Shohei Ohtani didn’t leave the Angels without giving the team and owner Arte Moreno a chance to keep him in Anaheim.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Ohtani and the two-way star’s agent, Nez Balelo, went to the team and allowed them to take one more shot at retaining him.
Moreno, though, reportedly refused to match the Dodgers’ whopping 10-year, $700 million contract that resulted in Ohtani switching southern California teams.
The deal will only earn Ohtani $2 million a year over the length of the contract, while $68 million will be deferred each season — which reduces the overall value of the contract to $460 million, according to Major League Baseball’s valuations.
The Angels and general manager Perry Minasian haven’t given many details regarding their pursuit of Ohtani, with Minasian telling reporters during a Zoom call on Friday, “We congratulate him on his deal and we wish him nothing but the best.”
And Minasian insisted the organization had “zero regrets” about not moving Ohtani at last season’s trade deadline, even after their failed attempt to keep him with the Angels.
“We made a decision at the trade deadline,” Minasian said Friday. “We were playing really good baseball [at the time]… It didn’t work out. There’s zero regrets.”
Balelo added he “made sure that I kept in touch with” the Angels during the free agency process.
“We felt that they earned the right to at least have a discussion at the end,” Balelo said of the Angels, where Ohtani spent the first six seasons of his major league career.
And Balelo declined to say whether money was the difference in the offers.
“I won’t go there,” he said. “But just know that we had really healthy discussions. The Angels had every opportunity.”
The 29-year-old Ohtani, who won’t pitch in 2024 due to Tommy John surgery, never made the postseason as an Angel, as the pairing of Ohtani and Mike Trout didn’t result in much success for the team.
“It’s a place that he really loved to play,” Balelo said of Ohtani’s time in Anaheim. “He loved the people there, everything. So we didn’t want to miss the idea of giving them an opportunity… But at the end, it just wasn’t going to work.”
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