Even Ohtani’s current contract is an impressive amount of money to make playing baseball, and there’s been no indication that he is unhappy with his lot. Still, that Ohtani will be making so little while potentially redefining baseball reveals one of the biggest paradoxes in American pro sports: Though they may look meritocratic, leagues dramatically underpay their talent, to the great benefit of league front offices and teams’ owners, who do far less than the players to influence the on-the-field outcomes fans pay to see.

Ohtani’s massively deflated contract is an especially extreme example of this trend. Under the CBA, any international player who enters the majors or minors under age 25 gets the same basic deal, as do American players who enter through the draft. Ironically, says David Berri, a sports economist at Southern Utah University, the initial goal of that standardized contract was to spark bidding wars and increase the salaries of star players. In 1974, an arbitration ruling struck down the “reserve clause,” which allowed teams to hold onto their players indefinitely and prevent the players from negotiating with other teams. “What basically was facing baseball [at that time] was, every player was going to become a free agent, so the market was going to be flooded with free-agent talent,” Berri says, which would have driven down players’ salaries. Berri went on, “But Marvin Miller, the head of the union in baseball, suggested, ‘Why don’t we have it be that you can only become a free agent after six years?’ That way, in any given year you’d only have a few free agents, and their price would be elevated.” By staggering when players became free agents, Berri says, the union ensured that “baseball salaries went up dramatically, and star players got paid a ton of money.”

But in the last 20 years, Berri says, owners have found a way to exploit this arrangement. As statistical analyses have started to show, hitters tend to peak in those first six years under team control, then steadily decline beginning at age 26 or 27. The aging curve is even harder on pitchers, who typically see their velocity start to decline the moment they make the majors. Increasing recognition of these trends, coupled with the prevalence of young superstars like Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Francisco Lindor, means that the demand for older players—and in baseball, “older” means “30 and up”—has begun to shrink.

That leaves a player like Ohtani in a bind. Were he to wait two years and enter the league at 25, he could plausibly get the $200 million contract his talents dictate—or more, given that average salaries increase just about every year—while gaining the ability to negotiate the length of his contract. But he would be banking on teams either being willing to pay him into his likely decline based on just his track record in the less competitive Japanese league or to sign him for a shorter length of time, not to mention gambling on the prospect of injury or physical deterioration while still in his home country. Suddenly, that $2.3 million and a guaranteed six years at the league’s minimum pay sounds a lot more appealing, even if it does mean giving a team a $200 million discount.