NEWSLETTER
For as much as the Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto free agent stories may be intertwined, at some point, one of the two will have to leap first and pick a team. The conventional wisdom has that as Ohtani, since he sits at the head of the entire market, but it’s also true that Yamamoto is the one who has an artificial clock imposed by the posting process. Yamamoto has to sign by January 4. Ohtani, then, could theoretically wait that out if he felt it was best for his own process.
Still, I suspect Ohtani will choose his team first, and we certainly hope that it could come down this week at the Winter Meetings. I don’t want to see the Cubs’ offseason held up by the Ohtani process, only to miss out there and then have also missed out on a number of other moves because the Winter Meetings – one of the best times to make those moves – went by without any activity for them.
All that said, if the two free agencies are intertwined, it sounds like they’d have to diverge sharply this week if Ohtani is going to decide. Because it doesn’t seem Yamamoto is deciding anything this week.
Confirming an Andy Martino report from around Thanksgiving, Mike Puma reports that Yoshinobu Yamamoto is coming back to the United States within the next week to meet with some MLB teams:
We don’t yet know for sure the identities of the other teams, though we know a number of potential suitors have been identified, including the Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, Giants, Red Sox, and Cubs, among others.
Will the Cubs get an in-person meeting during this Stateside visit? Did they make it through a likely first cut via phone/Zoom presentations? We shall see. Or it’s possible we don’t hear at all – we certainly never heard definitively if and when Shohei Ohtani visited Chicago.
Either way, if Yamamoto is only doing visits during the next week, then a decision is certainly not coming at the Winter Meetings, which conclude on Thursday. So, either Ohtani decides well before Yamamoto does, or we’re going to be waiting until after the Winter Meetings on both guys.
Of note for the Cubs: it still probably stands to their slight benefit if Yamamoto is the one who goes slower and decides later. That’s because, if the reports about the Cubs’ very serious interest in Yamamoto are true, we can reasonably suspect that they would push in hard only if they miss on Ohtani. So it would be nice to know whether they’ve missed on Ohtani BEFORE they would have Yamamoto in for a potential visit. That way, they can really and truly completely commit to a full push, and not have to do some kind of awkward, “We EXTREMELY WANT you … it’s just … we have to hear back real quick from this other guy …. “
