Getty Image / Koji Watanabe
The offseason of dreams for the Los Angeles Dodgers has continued, as the team has signed free agent sensation and ace pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a massive deal.
YES Network’s Jack Curry was the first to break the news, beating all the big guns on the MLB reporting circuit.
So the Dodgers spend more than one billion dollars to sign Ohtani and Yamamoto. Obviously, Ohtani deferred almost all of his salary. But one billion is one billion.
— JackCurryYES (@JackCurryYES) December 22, 2023
ESPN’s Jeff Passan was the first with the details, and it’s a 12-year, $325 million dollar deal for the 25-year-old ace.
This comes after the team gave fellow Japanese superstar a massive 10-year, $700 million deal earlier this month. Simple math tells us the team has committed over a billion dollars to Ohtani and Yamamoto. That’s a truly insane amount. There may be franchises that haven’t spent $1 billion total on player salaries in their history.
Yamamoto is the only pitcher in professional baseball history to win the pitching triple crown three years in a row, as he’s dominated Japanese baseball. He has a career 1.82 ERA and over one strikeout per inning in the NPB, Japan’s top league.
The Mets and Yankees also made serious runs at Yamamoto, but ultimately fell short as the Dodgers and general manager Andrew Friedman continued getting it all right this offseason.
Yamamoto and Ohtani are obviously great signings for the on-field product as the Dodgers look to win their first World Series in a full season since 1988.
But, in terms of the balance sheet, they may be even better signings than they are on the field. The team is going to be absolutely huge in Japan, a baseball-crazed country that has the third-largest GDP in the world. They are now, by far, the biggest baseball brand in the world, even more than the Yankees are.