IronPigs doing their best to help the Phillies amid Shohei Ohtani chaos

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Detroit Tigers v Los Angeles Angels / John McCoy/GettyImages
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It's December, so naturally, tracking a certain person's flight data is commonplace this time of year. But Reddit and X users and other social media aren't in a frenzy at the moment, watching the movements of a sleigh and a pack of flying reindeer this evening. The buzz around Shohei Ohtani signing possibly the biggest contract in the history of Major League Baseball tonight is breaking the internet.

As If supplanting Babe Ruth wasn't enough for Ohtani, why not take aim at Santa Claus too?

But the Philadelphia Phillies organization refuses to go down without a fight. Well, that might not be entirely accurate unless you count the latest post on X from Triple-A affiliate Lehigh Valley as a legitimate recruiting message.

We're clearly breaking news tonight! Shohei Ohtani will sign with the Lehigh Iron Pigs and take his talents to Allentown.

Okay, that's entirely unlikely to happen, and the Major League Baseball Players Association would probably not be very happy with Shohei Ohtani or his agents if any of this was true. But if there is some traction here, it would certainly be as big or even bigger than any Scott Kingery bobblehead promotion night held at Coca-Cola Park.

As it turns out, while sports media websites were tripping over one another today to break Shohei Ohtani news, he was comfortably at home in Southern California, per Bob Nightengale.

And the plane that landed at Pearson Airport in Toronto? Just Canadian businessman Robert Herjavec of Shark Tank and Dragon's Den fame.

While we can't entirely rule out the Philadelphia Phillies as a last-minute "mystery" team, our sources tell us that the Lehigh Valley IronPigs will not get their man this offseason.

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