Star caught up in sports betting case
Shades of Hansie Cronje scandal in Major League Baseball
Maybe you don’t know of Shohei Ohtani. Doubtless you do know of Babe Ruth, who arrived on the big league baseball scene in 1914 as a pitcher who could bat, and became the greatest home-run hitter the game had seen.
Ohtani, 29, is the closest thing to Ruth in modern baseball, where all-rounders are mythical creatures. He bats! He pitches! He breathes fire! Not quite. But he is almost unheard of in this strictly specialised American sport. His clunky classification as a “two-way player” didn’t exist as an official designation until 2020.
Major League Baseball (MLB) has been confounded by Ohtani since 2018, when he first played for the Los Angeles Angels after establishing himself with the Hokkaido NipponHam Fighters in his native Japan. In December he signed the biggest contract in the history of sport: a 10-year deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, worth $700m or $26m more than Barcelona agreed to pay Lionel Messi in 2017, albeit for only four years’ work.
Ohtani was rookie of the year in 2018, but struggled with injuries in 2019 and 2020. In 2021 he became the only player to hit more than 10 home runs, steal more than 20 bases, record more than 100 strikeouts and pitch in more than 10 games in a single MLB season. He was a shoo-in as the most valuable player.
In 2022 Ohtani was the first player since Ruth’s era to bat and pitch often enough to make it onto the leaderboard in both departments.
“Normally I don’t worry about those types of numbers, but I was getting close and wanted to see what it feels like,” Ohtani said in Japanese. His words were translated by an interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. Remember that name.
In the World Baseball Classic (WBC) final in Miami in March last year, Ohtani duelled with the US’s Mike Trout, then his Angels teammate and a bona fide star, with two out in the top of the ninth, no-one on base and Japan leading 3-2. Ohtani took Trout to a full count of three balls and two strikes. Unless
the next pitch was hit foul, something had to give. Ohtani produced a wicked slider that veered away from the swinging Trout’s bat to reel in a strikeout and clinch Japan’s first title since 2009.
More than 55-million viewers saw that. Seven months later a total of 45.51-million watched all five games as the Texas Rangers earned their first World Series trophy by beating the Arizona Diamondbacks. That’s an average of 9.08-million per game, or more than six times fewer than for the WBC climax.
Ohtani has yet to feature in a World Series. If and when he does, expect those numbers to be hit out of the park. Merely signing him improved the Dodgers’ chances of winning this year by 3.4%, according to the bookies. And that’s despite the team knowing he can’t pitch until at least 2025 because of an elbow injury.
Undoubtedly Ohtani is good for the baseball business. But is some of the business around baseball good for him? Here’s where Mizuhara, the interpreter, comes back into the story.
The Dodgers fired him in March after Ohtani’s lawyers alleged he had hacked Ohtani’s banking account and stolen
$4.5m to pay a bookmaker in California, where betting on sport is illegal. A federal investigation cleared Ohtani, and The New York Times reported last week that Mizuhara was close to pleading guilty.
Gambling has been baseball’s kryptonite since the Chicago White Sox were bribed, reportedly by mob boss Arnold Rothstein, to throw the 1919 World Series. The scandal resulted in the appointment in 1920 of the game’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a judge who became the most powerful man in baseball. Ruth himself was obliged to write to Landis in 1924: “You can rest assured that I do not intend to do any more betting on the [horse] races.”
Not everybody is willing to let Ohtani go so quietly. Pete Rose was headed for the Hall of Fame before his betting on baseball while he was a player and a manager was exposed. He was banned for life. What did Rose make of Ohtani’s explanation? In a recent TikTok video that seems to have been shot in a casino, Rose says: “Back in the 1970s and 1980s I wish I’d had an interpreter. I’d be scot-free.”
Doubtless Hansie Cronje would have concurred.
Gambling has been baseball’s kryptonite since the Chicago White Sox were bribed to throw the 1919 World Series