The Los Angeles Dodgers are off to a roaring start to the MLB season once again. Their superteam won the World Series last year, running into very little trouble after picking off the San Diego Padres. It was the first year for the Dodgers with Shohei Ohtani after he signed a historic ten-year contract. Ohtani's agent said that he could have signed a 15-year deal and gave an intriguing reason why he went with the ten-year agreement.

“Shohei Ohtani could have pursued a 15-year contract through age 44, agent Nez Balelo said Thursday, explaining the two-way superstar didn’t want to risk a decline in his skills while under the big deal,” Beth Harris of The Associated Press wrote.

“We could have went to 13, 14, 15 years,” Balelo said. “But Shohei wanted to always kind of keep the integrity of where he’s at as a player. He just didn’t want to have the end of his storybook career tail off, and then on year 13, 14, and 15, it’s just like, who is this guy? You can’t even run down first, and he’s not a guy anymore.”

Ohtani will be 38 in his final season of the ten-year deal with the Dodgers. So someone, whether it was the Dodgers or another team chasing him, was willing to pay him into his 40s.

Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers are a match made in baseball heaven

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The Dodgers signed Ohtani to a historic contract when they landed him between the 2023 and 2024 seasons. His deal on paper is ten years, $700 million. But they are only paying him $2 million per season, with $68 million per year deferred for the ten years after the contract expires. So even though Ohtani is only guaranteed eight years after this one on the field, he will be on the Dodgers' payroll through 2043.

The Dodgers now have more money to spend on their roster because of this deal. That opens up the money to spend on Teoscar Hernandez, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tanner Scott, and the many other elite players they added since signing Ohtani. Without his deferral, he'd be trying to carry a team by himself. Now, he has a supporting cast that rivals The Avengers.

If Ohtani had signed a 15-year deal and everything else was the same, the contract would have been worth over $1 billion. The deferral would have run through 2048, and his playing days would have lasted until 43 years old. It still could have been considered an underpay after his 2024 MVP season.