Ohtani: What We (Think We) Know.
It's not good
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Who’d have ever imagined that a sport that has totally immersed itself in business ventures with the U.S. industrial gambling complex would find itself facing a gambling scandal?
Anyway.
OhtaniGate is an absolutely terrible moniker, but let’s use it as a placeholder. Based on deep-dive reporting from ESPN, the Los Angeles Times and The Athletic, among others, we’ve learned more in the last half-day about the scandal around international superstar Shohei Ohtani than we might have even wanted to.
In short, it’s bad.
It is very bad.
It’s just so, so bad.
Here’s what we think we know — and this is only to catch you up for the days of news ahead of us. (Public service.)
Since arriving in the States in 2018, Ohtani has relied on an interpreter. By most accounts Ohtani understands English well, but he’s not as confident in delivering answers to questions and prefers to have the interpreter do it.
The interpreter’s name is Ippei Mizuhara. He was born in Japan, but grew up in Southern California and went to UC Riverside. He and Ohtani are close friends in addition to the professional relationship.
When Ohtani played for the Angels, the team placed Mizuhara on their payroll. The Dodgers did the same once Ohtani signed with them this off-season.
Mizuhara’s salary has ranged between $300,000 and $500,000.
Mizuhara himself told ESPN how much he makes. This came during an extensive interview that was conducted in Korea on Tuesday in which Mizuhara said many, many things. (We’ll circle back to this. It’s kinda important.)
Mizuhara, by his own account, is a breathtakingly bad gambler. According to the reporting, he was $4.5 million in arrears to an Orange County bookie.
Bad luck for Ippei: The bookie is under federal investigation.
Now — here is where things go off the rails.
Reporters with sources well outside the world of sports became aware that the fed’s investigation of the bookie had uncovered payments from Shohei Ohtani’s own accounts to this betting operation.
Enter Team Ohtani. The star’s management group, in response to probing questions from ESPN and others, offered up Mizuhara for an interview that they believed would exonerate Ohtani and make it clear he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
During this interview, which is incredible, Mizuhara says plainly and repeatedly that Ohtani agreed to begin paying off his gambling debts last fall to get him out of trouble.
Not only that, but Ohtani insisted on wiring the money to the bookie’s shadow-collector himself, from his own computer. Ohtani did that, Mizuhara said, because the player didn’t trust Ippei with the money — he was afraid his friend would gamble it away.
So that’s a pretty big problem, since Ohtani cannot legally wire money to a bookie. Betting on sports is still illegal in California.
Whoopsie.
Then, amazingly, the following happened:
As ESPN got ready to publish its version of the story on Wednesday, its reporters were contacted by Team Ohtani. The message: Hold on.
The following statement was then issued from Berk Brettler LLP, the law firm representing Shohei Ohtani:
"In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities.”
Team Ohtani subsequently disavowed everything Mizuhara had told ESPN the night before, even though ESPN had already viewed wire documents showing Ohtani’s name on a pair of $500,000 payments to the bookie and even though Ohtani’s own people had set up the interview with Mizuhara.
Asked by a reporter if he was the guy being accused of theft, Mizuhara said he had been told that he could not comment. He did not say who told him not to comment, but he didn’t have a lawyer at the time.
Hmmm.
And here’s where we are as of this writing:
Ohtani is going to have to speak. His interpreter says Ohtani never bet on anything and was only trying to clean up the interpreter’s mess. Mizuhara also says he bet on other sports, but not MLB.
Best-case scenario is that Ohtani was trying to help a friend/associate, and in so doing put himself directly in the middle of a gambling scandal.
Does that matter? I honestly don’t know. MLB used to hate any association with sports betting, but, you know, $$$. Hello, FanDuel.
A not-as-good scenario is that Ohtani has known of this problem for much longer than the timeline laid out by Mizuhara, yet refused to distance himself from this perpetually losing, degenerate gambler despite playing a pro sport for a living.
Worst-case scenario: Well, it was Ohtani paying the bookie.
So — yeah. Not good. You’re caught up, but only for a minute.
Has Pete Rose commented on the situation?
Professional sports leagues and gambling: Bad bedfellows 🤦🏼♂️