Zaidi says SF Giants matched Dodgers’ offer, details Ohtani pursuit

It was sometime Friday that Farhan Zaidi began to realize another superstar was about to slip away.

The Giants had hosted Shohei Ohtani at Oracle Park a week earlier. They met all of his agent, Nez Balelo’s, financial demands. They had submitted their third offer and been informed it would be their final one. But it had been more than 24 hours of radio silence.

“When you get to that point in the deal and 24 hours go by and the clock is still ticking and you don’t have resolution, you start to think that there may be other factors at play that are out of your hands and you get a little bit more pessimistic,” Zaidi said Tuesday over Zoom. “By the end of last week, as we got into Friday and Friday night and certainly Saturday morning, it had been two or three days since we made that offer and kind of got a sense that things might be going in another direction.”

On Sunday, just after noon, Ohtani ended the Giants’ hopes for good, announcing on his Instagram that he would take his two-way talents to the Los Angeles Dodgers on the largest contract ever signed by a professional athlete, finalized and officially announced the team Monday, with the revelation that all but $2 million per year of it would be deferred until next decade.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon, offering insight into a supremely secretive process, Zaidi said the Giants were willing to meet those terms.

Ultimately, he said, the Giants couldn’t check the one box that they believed to be most important to Ohtani.

“It did seem like geography mattered,” Zaidi said. “Both in our direct conversations with the player and his agent but also in our background work talking to people in the industry … It wasn’t an absolute must or a deal breaker, obviously, given the pool of teams that was interested. We did sense there was a preference to stay in Southern California. We viewed that to be a challenge for us.”

Shortly before Zaidi spoke, the Giants made their first splash of the offseason, agreeing to terms with Korean center fielder Jung-Hoo Lee, according to multiple reports. Declining to confirm the deal, Zaidi said the Giants were still seeking to add with a focus on pitching and defense, though all of the funds earmarked for Ohtani wouldn’t necessarily immediately be reallocated. Yet again, however, they missed out on the top prize.

It wasn’t for a lack of effort, Zaidi tried to make clear as he laid out the timeline of the Giants’ pursuit in a five-minute monologue to begin the Zoom call.

They opened negotiations with “what would have been the biggest contract in major league history,” Zaidi said, referencing Mike Trout’s previous record of $426.5 million. “I’m guessing we weren’t the only team that did that. But we wanted to show our aggressiveness and interest right out of the gate.”

By the time Ohtani visited San Francisco last Saturday, the Giants had upped their original offer, Zaidi said.

The meeting was swift and small, though that’s not always an indication of a free agent’s thinking.

Ohtani flew into San Francisco International and was whisked to Oracle Park, where he met with club chairman Greg Johnson, part-owner Buster Posey, manager Bob Melvin and Zaidi. It lasted about two to three hours, Zaidi said, and Ohtani headed straight back to the airport.

“We had what we thought was a really productive meeting,” Zaidi said. “Pretty small group. But addressed what we thought were some of the long-term concerns. Our long-term plan, which we’re very bullish on. Again, thought those meetings were really productive and felt really good about things after that.”

By the time the Winter Meetings arrived, Ohtani had taken meetings with the Dodgers and Blue Jays. It was then that they got communication from Ohtani’s camp with another proposal, one that has garnered much attention since it was revealed as a component of his Dodgers deal.

“What they proposed conceptually – it wasn’t a formal offer to us, of course – was what looks like the exact deal that they wound up finalizing,” Zaidi said.

Of the $700 million, only $20 million will be paid to Ohtani over the next 10 years. Accounting for inflation, the deferrals, which will pay Ohtani $68 million per year from 2035-2044, reduce the contract value to $460 million and, crucially, the collective bargaining tax hit to $46 million per season.

The rules permitting the contract language are “black and white,” Zaidi said, so “I don’t really have any editorial comments on it.”

Zaidi said Ohtani’s camp explained that his lucrative endorsement deals allowed him the financial flexibility to take a $2 million annual salary, allowing his eventual team the money to continue to build a roster around him. The perception, Zaidi said, was that all finalists had offers in a similar range.

“It was certainly an unusual deal,” Zaidi said. “We understood the benefits to the player but also to the team. It was movement from our previous offer, but it was something we thought we could manage. So we quickly turned that around and said we were agreeable to it.