Published by
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
Shohei Ohtani wound up where almost everyone expected from the start Saturday when he agreed to a record 10-year, $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers. It is the biggest contract in North American team sports, and its reverberations will be felt in baseball for years after surpassing the next-highest MLB deal, Mike Trout’s 12-year, $427 million contract signed in 2019, by $273 million. But the story of the Ohtani courtship was a long and twisting road that had baseball fans engrossed for weeks, especially in the 24 hours before the deal was agreed upon, when an errant report and soci…