TORONTO – Two years after he was never on a flight bound from Southern California to Toronto, Shohei Ohtani continues to impact North American aeronautics.
Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers arrived in Canada this week for Game 1 of the World Series, to be contested Oct. 24 as they aim to become the first club in a quarter-century to repeat as World Series champions.
And they did it in comfort, taking two airplanes, one for the roster and the other for staff, a set-up that began as Ohtani led the Dodgers into the 2024 World Series and continued into this past regular season, for big road trips or middling ones.
This is a big one: The Dodgers will take on the Toronto Blue Jays, a first when it comes to World Series matchups and an appropriate one given the manner in which the course of baseball history was massively impacted less than two years ago.
The endgame sounds simple enough: Ohtani chose the Dodgers over the Blue Jays, who along with the San Francisco Giants offered a similar 10-year, $700 million, heavily deferred package – Ohtani’s preference so his new club could have greater luxury-tax wriggle room.
The run-up was unhinged: Media reports had Ohtani either agreeing to a contract with the Blue Jays or on a flight to Toronto, where pitcher Yusei Kikuchi, a Blue Jay lefty and Ohtani’s Japanese countryman, had supposedly made reservations for more than two dozen folks at a swanky sushi joint.
The aftermath suggests the hysteria surrounding Ohtani’s decision wasn’t enough: Ohtani delivered a 50-homer, 50-stolen base season and a World Series title a year ago, returned to pitching in 2025 and had, almost inarguably, the greatest performance in baseball history in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series.
Yet for 24 crazy hours, baseball history appeared to take a different turn.
Max Muncy thought so. The Dodgers’ slugging infielder saw the erroneous report on Ohtani’s agreement with the Blue Jays, bemoaned his team’s fate and went about life in his Dallas home.
“Like everyone else,” he says, “I saw the Blue Jays thing. And so I was like, ‘OK. It’s done. That sucks, but it’s done.’”
A day later, he was trying to get his young children down for a nap when his wife interceded. She asked if he’d heard about his new teammate. He wracked his brain.
Ohtani was gone, so who?
“And she says, ‘Well, he’s worth $700 million.’ And I was like, ‘Who in the world could that be?’”
Muncy had to contain his excitement. His children were trying to get to sleep, and he waited until he was downstairs to express his glee.
Two years later, they are not just the Dodgers, but also Guggenheim Baseball, as the uniform patch says, a global powerhouse that’s made up Ohtani’s salary thanks to dozens of sponsorships in Japan and the whirring turnstiles that counted 4 million fans entering Dodger Stadium this year.
Now, they are aiming for back-to-back titles, arriving in style on what we’ll call the Ohtani Plane.
“The course of the Dodgers is changed forever,” says Muncy, 35 and now in his eighth postseason with the club. “You’re talking about your international brand. You put him – one of the greatest baseball players of all time – in one of the biggest markets in baseball and now that market has become global.
“Things change. We got new renovations to the stadium. The way we traveled changed. Everything changed from that moment.”
And not just in Los Angeles. Here by the shores of Lake Ontario, they haven’t forgotten, either.
Hat tricks
From Florida’s Gulf Coast to downtown Toronto, the Blue Jays’ concerted efforts to become a first-class organization are readily apparent.
Their $400 million renovation of Rogers Centre resulted in a gorgeous modernization of the old Skydome, with a swanky clubhouse and expansive medical, training and workout facilities. Heck, even the home bullpen has a mini-weight room and multiple elliptical machines.
And in Dunedin, Florida, their $100 million in updates to their player development center has resulted in a gorgeous, modernized campus. It was there that Ohtani did, in fact, visit – and the Blue Jays took no shorts.
From the de rigueur – an Ohtani locker with all his preferred fixings – to the extreme, the Blue Jays loved on Ohtani. They flew out his dog, Decoy, outfitting him in a Canadian dog jacket. They took Ohtani’s secrecy oath to an extreme, moving a winter meetings debriefing from general manager Ross Atkins to Zoom, placing him against a generic background to conceal his location, which they would not reveal.
Ohtani kept his Blue Jays swag. Toronto manager John Schneider has not forgotten.
“I hope he brought his hat,” Schneider said before the Blue Jays’ World Series workout. “And the jacket for Decoy, you know?
“It’s like, give us back our stuff already.”
Schneider’s tongue was definitely in cheek. And Ohtani – amid a crush of international press amid the bowels of Rogers Centre – responded in kind.
Yes, he still has the hat. It’s in his garage.
All kidding aside, though, the Ohtani saga might have stung much worse had the Blue Jays not reached the promised land.
His cheerful decline of their offer was just one of many silver medal podium finishes with nine-figure free agents: Juan Soto. Dodgers ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto. And prized Dodgers rookie Rōki Sasaki. Forever bridesmaids in Queen City, it seemed.
“It was free agency. It was one of the best baseball players in our sport getting to choose. He chose L.A., and he had every right to choose that,” says Blue Jays pitcher Chris Bassitt. “It wasn’t so much, ‘Man, we wanted him.’ It was more, he had the ability to choose.
“And he chose.”
Yet look at them now: American League champions behind homegrown superstars Vladimir Guerrero and Bo Bichette, and bell cow free agent George Springer and a gaggle of veteran pitchers.
Who needs Shohei?
“We have a megastar in Vladdy,” says Bassitt. “The reality is, I think so many fans and so many media members will sit here and say, ‘Toronto’s always second place, Toronto’s always third place for these megastars.’
“They’re second place out of 30 and you’re punishing them for going after megastars and not getting them. I guarantee you there are 20 other organizations wishing they were going after megastars. Just because they’re not getting three, four, five guys, I think it’s ridiculous because you’ve got Kevin Gausman, you’ve got (Jose) Berrios, you’ve got Bo here, Vladdy here, George Springer here, Max Scherzer here.
“To sit here and be like, three-four guys didn’t come and you’re supposed to feel bad for that? It’s a big discredit to all the really good players they got to come here.”
‘Just little a kid out there’
And so it goes. Ohtani will bat leadoff coming off his three-homer performance in NLCS Game 4; he’s expected to start on the mound in World Series Game 4, too, at Dodger Stadium.
He’s hit 109 home runs in two years as a Dodger and will have a second NL MVP plaque delivered this offseason. He will probably go into the Hall of Fame with an interlocking LA on his cap, and the eternal regard of his teammates.
“The thing for me that’s been most important is just how special it’s been to be his teammate. He’s a truly wonderful human being,” says Muncy. “He’s a great teammate, a great ballplayer.
“He’s funny. He loves playing baseball. He’s just a little kid out there.”
A little kid who steered almost all the way into the intrigue around his pursuit. Toronto’s not mad about it. World Series trips have a way of soothing any hurt, even if the flight pattern doesn’t point in your direction.
“He’s a great player,” says Schneider. “But that aside, I think that we have a great team and just an unbelievable cast of characters and players.
“I think things worked out the way they’re meant to work out.”