All parties hoping Ohtani’s hands clean
FOR now, it seems, Major League Baseball has avoided the second arrival of the onrushing locomotive that nearly killed the sport 125 years ago. For now, it seems, the most famous baseball player on the planet remains on the correct side of the one uncrossable line that would blow the sport apart at its core. For now, the story is this: Shohei Ohtani was duped, possibly by his best friend, Ippei Mizuhara, a 39-year-old native Japanese whose family moved to the United States in 1991, who has served as an interpreter for league players since 2006, not long after graduating from UC-Riverside, serving that role both for Japanese players in America (beginning with Boston’s Hideki Okajima) and also for Americans playing in Japan. Since 2017, he has been Ohtani’s interpreter as well as his constant companion.
These things we know for sure: Mizuhara has a taste for gambling — and, worse, a propensity for losing. This we also know: His debt, by last year, working through a California bookmaker named Mathew Bowyer, reached $4.5 million. And that debt was paid off thanks to funds transferred from Ohtani’s bank account.
This is less certain, based solely on Mizuhara’s word: He did not lose that small fortune betting on baseball.
And what’s murkier still is how this all came to be. At first, a spokesman for Ohtani told ESPN that Ohtani himself had covered the debt. Later, after Mizuhara gave an interview to ESPN, Ohtani’s legal counsel issued a statement that altered the narrative significantly.
“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,” read the statement from Berk Brettler LLP. Mizuhara has not yet been charged with any crimes.
Wednesday, a day in which the Dodgers opened the season in Seoul, South Korea, with a 5-2 win over the Padres (Ohtani going 2-for-5 in his L.A. debut), the team fired Mizuhara, who’d followed Ohtani 31 miles west along I-5 when the slugger moved from the Angels to the Dodgers.
There are still a number of furlongs to go before we get to the teeth of this story. It is clear that the Dodgers, and Ohtani’s representatives, wanted to distance him as far away as possible from his friend, as quickly as possible. And that’s understandable. Covering a gambling nut for a friend isn’t illegal, and it doesn’t violate baseball’s sacrosanct policy against gambling.
But it sure pushes the game’s biggest name perilously close to the line.
And baseball, more than any other sport, has not only felt the wrath of gambling’s underbelly more profoundly than any other, it has spent a century being aggressively proactive in reminding the folks who play of the consequence of ignoring that commandment. There used to be a saying among old-school New York mob bosses who tried to stay out of the drug business: “You deal, you die.”
In baseball, it’s always been equally as succinct: “You bet, you’re out.”
It was the sentence handed down to the eight members of the Chicago White Sox accused (and later acquitted) of throwing the 1919 World Series, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the 15 or 20 best hitters in the game’s history. It was the fate for Pete Rose 70 years later, when it became clear he’d placed bets while managing the Reds.
Hell, in the ’80s, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were tossed temporarily from the game merely for taking jobs shaking hands at Atlantic City casinos. This is no joke in baseball’s eyes.
Sometimes, folks wonder if worrying about baseball players throwing games in an era where many command nine-figure salaries is an outdated concern. It is not. And should not be. And at a time when baseball is in bed with the legal bookmakers — same as every other sport — the leagues have to be extra vigilant.
And players have to stay as far away from it as possible. It took Ohtani and his people about 30 seconds to realize this. Baseball must hope it stays this way, that the farther the story goes it doesn’t nudge Ohtani closer to that uncrossable line. For 125 years, every time you walk into a baseball clubhouse, this is the message that greets you:
“Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has not duty to perform, shall be declared ineligible for one year. Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.”
Nothing ambiguous about that. And nothing ambiguous about needing the most famous player in the world to be as far away from this — and from his erstwhile best friend — as possible.