It was sometime Friday that Farhan Zaidi began to realize another superstar was about to slip away.
The Giants had hosted Shohei Ohtani at Oracle Park a week earlier. They met all of the financial demands from his agent, Nez Balelo. They had submitted their third offer and been informed it would be their final one. But it had been more than 24 hours of radio silence.
“When you get to that point in the deal and 24 hours go by and the clock is still ticking and you don’t have resolution, you start to think that there may be other factors at play that are out of your hands and you get a little bit more pessimistic,” Zaidi said Tuesday over Zoom. “By the end of last week, as we got into Friday and Friday night and certainly Saturday morning, it had been two or three days since we made that offer and kind of got a sense that things might be going in another direction.”
On Sunday, just after noon, Ohtani ended the Giants’ hopes for good, announcing on his Instagram that he would take his two-way talents to the Los Angeles Dodgers on the largest contract ever signed by a professional athlete, finalized and officially announced the team Monday, with the revelation that all but $2 million per year of it would be deferred until next decade.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon, offering insight into a supremely secretive process, Zaidi said the Giants were willing to meet those terms.
Ultimately, he said, the Giants couldn’t check the one box that they believed to be most important to Ohtani.
“It did seem like geography mattered,” Zaidi said. “Both in our direct conversations with the player and his agent but also in our background work talking to people in the industry … It wasn’t an absolute must or a deal breaker, obviously, given the pool of teams that was interested. We did sense there was a preference to stay in Southern California. We viewed that to be a challenge for us.”
Shortly before Zaidi spoke, the Giants made their first splash of the offseason, agreeing to terms with Korean center fielder Jung-Hoo Lee, according to multiple reports. Declining to confirm the deal, Zaidi said the Giants were still seeking to add with a focus on pitching and defense, though all of the funds earmarked for Ohtani wouldn’t necessarily immediately be reallocated. Yet again, however, they missed out on the top prize.
It wasn’t for a lack of effort, Zaidi tried to make clear as he laid out the timeline of the Giants’ pursuit in a five-minute monologue to begin the Zoom call.
They opened negotiations with “what would have been the biggest contract in major league history,” Zaidi said, referencing Mike Trout’s previous record of $426.5 million. “I’m guessing we weren’t the only team that did that. But we wanted to show our aggressiveness and interest right out of the gate.”
By the time Ohtani visited San Francisco last Saturday, the Giants had upped their original offer, Zaidi said.
The meeting was swift and small, though that’s not always an indication of a free agent’s thinking.
“I’ve learned in these free agent meetings, short and sweet is probably the best approach,” Zaidi said. “I don’t think players want to spend their offseason going from one board room to the next, meeting with suits. So, I tried to keep it casual. I thought it was a good conversation.”
Ohtani flew into San Francisco International and was whisked to Oracle Park, where he met with club chairman Greg Johnson, part-owner Buster Posey, manager Bob Melvin and Zaidi. Over two to three hours, they discussed the organization’s history, the ballpark, their long-term plans and life in San Francisco.
“In our view, it was as impactful of an opportunity that he would have had anywhere,” Zaidi said. “So that was the pitch.”
When it was over, Ohtani headed straight back to the airport.
“We had what we thought was a really productive meeting,” Zaidi said. “One thing we like to do, which I think can be impactful, is have players see the city, the region, get to see real estate and kind of give players the chance to fall in love with the area like many of us have. That was something I think could have been helpful in this case, and it just wasn’t practical.”
By the time the Winter Meetings arrived, Ohtani had taken meetings with the Dodgers and Blue Jays. It was then that they got communication from Ohtani’s camp with another proposal, one that has garnered much attention since it was revealed as a component of his Dodgers deal.
“What they proposed conceptually – it wasn’t a formal offer to us, of course – was what looks like the exact deal that they wound up finalizing,” Zaidi said.
Of the $700 million, only $20 million will be paid to Ohtani over the next 10 years. Accounting for inflation, the deferrals, which will pay Ohtani $68 million per year from 2034-2043, reduce the contract value to $460 million and, crucially, the collective bargaining tax hit to $46 million per season.
The rules permitting the contract language are “black and white,” Zaidi said, so “I don’t really have any editorial comments on it.”
Zaidi said Ohtani’s camp explained that his lucrative endorsement deals allowed him the financial flexibility to take a $2 million annual salary, allowing his eventual team the money to continue to build a roster around him. The perception, Zaidi said, was that all finalists had offers in a similar range.
“It was certainly an unusual deal,” Zaidi said. “We understood the benefits to the player but also to the team. It was movement from our previous offer, but it was something we thought we could manage. So we quickly turned that around and said we were agreeable to it.
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“From that point, we were told it’s kind of in the player’s hands now. It was sort of explained to us that it was the end of the financial negotiation part of things and really it was going to come down to a choice by the player at that point.”
Like Aaron Judge before him, and Bryce Harper before him, and Giancarlo Stanton before him, Ohtani chose not to play in San Francisco.
Once again, the Giants were forced to pivot to Plan B, which started with their agreement with Lee, the highly regarded Korean center fielder.
“In terms of where we go from here, we’ve talked about our priorities of really trying to strengthen our pitching and defense,” Zaidi said. “Offense was an area that went backward last year, but really our emphasis is going to be on run (prevention), so we’re going to continue to look for athleticism up the middle of the diamond … and really support our pitching staff … We’ve talked about wanting to add a starting pitcher. That’s still very high on our list and something we’re going to continue to look at.”
