shohei ohtani alert

whoa

So sad to think he won't make the post-season.

his velo is way way down tonight

I'm reading 89 mph fastballs?

he's throwing up to 95 now in the 4th

2 HRs tonight (Angels are down by 5)

a pittsburgher i follow drove to nyc specifically to see ohtani tonight and lol

2 more HRs tonight

I would never in a million years bet on Ohtani having the season he’s having right now.

Folks need to stop comparing Shohei Ohtani to Babe Ruth

Shohei Ohtani is the first Shohei Ohtani

Nobody’s ever done what he’s done in a half season, and it’s somehow still not getting enough media coverage https://t.co/cGY2CzpeUn

— joon 이준엽 (@joonlee) July 8, 2021

I agree that there aren't enough superlatives to describe what he's doing.

However, when it comes to Ohtani, there can never be enough comparisons to Babe Ruth. Babe f'n Ruth!!

The need for the angels to make the playoffs only grows more and more urgent

when is he a free agent? he will be an LA dodger or a boston red sock or a new york motherfucker in a couple years

yea he seems like one of those players who could singlehandedly rescue the sport but having him play on the West Coast on a team that's 4th in their division sucks. crazy if the Angels miss the playoffs yet again despite having 2 generational talents on their team

it's a team sport

which consists 95% of moments of individual skill

this is one of the hardest hit balls I've ever seen

Ohtani to the MOON. 😳 pic.twitter.com/BeZ3Ek9gF6

— MLB (@MLB) July 10, 2021

fucking absurd man

I don't know about you but I cannot see the ball post-impact with Ohtani's bat. I think he hit it so hard it disintegrated into fucking quarks.

you can just briefly see it shoot straight up, it kind of looks like the 600-foot pop up from Major League

463 feet

It feels like he should be more talked about.

Not here, but in media generally.

watching so many people discover Giannis even though he's been 2x MVP kinda tells me you need some playoff success for that to happen

Thinking about DiMaggio's streak and Richard's 50 in 50, I have the feeling we used to have national conversations about specific athlete in a way we don't anymore? Maybe I'm wrong. But it seems conversations about sports are much more macro and/or focused on the past (how much can we still create content around Michael Jordan, I'm certain more people are aware of Jeter than of Trout or Ohtani).

tom pagnozzi

haha, mais encore?

...

matt pagnozzi :(

ohtani is the first player to be named AL Player of the month in back to back months (June and July) since josh hamilton in 2012

40 HR, 2.79 ERA

Angels are still .500 though

that’s fucking crazy

this season is historic

Orange County doesn’t deserve this dude

i honestly would never have expected him to have a season like this. just did not think this was possible.

well it's never been done before!

What a joy this guy is

he's on pace to make the top 10 single season WAR list, which is basically all guys like Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds, plus those insane Yaz & Hornsby seasons

there are a bunch of guys having monster seasons and he’s 2 wins ahead of them

even though ppl, like, intuitively understand this, it's still an under discussed story that the angels have had one of the greatest baseball players in 100+ years on their team for a decade, and now have an international superstar putting up one of the greatest seasons in 100+ years... and still LITERALLY CANNOT MAKE THE PLAYOFFS MORE THAN ONE TIME!!! you can make a very reasonable argument that this fact alone has contributed to baseball's decline as a national interest and cultural phenomenon. you could also make a very reasonable argument that it's in the best interest of baseball to forcibly remove arte moreno as owner and find someone who could maybe run a franchise in LA w/ 2 of the best players in baseball and get them into the playoffs, like, one time before the world implodes. it's not asking for much!

its a uniquely frustrating scenario...idk if the Angels ownership/management just sucks but I can't really point to a single thing they've done over the last decade that's worked, outside of maybe the trade for Andrelton Simmons. they also happened to grab those two players during the years where they knew Pujols was gonna be an albatross - they signed him knowing full well that they were likely going to be punting the last 4-5 years. they've also had a lot of bad luck - Trout's hurt, Rendon's hurt, they just cannot seem to develop a decent pitcher who doesn't overdose on fentanyl. its a shitty situation and I agree its bad for the game.

they give big free agent contracts to older and/or injury prone players and rarely have homegrown talent, it's a really bad mix that comes from the top down. josh hamilton contract was a disaster, rendon contract isn't looking much better. they haven't had a good pitcher since like jered weaver. it's just a poorly run franchise.

they actually have some younger talent now... jo adell has looked good recently, brandon marsh is a top 50 prospect tho he flopped after being called up. reid detmers is finally a pitching prospect they have. if they had a healthy trout, rendon, ohtani, plus a good season from adell, and made some additions, found some pitchers.... it's still so many ifs. and trout is at the point now where he's prob more of a 130-140 game player -- at best -- than a 160 or 180 game player. the fact that they're 5.5 games worse than the mariners this year is insane.

