SHO’ & TELL

There’s still plenty we don’t know about Ohtani’s ‘theft’ situation

There’s so much we don’t know about Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, other than he was apparently working with one of the most patient and understanding bookies any bettor has ever known about, as the interpreter was allegedly running up between $4 and $5 million in gambling debts. Most bookies would have come knocking on Ippei’s door at fifty grand. Or even less than that.

At this point, all we know for sure with a story developing faster than Ohtani’s fastball when he was still pitching is this: The face of baseball, even more of a thrilling talent as both a hitter and pitcher than Babe Ruth was in Boston over a hundred years ago, now sees his name – and the name of his friend and interpreter – in a gambling story. It was only as inevitable as the tide once all these online betting platforms began to finance so much of professional sports in this country the same way casinos would, trying to turn the whole world into suckers.

Back in the old days, they used to call boxing the red-light district of sports. Now there aren’t any red lights in sports, or stop lights, where gambling is concerned.

Here’s something Bernie Bickerstaff, coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, said just the other night:

“There’s no doubt about it that (sports gambling has) crossed the line. The amount of times where I’m standing up there and we may have a 10-point lead and the spread is 11 and people are yelling at me to leave the guys in so we can cover the spread, it’s ridiculous……But again, I understand the business side of it and the nature of the business of it. But I mean, it’s something that I believe has gone too far.”

Sports is lousy with legal betting. It comes at you in the waves of commercials, the odds crawling across the bottom of your screen while you’re watching the game, while the announcers are acting as carnival barkers with the same odds. Not only do we now have professional sports teams in Las Vegas, once viewed as another level of hell by sports commissioners, they just took the Super Bowl there.

And, well, what we’re the FanDuel and DraftKings odds of that happening twenty years ago?

Now here comes this mess of a (changing) story with Ohtani and Mizuhara, which has come into the light because of an federal investigation into a southern California bookmaker named Matthew Bowher, one which reportedly uncovered wire-transfer payments from Ohtani’s account to Bowher’s to cover bets Mizuhara himself says he made on international soccer matches and sports other than baseball.

“I never bet on baseball,” Mizuhara told ESPN. “That’s 100 percent. I knew that rule.”

But he admits he didn’t know a rule in California — one known as a law — about sports betting being illegal in that state. Or baseball’s own rules about placing bets with illegal bookmakers. Those, literally, must have gotten lost in translation.

Of course a lot of this story seems to require the suspension of disbelief. Or we all risk getting played for suckers. First, someone described as a “spokesman” for Ohtani in the ESPN story said that the $4.5 million was being paid off in $500,000 transfers to cover the debts of a man reported to be making $300,000 a year, or thereabouts. That was when the spokesman was presenting Mizuhara to ESPN for a 980-minute interview on Tuesday night.

But then, as ESPN was preparing to post its report on Wednesday, Ohtani’s people clearly panicked, finally realizing the magnitude of the this story and its possible fallout, and decided that this wasn’t a gesture of friendship on Ohtani. No, they had now decided that Mizuhara had been systematically stealing from Ohtani, like that front office guy who had finally been caught after embezzling more than $20 million from the Jacksonville Jaguars in plain sight.

So, overnight — or we’re supposed to believe from Ohtani’s handlers — Mizuhara went from a bailed-out friend and victim of a gambling addiction to being a thief himself.

“In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei had been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities,” is how the statement from Berk Brettler LLP read.

At almost dizzying speed, Mizuhara went from being presented to ESPN with a bow around him to being fired by the Dodgers. In the process, the people in charge of protecting Ohtani had done anything but. What they had learned was something others before them had learned, often the hard way: If you don’t get out in front of your own story, it will run you right over.

You hope, for Ohtani’s sake, that Mizuhara’s original version was true, that Ohtani had been acting as a friend in covering those gambling losses. Mizuhara enthusiastically fell on his sword with that one. That was before Ohtani’s spokespeople and lawyers started falling down themselves as if they’d all slipped on banana peels.

Logic tells you that at least one of these versions might be true:

The first one.

The second, which has Mizuhara being nothing more than a common thief.

Then there is the one no one wants to believe, that Mizuhara, despite saying “Shohei had zero involvement in gambling,” was fronting for Ohtani on those non-baseball bets. We don’t want to believe that, absolutely wouldn’t want to know that Ohtani might be Phil Mickelson on training wheels. But, let’s face it, that would be one more thing we didn’t know about Ohtani, including that he had a wife.

There is likely so much more to this story that the feds know, and we will eventually learn, just because the full story always does seem to come out sooner or later. For now, we’d just like to hear what Shohei Ohtani really knows about all this from Ohtani himself. In any language.