The Shohei Ohtani Scandal
Baseball makes its long-awaited return to gambling scandals! We did it, guys!
You think you know a guy.
Nah, just kidding. I don’t have any evidence that Shohei Ohtani, the LA Dodgers’ all-world mover of baseballs, has a gambling problem.
Still, let me be the 1,000th guy to contribute ‘Say It Ain’t Sho’ to the lexicon.
If Shohei could bet on sports — baseball players can’t, unlike some other pro leagues around here — then $4.5 million isn’t even an amount that would constitute a problem.
You and me? Oh, yeah. We’d be totaled. Not him, though.
And yes, even with the deferred contract. When you make $50m a year on endorsements back home, you’ve got some leeway.
His interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, though? Well, that’s a different story. He’s doing better than you and I (probably?), but that’s still reportedly many multiples of the guy’s annual income. Like, 10+. Sounds like he was in pretty deep.
Also sounds like the exact sort of guy you’d want to target if you were an illicit bookie looking for a whale, and my guess is that’s what happened here.
The first explanation is, to me, perfectly plausible: Shohei’s longtime employee and very good friend got himself into ruinous debt and came to Shohei for help. Shohei paid it off for him, only realizing later that what he was doing was itself a potential legal issue, given the FBI is investigating the bookie he was paying off.
I’ll try and avoid taking the speculation train any further stops than this one, but I don’t buy the new explanation from Shohei and his team that Ippei was actually stealing from him and Shohei had no idea. That strikes me as an overly convenient edit to make Ippei the full-on fall guy. Not that he shouldn’t be, all things considered, but that seems meant to cover Shohei.
It’s already an issue, and this could keep spiraling. Baseball continues to get in its own way. And here we thought the see-through pants were an issue. Man. You think you know a league.
The Line
What I’m more interested than the Shohei-specific aspect here, though, is whether this (don’t) moves the line. Not the betting line, per se, but pretty close. The line that a given gambling scandal must cross in order to disrupt what has otherwise been the full embrace of every pro sports league these last few years.
I wrote about this trend in the NFL last year.
MLB has $everal rea$on$ not to jump into this if they can possibly avoid it. Not only is gambling a nice little driver for fan interest, Shohei Ohtani is the sport’s biggest star, now on its biggest team. This isn’t a great start in LA.
I don’t anticipate MLB turns its back on Draftkings and co. next week, any more than I expect they’ll Pete Rose Shohei. (And
rightly points out that the Pete Rose decision is often remembered as a bit more agonizing than it really was. He was done playing. Neither’s ideal, but it’s a whole lot easier to blacklist the all-time hits leader when he’s no longer the active hits leader. I digress, after this: Free Pete Rose.)My question is: what’s the thing going to be? Many people, plenty of whom no doubt thought themselves to be Cassandrizing, warned that embracing gambling would inexorably harm the sports leagues now letting the fox into the henhouse. To extend that metaphor, there seems to be some Swiper, No Swiping! dissonance at play here.
Of course there were going to be scandals. Now there have been. The question is whether there are enough of them to be a problem, and whether those problems force any of the leagues to change their posture.
My guess, as has been my guess since this all started a few years ago, is still no.
MLB will try and weather this without suspending Ohtani. I suspect they will succeed, pending further and more damning developments.
MLB will also try and weather this without cutting ties with the sportsbooks, and I have all the more confidence that they’ll be just fine on that front.
Also, This
A very happy March Madness to all who celebrate, which is, far as I’m concerned, an every-hand question. For now, my bracket remains mostly intact, but it will face its greatest test yet in a few hours as the liberal arts ballers of Colgate University look to knock out Baylor. I’m already on the record here with
at 5x5, but I’ll say it again. #14 in our brackets, #1 in my heart. Go Raiders.I’m late to this, but: an in-season college basketball tournament awarding NIL money to all participants and the winning team? That’s… interesting? And possibly a threat to the above, more than the proposed expansions to the tournament?
Hard to say quite yet, but I bet you’d get a pretty good rundown of how we got here by listening to our docuseries, The Option. Episode 4 drops Monday!!!
I’m also late to this, but the Steelers seem to have installed a revolving door in their QB room. Out goes a disgraced Kenny Pickett, in comes a briefly confident Russell Wilson, now followed by a scorned Justin Fields. Guess that answers that,
.I happen to think Fields is the better option there, though I guess this publication is biased. I also happen to think neither’s… awesome. Still, Pittsburgh got to 10-7 this past year. They clearly don’t need a ton.
We got another, admittedly more minor, entry in the Sinner-Alcaraz rivalry this weekend at the BNP Paribas Open in California. Alcaraz won the whole thing, downing Sinner in the semis and Medvedev — always the bridesmaid — in the final. These two are fun to watch. Highly recommend: