☀️ Good morning and welcome back to The Nosebleeds.

🦄 Shohei Ohtani is going to sign one of the largest contracts in sports history this offseason—we’ll investigate what that contract could look like.

⚾️ Let’s play ball.

💸 Billion Dollar Player?

There was a fantastic article on ESPN earlier this week by Bradford Doolittle that looked to calculate Shohei Ohtani’s true value. But for whatever reason, I have not seen this article circulating at all. The only reason I found it is because I stumbled upon it while doing some fantasy football research lmao, so I thought I would summarize and share it because it deserves some love.

Let’s dive in.

What ESPN did first was calculate Ohtani’s base value. To do this, ESPN separated the components of Ohtani’s underlying skillset into individual skills and assigned a dollar value to each skill based on the WAR (Wins Above Replacement) that the specific skill generates (1 win is worth $8M). Based on these calculations, the baseline value Ohtani provides is $76M.

That $76M is just for one year of Ohtani’s services. Assuming flat production, that’s a $760M contract for ten years, and $912M (!) on a 12 year deal.

But the $912M doesn’t account for the aging curve, which is projected to be a -$122.3M loss of value over the duration of a 12 year contract—equating to a true value of nearly $790M over 12 years.

But the most interesting part about this article is what hitter and pitcher can combine to be comparable to Ohtani. Taking the average contract for the most similar hitters and pitchers and adding them together, we get a $303.5M low end projection.

Now $303.5M is ridiculously low, especially when you consider that Aaron Judge got nearly 20% more than that in free agency last summer ($360M over 9 years). But if you add the highest paid hitter and pitcher from the comps list, this is what we get:

Now $624M, that would not surprise me.

The biggest question marks about Ohtani that make this contract so difficult to predict is how long can he both hit and pitch? Even if Ohtani stays healthy throughout the duration of his next contract, will he be able to play both ways into his late thirties? Because Ohtani’s play is so unprecedented, no one has a hot clue what the answer to that question will be. If Ohtani cannot remain a full-time two way player, that will obviously drop his value significantly. But on the other hand, this is Shohei Ohtani we’re talking about here, he might be able to do this until he’s 50 and retire as the consensus greatest baseball player of all-time.

🩸 Bloody Good Play of the Week

Good Canadian boy Nathan Rourke is our Bloody Good Play of the Week winner with this unbelievable play against the Dallas Cowboys in the Jacksonville Jaguars’ first preseason game.

More proof these CFL guys are actually pretty good football players…

🤔 MLB Trivia

Shohei Ohtani will soon sign the richest contract in MLB history.

• Question: which two MLB players have the highest salaries in Major League Baseball this season?

Answer at the bottom.

📺️ Weekend Watchlist

🗺️ Bright and early on Sunday morning, the Women’s World Cup Final will be taking place with England and Spain set to face-off.

• Spain is the slight favorite, but not by much, the match will be extremely tight. Could we see another World Cup Final go to penalties? 👀 

⚾️ On the diamond, the best matchup of the weekend is Mariners @ Astros for a three-game series between division rivals that are deeply entrenched in the race for a postseason spot.

⛳️ The FedEx Cup Playoffs continue this weekend at the BMW Championship in Illinois.

• After R1, Rory McIlroy and the Champion Golfer of the Year, Brian Harman, are tied for the lead at -5.

👋 We’ll be back on Tuesday.

Trivia Answer: Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander ($43.33M).

🙏 Thank you for reading! Follow us on Twitter for more (@nbleedsports, @younggun001) or you can subscribe here!