On Friday, there was a lot of talk about previous Los Angeles Angels two-way star Shohei Ohtani going to the Toronto Blue Jays. And that particularly intensified with many tracking one particular private jet flight from the Los Angeles area to Toronto. But it turned out that that plane instead featured Canadian businessman and inventor Robert Herjavec, known for his roles on CBC’s Dragons Den and ABC’s Shark Tank. And that led to Rich Eisen posting a meme of Herjavec waving goodbye to a Dragons Den contestant, which Herjavec then retweeted:
To everyone hoping to spot Ohtani. https://t.co/TzhN5dVhO6 pic.twitter.com/STsgK0wp1a
— Rich Eisen (@richeisen) December 8, 2023
There was a lot of Ohtani-to-Toronto chatter Friday, bolstered by MLB Network’s Jon Morosi reporting he was en route there. But USA Today’s Bob Nightengale shot that down in strong terms while the plane in question was still in the air. The eventual report from CBC’s Devin Heroux and Evan Mitsui quoted in Eisen’s tweet was just the final icing that this wasn’t happening in this particular way. Even if the Lester B. Pearson Airport air traffic controllers got in on it a bit:
Here's the moment Pearson Airport ground control cheekily announced to the plane that had just landed "very warm welcome, to everybody that may or may not be on board, to Toronto, welcome in"
(h/t @baseballwooloo for finding the timestamp in the ATC archives) pic.twitter.com/9wNbn2U10m
— ℳatt (@matttomic) December 8, 2023
As Rodger Sherman noted, there’s a reason this kind of intense flight tracking is more generally seen in college football (featuring many small towns) than other sports:
Flight tracking doesn’t work as well for non-college football sports because CFB places are more specific. There are a million reasons someone might fly from LA to Toronto but exactly one reason someone might fly from State College, Pennsylvania to Starkville, Mississippi
— Rodger Sherman (@rodger) December 8, 2023
At any rate, Herjavec’s flight certainly attracted much more attention than it normally would have. And it’s funny to see him get in on the meme of that.
[Robert Herjavec on Twitter]
