“Cash, check or credit card
Everybody working hard
Yen, pound or dollar bill
Long as you call it money still”
“Make That Money” - Robi Rob’s Clubworld

Remixed with a techno beat, “Make That Money” was part of the highly-regarded “A Night at the Roxbury” soundtrack with the song playing in the background of the club as brothers Doug (played by Chris Kattan) and Steve (Will Ferrell) spend their time at the dance club rather than helping their father’s business.

The song was written and put together by Robert Manuel Clivilles, also known as Robi Rob, one of the founding members of early-1990s hip-hop group C+C Music Factory. The song never charted, but it has become a club favorite with live dee jays that mix the song’s fun beat under more popular new tunes.

“$700 million. Wow.”

The simplicity of a text I received from a long-time baseball writer said plenty.

The biggest news of this offseason in Major League Baseball (MLB) was going to be Shohei Ohtani’s free agency decision. The star player from Japan has already done things as a combination pitcher and hitter that not even the legendary Babe Ruth can claim.

Now, he was entering free agency before even reaching 30 years of age, likely to draw a tremendous bidding war from many teams.

The day before had been a wild ride. One report came out that Ohtani’s decision was “imminent.” Then another story emerged that he was not signing with the Dodgers, leaving questions as to who the team that finally inked Ohtani would be.

Finally, stories began to emerge about a private plane leaving Los Angeles, where Ohtani lived, and flying to Toronto, one of the teams that had been aggressively pursuing the reigning American League Most Valuable Player.

The day was spent with people digging up restaurant reservations made by a Japanese player on the Blue Jays, not to mention a whole host of updates from flight tracking apps on where the plane was.

Spoiler alert - Ohtani was not on that plane. He never left his home.

The superstar had requested from the drop this offseason that his free agency be handled in private, not played out in the media, and teams had gone to great lengths to ensure “radio silence” on their potential talks with Shohei.

Heck, Dodgers’ manager Dave Roberts received a rebuke from his team’s front office after simply being honest during an interview and admitting that the team had met with Ohtani’s representatives - no more info than that, but the Dodgers were worried that even leaking that would drive the biggest star in the game away from potentially signing with them.

Then the contract was announced.

Let’s quickly put some numerical perspective on the overall contract to begin. Shohei’s $700 million, 10-year deal is the largest overall contract ever given in professional sports, topping Lionel Messi’s contract in 2017 with Barcelona for $674 million (yes, Messi’s contract was only over four years, but we’re going by total value right now).

His deal is more than one-and-a-half times that of former teammate Mike Trout’s $426.5 million, 12-year contract that was signed in 2019, previously the largest in MLB history.

Even on an annual basis, Ohtani’s base contract would be $20 million more than any other MLB player had ever earned in a season.

Then we learned about the deferrals on the contract - deferrals that pay Ohtani “just” $2 million per year through the first 10 years and then leave him with $680 million that will be paid out over the 10 years following that.

The contract seems like a huge deal for the Dodgers and potentially a game-changing one in control of contracts going forward for players.

Except it’s not.

Ohtani is a unicorn as far as baseball endorsements go.

Official numbers are not out yet, but based on publicly-known endorsement contracts, Ohtani made more than any professional athlete in the world in endorsements in 2023, a figure expected to potentially top $50 million for one year.

That was while playing in the general market of Los Angeles with the Angels, as he still will be with the Dodgers, but while also playing for a team with significantly less history and standing within the game.

The Dodgers’ “brand” is such that they can demand a local television rights deal in excess of $300 million per year on top of the money that they receive from MLB national broadcast deals that gets spread among all the teams.

Adding Ohtani’s star power on a global scale will provide advertising revenue, ticket revenue, and additional merchandising that is estimated to be roughly $100-350 million per year to the team.

In other words, the Dodgers will have realized enough revenue from the impact of Shohei Ohtani being on the team to have paid for his contract by roughly the halfway point of the contract, and they’ll only have paid roughly $10 million in salary by that point, with the bulk of the expenditure to Ohtani coming after the team has potentially flirted with an additional $1 billion in revenues over 10 years of having Shohei on the team.

That’s without the Dodgers getting to and potentially winning a World Series. That doesn’t factor in the impact of additional national games on Fox and ESPN that could attract additional advertisers, never mind the added exposure of Shohei wearing a Dodgers cap/jersey in any of his personal endorsements.

Before anyone begins to believe that Shohei just hurt himself and potentially future players with this deal, realize that he’s going to finish his playing career (he’ll be 39 when the contract ends, so while he could potentially play a few years beyond, this deal likely will be for the rest of his MLB career) with $680 million owed to him by the team.

Shohei has shown himself to be a very shrewd investor already in his career, so who’s to say that when he gets to the end of his career, he may not leverage that sort of “debt” owed him by the team into a minority ownership share of the Dodgers? It’s certainly something that he could do.

On the concern for other players, quite literally no other player in the game could do this sort of thing and yet still be one of the highest-paid players in the game, as Shohei still will be while only earning $2 million in salary.

It’s quite likely that he’ll make more than $50 million total in endorsements in 2023. The second place among MLB players in that total in 2023? His former teammate, Trout, who finished the year with just over $5 million in endorsement revenue in 2023.

No other player will be getting salary deferred in this way because they can’t afford to in the same way that Shohei can.

Of course, there are those who are using this as a moment to complain about sports contracts in general, with more than one national sports columnist already asking, “when will we value teachers in the same way as professional athletes?”

Quite frankly, we can ask those questions as a society, but the fault does not lie with the players for seeking the contracts that they get. For one, the teams have to hand them out, and where do teams get money to pay those contracts?

When you sign up for a TV package that includes NFL RedZone on Sundays, when you buy a jersey, when you buy team flags or decorations, when you buy a ticket at the ballgame (though the concessions in general are not directly tied to the team - however, the organization usually earns a rental fee each game from vendors that drives where prices sit), and when you buy from an advertiser that advertises during games, giving them the idea that spending money advertising with a team results in more sales, which, in turn, causes them to spend more marketing dollars with a team.

All of those things bring revenue into a sports team.

Right now, MLB as a whole makes more than $10 billion per year, and that doesn’t take into account team-specific revenues, which, for a team like the Dodgers, can be more than a half-billion dollars.

The Atlanta Braves are the only team in MLB that currently has “open” books due to being owned by a publicly-traded company, and the Braves’ annual revenue (including their share of MLB’s overall revenue) is more than $550 million.

In other words, teams are bringing in the money to afford to pay these sorts of salaries, and turning it into a societal commentary, while that may have some merit, only vilifies players who are doing what any employee would do, maximizing earnings during prime earning years.

So as Robi Rob would say, make that money, Shohei. I see no problem with your contract. That you chose the Dodgers, on the other hand…