While Los Angeles Dodgers supporters were celebrating the historic $700 million signing of Shohei Ohtani, countless baseball fans north of the border were crushed and left wondering what went wrong.
Inaccurate reports and rumors on Friday suggested that Ohtani was flying to Toronto to meet with the Blue Jays. Naturally, Jays fans across Canada got awfully excited and felt as though their team was about to land the two-way superstar.
According to Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, the Ohtani-Toronto rumors caused “angst among” some Dodgers executives.
Presumably, this caused the Dodgers to up their offer for Ohtani, who eventually agreed to the richest contract in the history of professional sports over 10 years:
“On Friday, reports broke that Ohtani’s signing was imminent and that he was headed to Toronto to sign with the Blue Jays. The report was completely erroneous. The Dodgers didn’t know that. They held meetings Friday night with an air of worry. The rumors were likely false, they decided, but they still created angst among the Los Angeles executives.
“You just don’t know,” s ays one of the Dodger executives when asked about the Friday night meeting. “That’s the best way to describe it. We just didn’t know. It was not a comfortable feeling.””
Whether or not Ohtani seriously considered the Blue Jays? Only Ohtani and his camp know. The Dodgers were always the heavy front-runners to land the two-time AL MVP, and no other club was going to match their $700 million offer.
