The Shohei Ohtani store is now open for business. And business is good.

There’s a clear consensus on Ohtani as a pitcher -- he’s a potential No. 1 starter with three plus pitches now, with a curveball he will also use occasionally and a changeup he’s largely discarded, with an imperfect delivery and limited history of full health.

Ohtani has hit 100 mph and can get to the upper 90s regularly, but doesn’t always pitch there; more than one scout told me he’d seen Ohtani sit at 91-plus and just reach back for mid-90s when he needed more, and everyone agreed that his fastball plays down a little from its velocity because it’s straight. His slider and splitter are both grade 70 pitches on the 20-80 scale; his curveball is more average, without the tight spin of Yu Darvish’s, to pick one easy comparison.

Ohtani has above-average control but not command, possibly related to how late his arm is relative to his front foot landing, which is also a possible marker for injury risk over time.

The 23-year-old hasn’t pitched that much over his career with his career-high 160.2 innings coming in 2015, his age-20 season. He made only five starts and threw just 25.1 total innings in 2017 because of an ankle injury that he suffered the previous offseason, requiring surgery this October, and a quad injury suffered during the season. That means teams didn’t get many opportunities to scout him this season -- I spoke to more than one person who flew to Japan only to find out Ohtani’s start had been pushed back, or who had colleagues who’d done so -- and thus are relying more on looks in previous years and/or video.

There’s less consensus on Ohtani as a position player, although the one aspect on which most sources agreed is that he’s unlikely to develop into a major-league average hitter if he’s only playing part-time. Ohtani is an incredible athlete, an 80 runner when healthy who can get down the line in under 3.9 seconds, with a plus-plus arm (duh) and 70 raw power. He’s played a handful of games in the outfield corners, although none since 2014; it’s hard to believe someone with his athleticism and instincts couldn’t roll out to right field in an MLB park and play average defense now.

His swing, however, is where the disagreements arise. I’ve seen video of Ohtani, never having seen him live because of his ankle injury, and the swing looked long to me, to the point where I’d expect him to have a big hole on the inner third. The majority of scouts I asked said something along the same lines -- although one strongly disagreed about the swing’s length -- and thought that MLB pitchers who could run something in on a left-handed hitter would force him to make a major adjustment. He struck out at a high rate for an NPB hitter; he ranked fifth in the Pacific League in strikeout rate the past two years, surrounded on the lists by MLB refugees who didn’t hit enough here to stick in the majors. He sells out for power, because he has so much of it, and thus doesn’t show much of a two-strike approach.

I didn’t run into anyone who would say Ohtani would not hit, just increasing levels of skepticism that he could 1) shorten his swing enough to cover the inner third and 2) develop a real two-strike approach and 3) recognize MLB-caliber pitches well enough to become an average hitter. If he were to get 500 at-bats here in 2018, and maybe again the following season, that would change his outlook, but no matter what teams tell Ohtani now, there’s no way anyone will risk his health or deal with the fatigue that would come with having him play every day.

That raises the question of how a team that wants to let Ohtani hit part-time would handle him. It’s a much easier sell for an American League team that can DH him, of course, as he wouldn’t suffer the wear and tear of playing the field any day he’s not pitching. An AL team could, for example, have him pitch on Day 1 of a cycle, DH on Day 2, play the outfield Days 3 and 4, and then take Day 5 off completely, working in additional off days as the schedule permits. Or they could move to a six-man rotation, which would better mirror NPB pitching schedules. National League teams don’t have such flexibility in their lineup, and might have to work Ohtani in as a part-time right fielder, playing two days out of five in the field and one on the mound, but that’s a bigger ask of a contending club, since most teams have full-time options in their outfield corners.

Ohtani would make sense for any team strictly as a pitcher, and for any team as a bench player/part-time outfielder, especially in this era of 12- and 13-man pitching staffs that leave managers with comically short benches. I would not, however, project him to throw 200 innings -- something he’s never done -- this year, or assume he’ll add five wins or more to my team.

The argument that Ohtani is holding up the market for starting pitching is specious; Ohtani will cost so little money that any team interested in him with the available payroll to sign Jake Arrieta or Yu Darvish could still do the latter even if they win the Ohtani bidding -- and they’d get an unprecedented opportunity to remake their rotation in one fell swoop.

Major League Baseball has already warned teams about shenanigans in the Ohtani negotiations, such as side agreements or promises of future payouts to compensate Ohtani for coming over early, and MLB already came down very hard on Atlanta this offseason for different shenanigans in the international market. That said, I don’t see how MLB could potentially punish the team that lands Ohtani if a year from now the club signs Ohtani to a five-year, $100 million extension, which would buy out his arbitration years at a high but not outrageous price. And if the team promises that today, quietly, and executes it far enough into the future, I don’t see how MLB would manage to catch them in the act -- which is my long way of saying I expect someone to try this.

I think the truth here is that MLB doesn’t want the world to see just how much a potential franchise-altering ballplayer like Ohtani is worth on the open market. If someone decides he’s a $40 million a year player, what will Bryce Harper and Manny Machado ask for next winter? Wouldn’t Clayton Kershaw exercise his opt-out clause after 2018, forgoing two years at $32.5 million per year, if Ohtani gets more than that? The league’s goal in every CBA negotiation, and one at which they’ve largely succeeded in the past three such agreements, has been to restrict the amount of money owners can spend on players from outside of the major leagues -- drafted players, international amateurs, and now the best player to come out of Japan to date. I’ve written for years about how MLB has pushed for such changes, then faced unintended consequences (which come with every tax policy or subsidy, ever). This move will allow some team with a huge payroll, like the Yankees, to acquire a $40 million player for $3.5 million plus 1/6 of the posting fee, just leaving them free to acquire another star player at market value. If I were a small-market team owner, especially one trying to compete directly with whoever lands Ohtani, I’d be less than thrilled at that outcome.