Sho Me the Money: Why Star Baseball Players Are Earners, But Not Always Winners
On Shohei, WAR across the major sports, weak-link winners, and what exactly you pay $700M for.
It’s 2012, and 17-year-old Shohei Ohtani is on the mound. Ohtani is representing his high school team in a regional tournament in Japan, and there are hundreds of fans and even a TV outlet covering the game. There’s two outs in the sixth, with two runners on base, and the camera zooms in on Ohtani’s face as he nods to the catcher, locking into a pitch. As he postures up to throw, you don’t yet see the 6’4” frame or the broad shoulders that will muscle 450-foot homers whenever he’s in the box instead of the mound, but you still see Ohtani there, sure as anything.
He fires a fastball over the left side of the plate, and everyone in the stadium knows it is faster than any 17-year-old should be throwing anything. Ohtani’s eyes go to the scoreboard, where the park's radar gun reads 98.8 mph. Ohtani puffs his cheeks and smiles a smile that says, “Watch this.” The batter is still in the box, but now it’s just Ohtani against the gun. Ohtani fires a fastball down and left. He doesn’t even need to look at the board. He’s already mid-fist pump when the crowd sees the number and roars: 99.4 mph.
Ten years later, that same smile was frequently on display as Ohtani broke nearly every record in baseball. He became the first MLB player to record 100+ strikeouts as a pitcher and 100+ RBIs as a hitter. Ohtani won the AL MVP award, was named the AP Athlete of the Year, made Time 100’s list of most influential people, was the first player ever to start the All-Star Game as a pitcher and a hitter, and set two Guinness World records.
That campaign turned out to be the first of a three-year stretch that many believe is the best in baseball history.
Following the 2023 season, Ohtani’s contract with the Los Angeles Angels expired, and he hit free agency. Despite concern over a second UCL tear, every team in the league lined up for the Shohei sweepstakes.
The winning bid? $700M over ten years to sign with the L.A. Dodgers. The contract is the largest in the history of baseball by nearly $300M. It dwarfs the former largest contract in North American sports, Patrick Mahomes at $450M.
Ohtani has also deferred $680M of the deal until after 2033, giving the Dodgers the financial flexibility to add further to the roster. Shohei is positioning himself to dominate in just about the only place he hasn’t already: the win column.
You wouldn’t be able to guess from the two MVP awards and non-stop coverage on ESPN, but Ohtani has never had a winning season in the MLB. Even with a future hall-of-famer next to him, Mike Trout, Ohtani’s Angels never made the postseason in his six-year tenure.
There are plenty of theories on those underperforming Ohtani-era Angels - poor pitching, bad management, injuries, misses in free agency, etc. The most compelling idea is also the simplest: Ohtani and Trout just couldn’t do it on their own. It’s a claim we wouldn’t believe for almost any other sport. In the NBA, it’s common to see teams with two stars and a team of role players win the championship. In the NFL, elite quarterbacks make up a quarter of the salary cap and still find a way to the Super Bowl. That Ohtani was able to put up these legendary numbers next to another Hall-of-Famer in his prime and couldn’t even get the Angels to October is a story about more than just Ohtani. It makes you wonder how important stars are to winning baseball games at all.
Measure it in Wins
The first step to understanding a player’s impact on their team is to isolate and quantify it. Fortunately, there’s a stat for that. Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is a metric that tracks the number of wins a player adds to the team compared to a “replacement level” player. We can use it to understand how many wins Ohtani’s historic play added over the last few years for the Angels.
Ohtani was first in the MLB in WAR in 2021 and 2023. He was second to Aaron Judge’s HR record season in 2022. Ohtani added 28.7 wins in that stretch, 9.5 per season on average.
Even though that’s a lot by baseball standards, consider this: If you added a second Ohtani to those Angels teams that put up identical numbers to the first one, they’re still about 15 wins away from the best teams in the MLB. You would have to add a third Ohtani - creating a lead-off order of Ohtani, Trout, Ohtani (clone 1), Ohtani (clone 2) - for the Angels to lead the league in cumulative WAR.
If that impact feels undersized for one of the best baseball players in history, well, it is. That becomes even more clear when we look at elite players’ WAR in other sports. Let’s compare Ohtani’s WAR to the average NBA MVP’s WAR over the past three seasons and three years of NFL MVPs. Scale each of those seasons to the MLB’s 162 games, and the numbers look like this:
Although Ohtani may have had the best three-season stretch in baseball history, his impact is tiny compared to top football or basketball performers, and Ohtani might be the most impactful baseball player ever. Baseball stars just don’t affect outcomes as much as elite performers in other sports, and the reason lies in the structure of the game itself.
All About Touches
Consider how often the best players in sports touch the ball.
Patrick Mahomes has been the most impactful player in the NFL since he entered the league. There are around 150 plays in a football game, and Mahomes is on the field for all 75 offensive snaps. Mahomes gets to leave his imprint on the game every offensive play. Whether he throws a 60-yard bomb or a 5-yard screen, he is always threatening the defense, accruing impact on every play on the way to .25 WAR per game.
