Shohei Ohtani has given baseball the story that people will actually care about

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A couple of months ago, Major League Baseball announced its cover boy for this season. Blue Jays’ part-time first baseman Vlad Guerrero Jr. will front the league’s flagship video game, MLB: The Show.

No knock on the guy, but what?

If you had to list aloud the best players in the game, you’d need to ask for a glass of water before you got to Guerrero. He’s in there somewhere, but nowhere near the top. He’s not even the best player on his own team.

Last year’s edition was even more of a reach. The cover people tapped Miami’s Jazz Chisholm. Quirky guy, decent ballplayer, zero market penetration outside Florida.

This speaks to baseball’s ongoing star problem. As in, it doesn’t have any. It has many great baseball players. It just doesn’t have anyone that people who aren’t baseball obsessives want to know more about.

Until recently, Mike Trout was the consensus best player in the game. I defy you to summon to mind an image of Trout talking. He does so. Just not in a way that would make an impression on anyone.

But if you work hard and dream big, eventually you get what you want. Then the punishment begins.

This year, the league finally has a face that everyone everywhere knows and cares about – Shohei Ohtani.

A month ago, that was good news. Today, it’s fantastic news. The sense of impending doom around Ohtani is baseball’s best hope to capture the collective imagination and pull it along for seven months.

The season begins Thursday afternoon. The Jays start their year in Tampa against the Rays.

Until Ohtani’s troubles began, baseball’s overarching narratives were the same this season as they seem to be every season nowadays:

• This is the Blue Jays’ year. Honest. Hand to God. It’s going to happen this time.
• But probably not. The Jays are where they always are – talking like they can win the division; hoping they can hang on for a wild-card spot. Once in the playoffs, the AI-enhanced terminal in the executive lounge will go on the fritz mid-game, telling management to pull the starter who’s throwing a no-hitter and replace him on the mound with a backup second baseman.
• The Los Angeles Dodgers are overwhelming favourites, not because they’re smart, but because their local TV deal allows them to spend like tech billionaires at a yacht convention.
• The Atlanta Braves are co-overwhelming favourites, because they’re smart. Every year, the Jays’ decision to let former GM Alex Anthopoulos slip away looks a little dumber than the one before. And it looked unbelievably dumb to begin with.
• The New York Yankees are good again. Theoretically. This is terrible news for the Jays.
• The Baltimore Orioles should be even better. They are shaping up to be the team the Jays thought they could be. The difference – the Orioles committed harder to their tank.
• The American League Central is the worst division in all of sport. If the Jays were in the Central, they could forfeit a quarter of their games and still be in with a chance to win it. Jays’ fans love to complain about how tough the AL East is. This will be a peak year for divisional malaise.

But you know how this goes in baseball. The algorithms everyone depends on for their predictive models do a decent job over the vastness of the regular season. Once it gets to the playoffs, it’s a free-for-all.

No sport has suffered more of a charisma drain from the expansion of the postseason. Winning in June used to matter. Now it’s optional. A good team can drift through the summer. Last year, the eventual World Series champions, the Texas Rangers, had a 40-38 record for June, July and August.

These days, if you wander into a baseball manager’s office, you will be battered senseless by versions of ‘never too high, never too low’ or ‘put it behind us and get ready for tomorrow.’

Is that the sort of thing that drives you to go out and buy tickets? It is not.

The players have become like the game they play – somnolent, rarely roused to anger or joy, grinders.

Then Ohtani happened.

He was going to be a story because of his US$700-million deal. But he was going to be a normal baseball story – one that doesn’t say anything worth discussing.

Ohtani’s a talker now. He better be. It’s his only protection.

Even if he turns into a muscly Fran Lebowitz, there are three ways his seasons can go:

He can go wild in Dodger Stadium, turning himself into the next Jackie Robinson – a cross-cultural sports touchstone;

He can disappoint, making the Dodgers look silly for splashing out so much on him, drawing the league back into a period of entropy, which creates its own sort of debate;

Or he can spend the year one step ahead of investigators, trickle-truthing the details about his curious understanding of U.S. wire-transfer laws.

Maybe at different points in the year, he can be all three.

The Ohtani the Dodgers thought they were getting could have been many things, but probably not the thing baseball needs – interesting.

This new Ohtani is fascinating. He can be baseball’s Donald Trump, running just ahead of the law as he chases history. With his intoxicating mix of talent, forbearance and jeopardy, Ohtani is a Scorsese film waiting to be written.

Other things will happen in baseball this season. If the Jays win big or flame out – the two likeliest possibilities from this perspective – that’s the only story anyone around here will care about.

But from a league-wide vantage, baseball finally has what it’s been missing – a story everyone will be hanging on until the end.