The Angels Walked Shohei Ohtani To Face Mookie Betts. What Happened Next Will Shock You.

It was hardly a mystery to anyone familiar with any of the parties involved, but the last moments of Tuesday night's game between the Dodgers and Angels was precisely why the Dodgers committed a billion dollars to Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts. It's good business, because these are good players, but it's a nice ancillary benefit that doing so was guaranteed to make Ron Washington cry and Arte Moreno to re-re-revisit his decision not to sell the Los Angeles Angels. And so it did.

But let's provide the minimal context you expect from us. It was the top of the 10th inning, in a 2-2 game between the Dodgers and their exact opposites from down the highway; Washington had just spent his ridiculous bullpen heat-bringer Ben Joyce to escape the ninth inning, which ended with a swing and a miss on a fastball traveling at 105.5 miles per hour. For the tenth, Washington had to bring in Roansy Contreras, whose particular hell is that he has earned his MLB pension as a Pirate and Angel. Tommy Edman had been dropped at second base as the discourtesy runner, which left Contreras to navigate the bottom three hitters in the Dodgers order. Easy enough, we suppose, because the one thing Contreras (and definitely Washington) needed not to happen was to have to face Ohtani with an open base.

Well, best laid plans and all that old tired bullshit. Max Muncy grounded out to move Edman to third, and then Miguel Rojas singled him home. Rojas in turn was moved to second on a groundout off the bat of Gavin Lux, and Washington was handed the poop flambée of either pitching to Ohtani or walking him and pitching to Betts. He chose the latter, which meant Roansy Contreras had to go ahead and do it. Guess what happened.

Betts's reaction was what you would expect:

His explanation was equally economical:

And Wash? He looked like this:

Which is almost as evocative as what he looked like after witnessing the result of a similarly bold and similarly botched managerial gambit, three days earlier:

See, when you're the Angels, this is your lot in life. You had Ohtani, and you had Mike Trout, and now one is going to be National League MVP and the other hasn't played since April 30. Your closest marketing rival has the best record in baseball, and your team is the living essence of mediocrity. Of course you have to choose between Ohtani and Betts, and of course you get custard-coated shrapnel all over your face and chest.

But there is a bright side, because even if you are the Angels, you are not the Chicago White Sox. For them, every day is an Ohtani-or-Betts conundrum, and you're wrong every time. It's not much comfort after winding up on the wrong side of what is probably the single most predictable binary outcome of the season, but it is true—it somehow could be worse.