Jon Heyman Oi Genius
Superstar’s camp pushes narrative he’s baseball savant/financial idiot
ONE GAME into superstar Shohei Ohtani’s Dodgers tenure, the glorious narrative of the unique and all-time great ballplayer joining the super team took a bizarre and unhappy turn. And we still aren’t quite sure what to make of it.
It all started when Ohtani’s lawyers issued a statement that Ohtani “was the victim of massive theft” and “are turning matters over to authorities.” Their story is that Ohtani’s longtime interpreter/friend stole millions out of Ohtani’s account to pay gambling debts to an illegal bookmaker, and the Dodgers immediately fired the interpreter and presumably former friend, Ippei Mizuhara.
It is alleged that Ohtani was the victim. But we are in the first inning of this story. The principles haven’t even weighed in yet. We haven’t directly heard from Mizuhara (or directly from Ohtani) since the story broke. Mizuhara originally told ESPN that Ohtani gave him the funds to pay off his debts, but later changed his story to say Ohtani had no knowledge of his debts.
The story of the Ohtani camp is that the longtime interpreter/ former friend is an amazing actor who fooled Ohtani for years, and presumably that Ohtani is gullible and naive, plus has really terrible taste in best friends. That may be the correct story anyway — Ohtani hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing — but Ohtani has many top PR people working for him while Mizuhara is a relative nobody who’s out of work and appears out of money, too.
Mizuhara’s firing is a huge loss for him since he was said to be extremely well-paid as an interpreter for a guy who almost never speaks (not to the press, anyway). The real job morphed to become Ohtani’s occasional driver, workout partner and constant companion.
It’s not a happy story for anyone. But it’s not an illegal one, at least not from Ohtani’s standpoint, assuming all of Ohtani’s PR people are correct and his best buddy was a rogue operator who was dumb enough to lose all his money betting on sports (he told ESPN it wasn’t on baseball) but smart enough to allegedly get around all security measures and figure out how to move Ohtani’s money for his own benefit. (Mizuhara has not yet been charged with any crimes.)
Though it’s somewhat hard to believe Ohtani could know so little about the man he seemed to spend 20 hours a day with, folks around Ohtani — the ones who actually know him, not the PR folks — say they believe he’s a one-track ballplaying genius, a genius who’s oblivious to things off the field, including money. That’s the preferred storyline, at least for today.
Ohtani certainly doesn’t seem very interested in money, which supports their contention that he didn’t know what was going on, that millions were removed from his account without his knowledge. If he cared about money, would he have played for pennies for years? Or more to the point, if he had a gambling issue, would he have deferred 97 percent of his contract — $680 million — for 10 years?
It’s a little strange that ESPN, and also the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story, seem to know more about what’s going on than Ohtani, who was seen on TV joking on the bench with Mizuhara as late as the eighth inning of the opener. But word is Ohtani knew nothing about a reported $4.5 million being removed from his account until sometime after the game.
There’s a lot that remains unclear. But for now the story that he’s an all-time baseball genius but a financial dimwit is the story that works best for Ohtani and frankly, all of baseball. It’s also possible, of course, that this is the real story.