it’s a team sport

i wonder if any other team's management would have done anything differently about the "pujols problem", especially the 2017-now version of the problem. i guess it's easier said than done to bench him, because he truly always believes he's about to turn the corner and is vocal about it. i guess they just couldn't face the spectacle of releasing him years early and eating the cost?

i mean, i think the marlins would have done something drastic for some reason. and the padres. although they haven't exactly done anything about their "eric hosmer problem"

how many other teams would have even signed a stupid contract like that? I mean I guess I'll cut them some slack because 2009-2012 was like the prime era for teams giving fat contracts to fat players, despite the fact that IT HAS LITERALLY NEVER WORKED OUT A SINGLE TIME. to his credit Pujols has not been downright awful since that 2017 season but I still can't believe they didn't find some way to engineer a trade to some bad team that needs to get fans in the door. even if they had to eat like $80 mil

how many other teams would have even signed a stupid contract like that?

*stares in chris davis*

I think there are possible universes where the Chris Davis deal isn't awful, the Pujols one was just so doomed from the start. The only way it makes sense is if the Angels were a slugger away from being a championship team which they definitely were not

one that comes to mind that is definitely worse is Ryan Howard, sure it's a lot less money but also possibly the dumbest, most guaranteed-to-fail contract I've ever seen in pro sports. and it somehow turned out even worse than anyone could've imagined

Yeah, definitely universes where the Davis deal wasn't as bad as it was, not sure there are universes where it was good, I guess maybe if the Orioles don't bring in Ubaldo in the 2016 WC game and win a pennant or WC with Davis contributing before the real decline kicks in?

when the angels signed pujols he was turning 32 and had hit .328/.420/.617 over 11 seasons

when the orioles extended davis he was turning 30 and had hit .255/.330/.506 over eight seasons

the davis contract only went through his age-36 season, so that's a huge plus. but also he just wasn't that good -- and the orioles had seen how it might go in 2014 when he hit .196/.300/.404. i mean both contracts are terrible, but if you're gonna dream on a guy beating the aging curve you might as well go with the one who was the greatest hitter of his generation

yeah, davis was very much a limited skill, adam dunn* kind of player

*and wasn't nearly as consistent as adam dunn, it turns out

holy cow I had no idea Davis's OBP was only .330, yeah that contract might be worse in retrospect

i mean both contracts are terrible, but if you're gonna dream on a guy beating the aging curve you might as well go with the one who was the greatest hitter of his generation

true but I still think it was fairly unlikely that Davis would be downright unplayable for 5 years of that deal, for Pujols it feels like that was one of the most likely outcomes. I can't argue it's one of the worst contracts ever because there have been so many bad ones but none of them involve paying a guy $24 million when he's 42

shit he just got hit in the right hand by a pitch

9700 pages of text messages between ohtani and mizuhara. i can't think of anybody i have 9700 pages of text messages with. maybe ilx if each of my posts was one page. even the ones that just say "lol".

Lonely guys just texting baout things

Imagine being fortunate enough to be raised in a bilingual/bicultural household while also possessing a passing interest in baseball and armed with those 2 traits you sneakily get access to $183M (of which you lose $43M of but that's another story). That is some real "When you were partying, I studied the blade" shit.

Also this bookmaker is a real piece of work, his confidence thinking he's gonna get this $43M back before and then after he got taken down by the feds, just... lol. #IppeiMastermind

9700 pages of text messages between ohtani and mizuhara. i can't think of anybody i have 9700 pages of text messages with. maybe ilx if each of my posts was one page. even the ones that just say "lol".

― 龜, Sunday, April 14, 2024 6:50 AM (one hour ago)

also to consider, japanese (esp texts) is far more dense than english (~20% less input for equivalent meaning/conveyance)... probably 12k pages in english (relatively)?

What bothers me about this:

1. it seems that if Bowyer was an illegal bookie in California, none of the agreements to place bets would be enforceable contracts. Any such contracts would be void as illegal and Ippei shouldn't have been liable to pay his "losses." Of course we'll never know if Ippei could have cashed out his "winnings" because of the house edge. Which makes it essentially a scam due to Ippei's apparent ignorance of the law.

2. I haven't seen any mention of the terms of Ohtani's employment or manager agreement with Ippei. Customary personal or business managers work on percentage. 10 to 20%. So you see losing $16m at this level is a lot less than 10% of a contract worth $700m. Manager is a different role than financial advisor who makes maybe .5 to 1% of the investment portfolio. Ok so maybe Ippei's compensation wasn't $70m. Then what was it?

