Color Me Skeptical

Baseball-reference.com compares Shohei with his 681 career hits to Pete Alonso, Tony Clark and Greg Walker. The thirty-eight career wins puts him in the company of Jose Fernandez, Mike Clevinger (!) and Jose Urquidy. Somehow, all those modest names turned into a $700 million contract for Ohtani. Nice work, if you can get it. With pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, major-league “work” doesn’t even enter into it, or at least it didn’t for the Dodgers, who on Thursday signed Yamamoto to a twelve-year deal worth $325 million. Not one inning, not one-third of an inning, not one pitch in the major leagues, and a monster contract. Nice payoff, if you can get it. As you might expect, all the usual suspects love the deal; it shows how serious Los Angeles is in getting back to the World Series. OK, but Yamamoto stands all of 5’10”. That’s Tim Lincecum territory, and Lincecum had seven ten-plus-win seasons, three of them under .500. Lincecum made an estimated $102.55 million over the course of a ten-year career. Oh, and he was done at age thirty-two. Yamamoto will turn twenty-six next August. I won’t get all Jerry Reinsdorf here and go into Cassandra mode about the dangers of long-term deals for pitchers. The Dodgers either got it right, or they’ll crash and burn. But this does inflate—dare I say “artificially”?—the value of starting pitchers. Given a choice, I’d take Ichiro and Hideo Nomo over Ohtani and Yamamoto. Time will tell.