Did Ohtani get Doom Looped?

An investigation

December 14, 2023

You may have heard that Shohei Ohtani, a baseballer who is “arguably the best player ever,” signed a mind-bending $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won out over a number of teams to secure Ohtani’s services, one of those teams being the San Francisco Giants. Fans and the media immediately searched for an explanation. Why did he like them and not us? What’s wrong with us?

Garbage City being what it is, there was a ready-made explanation:

Former Giants legend and current co-owner of the team Buster Posey said San Francisco's image also played a small part in Ohtani’s decision.

"There's been a bit of uneasiness with the city itself as far as the state of the city with crime and drugs," Posey said to Baggarly. "There was some reservation."

And Posey says they've got that from other free agents too.

There it is. OH NO another good thing that could have happened to us got Doom Looped. First the American Academy of Forensic Herbologists convention, now the Greatest Player Ever, all because of the Crime and the Drugs!

I have some thoughts. First, if I were Buster Posey and part of my job was to land a highly-prized free agent and I failed, I would want to come up with a good explanation other than the probable likely explanation, which is that Shohei Ohtani already lives in the Greater Los Angeles Area and the Dodgers are much, much better equipped to win a World Series in the next few years than the Giants are and have an apparently inexhaustible fund of money to pay other players to come help win that World Series and the Giants are nowhere close? BOR-ING. And there’s a perfectly good explanation sitting right there! San Francisco sux, it works for everything.

BUT. Los Angeles, as you may know if you’ve ever been, is not without its own issues with the Crime and Drugs. In fact, San Francisco is CONSIDERABLY safer than LA:

It’s true that SF has a higher theft and burglary rate than LA, not gonna lie, but the idea that SF is somehow more dangerous than LA is just misguided. Now, as we’ve discussed before, SF has kind of a unique problem in that one of the major areas of homelessness and open drug use, the Tenderloin and SOMA, is immediately adjacent to, and overlaps, the major tourist areas, whereas LA’s major homeless areas like Skid Row are far from anywhere that a tourist would happen across.

But let’s say that free agents have mentioned crime and drugs to Buster Posey. Where do you think they got that idea?

I can’t find the post now, but somebody made the point that a lot of baseball players are conservative white guys who live in suburbs and probably watch a lot of Fox News, which has relentlessly pushed the idea that San Francisco is a lawless dystopia where white people should fear for their lives. Of course they’re gonna parrot that back to Buster Posey!

Meanwhile, Matt Dorsey, a supervisor who used to be a spokesman for the police department and whose driving issue now, unsurprisingly, is getting more money for the police, thinks he knows the answer. Can you guess what it is? One guess.

"What I heard from Buster Posey is what I have heard from large employers and what I have heard from businesses that San Francisco needs to do a better job at progress on its public safety challenges,” said San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents the district where the Giants play.

He's also been one of the members of the board of supervisors who's been pushing to try to get the police department back to full staffing, and has been an advocate of tougher tools to deal with the city's fentanyl epidemic.

"If we can't make progress on police staffing, we're going to have a hard time making progress on anything. And in some ways, I think this reputational issue that playing out now with a Major League Baseball player, is emblematic of why we need to take this seriously," said Dorsey.

Can’t sign a free agent? More police. Police not doing their job right now? More police. Two hour wait time at Zazie for brunch? More police.

The reality, of course, is far more nuanced. From the same story above:

Matt Levine lives in the city and often works close to Oracle Park.

"I do the pedicab on the Embarcadero. So, we always hear from people, and usually their reaction is,’ I can't believe how lovely the city is. I thought it was going to be like ‘Mad Max or something,’” said Levine.

Also, it’s weird how Crime and Drugs don’t keep free agents from signing with the Warriors, who play a few blocks away from the Giants.

Current San Francisco Giant Logan Webb, maybe the best remaining player on what will be a very bad team this year, had the best response to the whole thing. He posted this without comment on Ex-Twitter:

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