3. California law heavily favors employees versus employers on almost every dispute. So while it seems Ippei's real mistake was lying to banks about being not who he said he was, it bothers me that someone so integral to the success of a mega high net worth talent is in a position where he needs this kind of money or is developing this kind of addiction. It's a shame when someone who is part of a talent coming up gets used and discarded. It's hard for me at this time to see this as a character flaw of Ippei for just the amounts of money involved because of what the amounts for a manager customarily are. The standard for when a person is considered an employee is when the employer "permits or suffers" a person to perform services of value. Placing a value on those services could be subject to dispute. If only Ippei had never lied to the banks and to Ohtani this could have been avoided.

4. On the other hand I can see a cynical motivation from other agents and commission takers for letting this happen to Ippei. One less intermediary and mouth to feed. So the weird thing is how CAA and Ippei first tried to handle this themselves with press releases. What a mess.

So in conclusion I don't like to demonize Ippei without finding out what the deal actually was. I mean lying over the mails and wires is bad, I get it, all the pieces matter. I just feel like the shackles etc. are kind of unnecessary. He got involved with professional sharks, legal and illegal and was just chum in the water due to lack of knowledge. The illegal bookie in California seems like the real villian here but make no mistake this would happen to benefit CAA and MLB to scapegoat Ippei as well.

#freeippei #freeshermanmccoy

What

Tldr: you shouldn't lie to banks or your employer or have an illegal gambling addiction

But also

Rich people shouldn't be stupidly cheap when paying people who work for them. Many rich people problems can be avoided by paying people what their work is worth. Not saying that's what happened here, just that I haven't seen that's not what happened.

The end.

Not saying that's what happened here, just that I haven't seen that's not what happened.

That....seeeems like license to believe anything, any old thing. Why speculate?

I think because of what I know about employment law and entertainment law, and I keep seeing these takes that want to paint Ippei as the total villain. I think people don't understand the work it takes behind the scenes to make overnight success happen over a period of years.

Baseball players are entertainers in the end. I personally prefer to see a happy story of everyone succeeding as a team. I think social media simplifies things to a point where people are wrongly overconfident about making snap judgments and ruining people's reputations and I had a lot more questions here about what really happened then some of the takes I've seen online.

And it's not license to believe in "anything." I wrote an extremely long detailed post laying out the particular pieces that were missing. If you want to take my tldr out of context that could seem like anything, but then why post at all if any piece could be taken out of context at any time.

I made a tasteless Parasite joke upthread but after reading f.'s posts I can see how it may indeed apply here...

...also "arbitration" ;-)

Exactly! Tbh I hadn't thought of the employment law angle until you mentioned Ippei's salary and "arbitration" a few weeks back. It has been bothering me ever since.

Parasite is a good reference. And the culture of keeping up and desperation portrayed in Squid Game. There's something so unnecessary here, like this whole Caught Stealing situation should never have happened.

f., I would like to declare that I/we are extremely fortunate to have someone of your background, experience and wisdom posting on this silly board.

I may have missed the opportunity to tell you but I always appreciate you!

You're too kind but it's appreciated nonetheless.

May all your tacos come in 10s :)

ah... such simpler times...

!!!!! Just realized I met Shohei's translator a long time ago when he was a fresh faced Red Sox employee... let me go dig up a picture lol.

― citation needed (Steve Shasta), Friday, December 8, 2023 3:44 PM (four months ago)

You met Ippei? Wow!

― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Friday, December 8, 2023 3:47 PM (four months ago)

I can't find it (my flickr account is now paywalled?). I sat next to him and Hideki Okajima at a sushi bar in SF when the Red Sox were in town to face the A's.

― citation needed (Steve Shasta), Friday, December 8, 2023 3:55 PM (four months ago)

We've since learned that Ippei was only Okajima's translator for his short (and unfruitful) Spring Training stint with the Yankees which means the interpreter I met when Okajima was with the Red Sox was Ryo Shinkawa...

At any rate, here is a picture of Okajima's signature on MY translator lol, my trusty Sharp PW-SH4 which was a constant companion in my oversees biz journeys when an interpreter was unavailable.

https://i.imgur.com/jPik9IE.png

You met Ippei? Wow!

― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Friday, December 8, 2023 3:47 PM (four months ago)

lmaooooo

We are all Ippei

Wrong Ippei address.

btw I don't think flickr is paywalled. But I seem to remember they did do something funky a while back that required going in and adjusting settings if you want any of your photos to be public.

Yeah, I couldn't find that pic when I first searched flickr but I was able to find it when I searched by year and location: 2008 @ Sakana Sushi

I saw Okajima pitch (LOOGy) the following year @ Fenway...

YOUR baseball photos thread