensive years were 2019 and 2020, when he was recovering from his last surgery. Again: if money is no object, then neither would be the wait.
But there is other uncertainty. Ohtani obviously came back well from his first Tommy John. But how about two others who had the surgery a year after he did — Noah Syndergaard and Luis Severino? It’s a sobering reminder that some come back even better from Tommy John but some, most assuredly, do not.
If anything, it makes you wonder if maybe Ohtani isn’t now a smarter move for the Yankees, assuming they would be willing to take a huge swing from the heels.
At this point you have to at least ponder the possibility that Ohtani’s days as a dominant pitcher are numbered, if not over. His longer promise was always as a dominant slugger anyway. And if you put his left-handed swing in the lefty Valhalla of Yankee Stadium, and stack he and Aaron Judge back-to-back for the next eight years (in whichever order you choose) … well, that best-case scenario alone would almost seem to pay for itself.
This is terrible news for Ohtani, and just one more kick to the gut for the Angels, and it’s sad for baseball at large.
But in New York?
The chessboard has officially been flipped open. The intrigue of a half-billion-dollar decision has officially been amped up on either end of the Triboro. Gentlemen, start your coffers, and prepare your offers. It really is game on.
