There is no higher dream, no greater what-if in current-day baseball than “What if my team traded for Shohei Ohtani?” And since something like 30% of the reason to play a baseball video game is to live out these what-ifs, this post aims to show what the Angels ask in an Ohtani trade at the start of a new playthrough of Out of the Park Baseball 24.
We already did this experiment for MLB The Show 23 earlier here, if you’re curious.
Some items to keep in mind as you check out the screenshot gallery below:
- OOTP tends to assume that each team’s total budget is something like $8 million above their real-life current payroll. I’m not sure what the best method would be for guessing what real teams could really afford, but this makes exercises like this a little frustrating. Since Ohtani’s salary is $30 million, even famous infinite money teams like the Mets can’t afford him without trading away major leaguers or slashing their player development or draft budgets.
Since every team is in roughly the same place on this on starting a new 2023 game, unfortunately we can’t really analyze the money element of trades. So where I had to, I slashed the player dev and draft budgets in order to make room for a brand new Shohei. - If you’ve never played Out of the Park Baseball before, it’s a baseball manager/general manager game, where you control a team’s decisions then games are simulated. This comes with a little more realism at the financial level than something like MLB The Show, though I wouldn’t say trading logic has been its biggest strength generally.
If I were writing a strategy guide for how to do well at single-player Out of the Park, I would probably say to seek out trades as often as possible. If you keep poking into every other team’s wants and needs, you will inevitably find net-positive value trades.
This is my overall sense of OOTP‘s bias in trade value calculations: It overrates mediocre players making league minimum and underrates good players making a lot of money. If you have enough depth at AAA and the majors of young-ish, okay-ish players making no money, you can eventually find someone who will give you a top prospect for them. And though you have to be careful to avoid acquiring a true lemon, if you have enough salary room you can get mega-stars making mega-star money without trading much of anything back. - It doesn’t exactly pop off the page if you haven’t played OOTP before, so be aware the place to look to see if a trade was accepted is in the middle, where it says “The initial reaction of the Los Angeles Angels General Manager, Perry Minasian:” The text just after that line says whether the Angels accept the trade or not (in all but two cases here, the answer is Yes). Then your assistant General Manager weighs in on whether he thinks it’s a fair trade just below that, but you’re free to ignore him or her.
To get us started, here are Shohei Ohtani’s ratings in OOTP 24 at the start of the game. 
And here are his contract details. He is in his free agent walk year at the time of these trades, so bear in mind teams trading for him can hope they’ll extend him, but really they’re only trading for one year of service. 
The simplest way for the Astros to trade for Ohtani is to send away Yordan Alvarez. But there are probably better options. 
It would be a pretty painful chunk of pitching depth to lose, but trading both Hunter Brown and Cristian Javier will net the Astros Shohei Ohtani. 
Or if the Astros like Javier too much, it’s possible to trade Brown plus Urquidy plus a package of dudes instead. 
The computer GM may not like it, and it may not make sense for the real-life A’s to trade for one year of Ohtani, but Ken Waldichuk and Ken Waldichuk alone is maybe the least impressive-sounding return for Ohtani on any of these screenshots. 
Austin Riley makes this a pretty tough pill to swallow for the Braves, though there are certainly tougher trades among these screenshots. 
Alternatively the Braves can trade their young ace Spencer Strider for Shohei Ohtani straight-up. You never know with pitcher health, but I think the Braves would say no on this one. 
You can replace Woodruff with Freddy Peralta plus some more names if you’d like, but basically the Angels seem keyed in on Chourio plus one of the Brewers’ great starters. 
This feels like a realistic trade package for Ohtani to me, if they really were to trade him. The Cardinals give up a list of good but not elite near-majors names. 
Or the Cardinals can replace Burleson, Liberatore, and Winn with Walker if they’d prefer. 
I wasn’t quite able to get this trade over the finish line, while offering arguably the Cubs’ best player, their best prospect, and a good young starting pitcher. 
The Diamondbacks have a lot of available young talent and they’ll have to trade 75% of it to get Shohei Ohtani. 
Bobby Miller is the Dodgers’ top prospect but it’s not impossible for me to imagine this trade really happening, especially since you’d assume the Dodgers could get that extension signed with Ohtani. 
Matos seems to be trending as a better prospect in real-life than the three stars he has in-game. If we ignore that and treat him as a good-not-great prospect this looks like a reasonable trade. 
I cannot imagine Cleveland signing Ohtani to a long-term extension which ruins any thoughts of this trade happening in real life. 
Another option for the Guardians, trading Andres Gimenez as the main piece. 
I had to trade practically the whole Mariners AAA team plus Ty France to get Ohtani back. Love imagining seeing a news post announcing this crazy trade. 
Or the Mariners can simply trade a promising young MLB pitcher for Ohtani straight up. Not that Kirby isn’t good, but this feels pretty underwhelming for the Angels. 
The Marlins simply have to trade their ace for Ohtani straight up. Again, doesn’t seem like the Marlins would extend Ohtani to live in Miami for years, which makes this one hard to imagine. 
Or the Marlins can trade their mega-pitching prospect for Ohtani. 
Or the Marlins can trade practically all the rest of their great young pitching talent in a big bag if they’d prefer. 
Francisco Alvarez looks like he’s going to be a star, and so he’s enough for the Angels in return here. Not really clear why the Angels want Vogelbach as well but hey, why not. 
The Orioles need to trade the game’s top pitching prospect as of the 2022-2023 offseason to get Ohtani back. 
More than anything else on this list, this feels like a trade I wouldn’t be shocked to see really happen. The Padres basically have one major prospect left and they’ve been busy trading all their prospects over the last few years. 
The Phillies painfully have to trade both their current ace and their future ace to get Ohtani. 
The Pirates only have to trade from the middle of their prospect list to get Ohtani. I doubt they could get an extension but otherwise this looks like a reasonable trade. 
The Rays can trade a small sliver of their limitless minor league talent to get Ohtani in a trade. 
This screenshot shows a trade the Angels still say no to. I couldn’t find any trade the Red Sox can make for Ohtani without including Rafael Devers. 
A grab bag of second-tier prospects will net Ohtani for the Reds. 
Try as I might piling every Rockies player into a trade, the Angels still say no to sending Ohtani to Denver. 
The Royals need to trade practically their whole farm system to get a year of Ohtani. 
Losing Riley Greene hurts, and I’m not sure why the Tigers would especially want to add Ohtani to what they’ve got going on at the major league level right now, but it is possible to get a deal done. 
In what would be unusual for baseball, this trade of two megastars might make sense if the Twins are tired of trying to keep Buxton healthy or have some reason to think an Ohtani extension is possible. 
Or the Twins can do like most of the other teams on this slideshow and trade their best young starter plus some other guys for Ohtani. 
The White Sox also get the same deal: Best young starter plus some other guys for Ohtani. 
Somehow Anthony Rizzo is the centerpiece of this Ohtani trade which otherwise includes a lot of mediocre young talent.
So what did we learn:
- Despite it only being for a year of Ohtani, OOTP does not let teams get baseball’s biggest star for cheap. Most deals here would need to include a strong expectation of a contract extension to make sense.
- As with MLB The Show, the basic trade template to get Ohtani is “your best young pitcher” plus “some other interesting guys.” For some teams that’s easier to stomach than for others.
- Ignoring both the element of “would Ohtani sign an extension with this team,” these are the trades that look maybe realistic to me: Padres, Twins, Reds, Rays, and Cardinals.