Shohei Ohtani is popular, but you probably knew that already. Just how popular the Los Angeles Dodgers’ two-way player is, though, might surprise you. According to Michael Rubin, the CEO of Fanatics, as far as worldwide recognition goes, Ohtani is “doing as much for baseball as [Michael] Jordan did for basketball in the 90s.” If you weren’t around for Jordan in the 1990s, well, you can probably at least wager a guess at all of that given his sneakers remain ubiquitous decades later.
Rubin said that very thing to Ohtani himself — the quote, not the sneaker bit — as relayed by a story told on MLB’s 6-1-1 Podcast, hosted by former Philadelphia Phillies teammates Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins. Rubin continued by telling Howard and Rollins that, “If you really think about what [Ohtani] is doing globally — we all have a little bit of an American bias — his country is so proud of him. When I see the numbers, what he’s doing for the business. He’s a unicorn, he’s truly one of a kind.”
Rubin doesn’t just mean that as far as MLB goes, either, but in all the sports that Fanatics is involved in, which at this point is basically just “sports” in general.
“We work with 5,000 athletes individually at Fanatics, we work with just about every sport, every team globally, and he’s one of a kind.”
Ohtani and five of his teammates are dominating jersey sales, as they make up over a quarter of the top 20 themselves, with Ohtani in the lead. He’s captured the Los Angeles market, he’s a huge star across MLB as a whole, and the Japan-born star who got his start in Nippon Professional Baseball has a massive following in his home country, as well. Given Rubin’s praise for what Ohtani is doing “for the business,” it’s not hard to imagine that his popularity, and his jersey shipments, extend far beyond MLB’s home territories and Japan.
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He’s a hot commodity, and it’s pretty easy to see why Ohtani was willing to defer the vast majority of his then-record 10-year, $700 million free agent contract with the Dodgers, signed before the 2024 season: endorsement deals pay, too, and you know someone selling as many jerseys as he does is getting plenty of those. All of the money his very presence helps to generate makes it easier for the Dodgers to build a team around him that can help him win a championship. Or another one, rather, since they already succeeded in that goal in his first season in blue.
But don’t sleep on how the rest of MLB benefits, as well, both from Ohtani raising the profile of the league globally, and because merchandise sales are pooled among all 30 teams and redistributed more equitably as part of the revenue-sharing arrangement.
See? He’s truly great for the sport.
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