Nikola Jokic, the best player in the NBA by WAR, plays for about two-thirds of the minutes in each game. An NBA game has about 100 offensive possessions for each team, so Jokic is on offense for 67 plays per game and defending for 67 plays per game. As a result, Jokic touches the ball over 100 times per game - scoring, assisting, stealing, and blocking his way to a huge impact, around .22 WAR per game.
Compare that to Ohtani. An MLB game has around 30 at-bats per team, meaning Ohtani, at the top of the batting order, will get around 4 or 5 at-bats per game. In games where Ohtani pitches and hits, he actually posts similar WAR numbers to Jokic, .22 WAR per game. The problem is that he’s only able to do that once every five games, and even pitching that frequently forced Ohtani into a second Tommy John surgery that will keep him off the mound until 2025.
When you consider Ohtani’s batting and less frequent pitching outings, he posts around .05 WAR per game. Across sports, impact follows touches, and stars touch the ball in the MLB less than anywhere else.
Weak-link, Strong Link
Star baseball players like Ohtani don’t have a large impact on winning because the structure of baseball limits the impact of any one player. Hitters are only allowed to hit on 1/9th of the total at-bats. Pitchers can only pitch around six innings every five games, and even that much throwing was enough to cause severe structural damage to Ohtani’s elbow. These forces make constructing a baseball lineup less about individual stars and more about consistent quality throughout the lineup and pitching rotation.
This idea ties into my last piece, where I explored how NBA team-building was a strong-link problem, a situation where the best solutions focused on a few high-output, high-variance stars instead of a consistent, low-variance group of players. Part of the reason the NBA is like that is because of the amount of touches elite players get. Denver has Jokic, one of the best players in history, touching the ball on almost every offensive possession and impacting many defensive ones as well. He provides elite impact over and over on both sides of the floor.
Baseball, on the other hand, is a weak-link problem. Weak-link problems are problems that reward solutions with no “weak links”. Think of things like food safety or airline regulations, we want solutions where nothing bad gets through, not a strong link solution where some things are really safe and other components are a liability. The nine-man batting order and five-game pitching rotation make baseball a game where every player is a relatively small component in a much larger machine, and stars are no exception. If everyone touches the ball equally, a couple of below-average players quickly cancel out the production of a star.
There is no greater proof of baseball as a weak-link problem than the Angels over the last few years. Mike Trout leads all active players in career WAR. He and Ohtani were the best tandem in the league by a mile. What they lacked was a supporting cast; the Ohtani-era Angels were a strong-link solution in a weak-link sport, and it didn’t work. A few negative WAR players at the end of the lineup were able to turn a rotation with two all-time greats into a below-average baseball team.
On that Contract
But that doesn’t mean the Dodgers gave Ohtani $700M to break individual records in a different uniform. Winning baseball games may be a weak-link problem, but making money in baseball is a strong-link one, where a few stars drive most of the commercial success.
Consider the 2023 World Series: the Texas Rangers versus the Arizona Diamondbacks. These rosters are perfect examples of weak-link solutions: solid, consistent lineups with no glaring weaknesses. They were also, however, short on star power. Of the top-20 jersey sales across the MLB, a proxy to measure player popularity, only the Rangers’ Corey Seager played in the World Series. Rangers versus Diamondbacks was a weak-link World Series in terms of commercial assets, and this lack of star power tracked directly to viewership. The 2023 World Series had the worst TV ratings in history.
Because the success of a baseball team is much more about the sum of its parts than the excellence of any one part, it can lead to outcomes like the 2023 World Series: two solid teams without many big names playing on baseball's biggest stage. However, that is not the most financially desirable outcome, especially for big MLB teams, which are as much a business as a sports team.
Teams like the Dodgers are trying to build two things simultaneously - the most successful lineup and the most marketable one. They want to win a World Series but also have a great commercial product. Ohtani is worth $700M to them because he is the league's most impactful and marketable player. When the Dodgers sign him, not only are they buying 6-10 WAR per season for the better part of the next decade, but they are also buying the biggest draw for a baseball game on the planet. Ohtani is so popular in Japan that every Angels game until his injury was aired on Japanese public television. Ohtani is going to bring a nation of fans to the Dodgers.
The goal of big clubs like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Red Sox is not just winning; it’s doing it in style. Want to know the Ohtani effect off the field? An opening-day ticket for the Dodgers pre-Ohtani averaged $390. Post-Ohtani, it’s $983. The “get-in” price for a standing-room-only ticket is over $350. On the other hand, an average opening day ticket for the World Series champion Texas Rangers will run you about $130. That disparity shows us again this strange mismatch in baseball incentives: stars don’t necessarily win the most baseball games, but they are still worth their weight in gold.
Edited Excellently by Greta Gruber and Aidan King