The biggest star in baseball is involved in a burgeoning sports betting scandal, but there’s been considerable question this week about where that involvement sits on a sliding scale. Had Shohei Ohtani been an inveterate gambler, racking up millions in debt to an unlicensed bookie in California? Had Ohtani just been an astonishingly good friend, paying the debt of a close confidant who had gotten out over his skis? Was the truth some combination of the two? Or, as Ohtani’s lawyers said last week, was the story a lot simpler? Had someone stolen a million bucks from Ohtani, paying it directly from his account to the bookie?
At least two investigations remain ongoing. But Ohtani shared his version of the events with the international media on Monday at Dodger Stadium, and now something can be said for him that couldn’t have been said before: Given what’s currently in the public domain, Ohtani’s story adds up. Several threads that didn’t connect now do, and if you were—ahem—placing a bet on where all of this will land, you would place it on Ohtani being a victim rather than the Japanese Pete Rose. That would be good for Ohtani (who would not be in a lot of trouble), the Dodgers (who would not have spent all that money on a guy in big trouble), sports fans (who would not have to feel scruples about rooting for a very likable star), and, most of all, for Major League Baseball (which would avoid an ungodly shitstorm).
The story centers on Ohtani’s now-former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara. The 39-year-old had been translating for Ohtani since the player joined the Los Angeles Angels in 2017, and the two were more or less inseparable in public settings. Find Ohtani in the dugout, and Mizuhara would not be far. Ohtani is intensely private—private enough that the world didn’t know he was in a serious relationship until he recently announced he’d gotten married and didn’t provide his wife’s name. Mizuhara was one of the few who were clearly on the inside. “We’re not friends or anything. We’re just business partners,” Ohtani said of Mizuhara at the Dodgers’ fan fest in February. But Ohtani said it while nearly crying with laughter.
Last week, while the Dodgers were in South Korea to open MLB’s regular season, ESPN reported that Ohtani’s name was on two outgoing wire transfers worth $1 million to an illegal bookmaking operation in Southern California. The most marketable player in the sport having been in that deep to an illegal bookie would be a 500-alarm fire for MLB and still roughly a 250-alarm fire even if Ohtani were found not to be betting on baseball. In the most terrifying possibility for the league, Ohtani had invited a new Black Sox scandal. In a slightly less terrifying but still terrifying case, he’d made himself vulnerable to blackmail.
We have recently seen, in other walks of pop culture, how the internet abhors an information vacuum. But in this one, Ohtani’s camp made the situation much more combustible. One of the few undisputed facts of the story, to date, is that Mizuhara has a debilitating gambling problem. In a long phone call with an ESPN reporter last week, Mizuhara said his losses were at least $4.5 million, many times the roughly $85,000 salary he earned from the Angels. In an interview facilitated by a crisis communications spokesman whom Ohtani’s team had hired, Mizuhara told the network that he had asked Ohtani to pay the debt, and that Ohtani had done so. ESPN later reported that Dodgers team president Andrew Friedman told the rest of the team, in the clubhouse after a game, that Ohtani had stepped up to pay the debt.
That would be that—or so it might have been. Except that, by later that very day, Ohtani’s American lawyers released a statement that said, “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.” And still later that same Wednesday (Thursday in Seoul), Mizuhara told ESPN in a follow-up call that he had lied—and that Ohtani had no knowledge of his betting. He answered a few other questions, declined to answer others, then did the only wise thing he’s done lately: Already fired, he stopped talking to the press.
The shifting stories from people close to Ohtani raised all kinds of reasonable questions about the player’s role. One of those questions was: How could a hired crisis comms professional oversee an interview in which one of Ohtani’s dearest friends is able to lie on the record to a reporter about Ohtani having paid his debts willingly? Another good question was: If Mizuhara had stolen millions from Ohtani, why were the two of them looking so chummy together that morning during the Dodgers game against the San Diego Padres? And one more follow-up: How did Ohtani’s stateside lawyers blow the lid off this story in just a few hours while Ohtani and Mizuhara were half a world away?
These questions now have reasonable answers, which Ohtani’s people had begun previewing in the past few days and which Ohtani explicitly provided on Monday.
The public-relations disaster, with Ohtani’s side changing its story so diametrically? According to Ohtani, the contradictions resulted from dishonest translating by Mizuhara. Ohtani said that Mizuhara had “been telling everybody around” that he’d been communicating with Ohtani to get his comments but had actually made up his own story (the one about Ohtani covering his debts) and shared it with the world. In addition to a major ethical breach by Mizuhara, that would be a significant failure on the part of the communications professional Ohtani’s team hired. That spokesman apparently did not see the problem with handing a megaphone to the very person who was spreading a lie about his client.
The friendly interactions between Ohtani and Mizuhara at the game in Korea, shortly before the Dodgers fired Mizuhara and Ohtani’s lawyers alleged a “massive theft”? At the time, Ohtani did not know that the wires had come from his account at all. Ohtani said he didn’t learn about Mizuhara’s gambling problem until a one-on-one meeting late Wednesday, which came after Mizuhara had told the rest of the Dodgers the tale of Ohtani agreeing to cover his losses.
How did the American lawyers figure out that a theft had occurred before anyone else issued a determination like that while the story’s principals were in Korea? Ohtani says he got in touch with them immediately after Mizuhara came clean about what he’d done. “Obviously, it was an absurd thing that was happening, and I contacted my representatives at that point,” Ohtani said.
There’s at least one question without a readily apparent answer: How did Mizuhara gain access to Ohtani’s bank account? We might learn that one later on, though. The remaining investigations into the SoCal gambling operation could yield all sorts of new information.
Yet it is notable that the previously conflicting accounts from Ohtani’s people all stemmed from Mizuhara, who wasn’t just the gambler in the story but the person best positioned to play gatekeeper about what Ohtani heard and said about all of it. The Ohtani camp has told only one story since removing Mizuhara from the equation: that the interpreter lied, that Ohtani did not understand the situation his friend had thrown him into, and that the misunderstandings of the story were Mizuhara’s doing.
Part of Ohtani’s preference for privacy is that nobody commentating on this story has any idea whether he’s the kind of guy who’d bet on sports, cover a friend’s debt, or do anything else other than hit home runs and strike out batters. But Ohtani was as explicit as possible that he has never placed a sports bet or had someone place one for him, and he was just as clear that he had no hand in Mizuhara paying a bookie from his account.
A rich young athlete making a reckless financial decision to help a buddy? Sure, that’s easy to believe. But what about a rich young athlete, who is surrounded by public-relations handlers, lying through his teeth into a microphone at the end of a week of global attention on his team’s inconsistent stories? And with such enormous professional and legal repercussions if he is caught lying? Let’s just say that if Ohtani’s statement on Monday was not 100 percent honest, he needs to replace more than his interpreter.
