The Problem with Shohei Ohtani

And how baseball got in bed with gambling

A version of this story first appeared in New York Magazine.

Is Shohei Ohtani, the great global superstar, in more trouble than he’s letting on?

When news broke that Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had been accused of stealing $4.5 million from the baseball superstar to pay down gambling debts with a California bookie, it was already one of the more consequential sports stories of the year, rapidly overshadowing March Madness and the NBA playoff push. The wire transfers had come to light because the FBI was investigating a man named Matthew Bowyer for running an illicit bookmaking scheme (online gambling isn’t yet legal in California). ESPN and the Los Angeles Times were alerted that Ohtani’s name had surfaced in the investigation; two $500,000 payments had been wired directly from Ohtani’s bank account to Bowyer.

If Ohtani, the face of baseball—a two-way Japanese phenomenon who just signed a record-breaking $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers—was the mere victim of an elaborate theft, this episode might be little more than a widely publicized gossip item. The Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara, after all.

But there are several more twists to the story. When Tisha Thompson, ESPN’s investigative reporter, first started hunting around, Ohtani’s representatives told her it was Mizuhara betting on sports and Ohtani transferring the money to cover his losses. Ohtani’s team then permitted Mizuhara to sit for a 90-minute interview Tuesday night. Mizuhara told ESPN that he started placing bets on credit with Bowyer after meeting him at a San Diego poker game in 2021. His losses reached $1 million by the end of 2022 and exploded from there.

“I’m terrible [at gambling]. Never going to do it again. Never won any money,” Mizuhara said. “I mean, I dug myself a hole and it kept on getting bigger, and it meant I had to bet bigger to get out of it and just kept on losing. It’s like a snowball effect.”

Mizuhara claimed that he regularly bet on international soccer, basketball, and football, but not baseball. That was a line he said he wouldn’t cross, since he had access to so much inside information as Ohtani’s confidant, someone who had spent almost every waking hour with last year’s runaway MVP. Their close relationship had once been described as a “brotherhood.” After agreeing to cover Mizuhara’s losses, Ohtani thought Mizuhara still might gamble the money away, so he logged onto his computer and sent it to Bowyer himself, according to Mizuhara.

It was only after Mizuhara’s interview that Ohtani’s representatives changed their tune: They now claim Ohtani was the victim of “massive theft” at the hands of his interpreter, and that he never tried to cover the gambling losses.

MLB is desperately praying for this story to go away, but it will only evolve from here. That’s largely because Ohtani’s theft claim, on its face, makes little sense. How did Ohtani not know his interpreter was wiring $1 million from his own bank account? How did Ohtani’s bank not alert him? Banking institutions have aggressive compliance procedures in place to ensure very large sums of cash are not wired without the consent of the account holders. It is difficult to imagine Ohtani himself didn’t sign off on the transfer in some form.

More likely is Mizuhara’s original explanation: He ran up huge debts, and his friend, who is very rich, came to bail him out. But that story, which Ohtani’s team probably thought protected him until they realized the implications of the FBI’s involvement, is itself damning. It means Ohtani knowingly sent at least $1 million directly from his bank account to an illegal bookie in the FBI’s crosshairs.

MLB has said Ohtani is not under investigation, but that line won’t be sustainable for much longer. Mizuhara will probably face a prison sentence and prosecutors will be leaning on him for information. What will he tell them? Baseball players are forbidden from gambling on baseball and with illegal, offshore bookies, though are permitted to bet on other sports like football and basketball. Betting on baseball is, of course, especially serious. It’s what got Pete Rose banned for life and the Black Sox cast out of the sport in the primes of their careers.

For now, there is no evidence that Mizuhara bet on baseball. But what if he did? As prominent sports talk-show host and recovering gambling addict Craig Carton pointed out, a problem gambler like Mizuhara could’ve turned to the sport he knows best to make up for his gargantuan losses. If that’s perverse speculation, the rapidly evolving explanations from the Ohtani camp have invited it. Another unsettling question: Why would a bookie like Bowyer extend so much credit to an interpreter who is plainly not rich? Mizuhara reportedly earned between $300,000 to $500,000 annually, a comfortable but not extravagant salary that, in theory, would have made it hard for him to fall into a gambling hole that neared $5 million. Or, at the minimum, it should have made a bookie like Bowyer skeptical: It’s not like Mizuhara was a multimillionaire professional athlete. He just happened to be very close friends with one.

The timing of this scandal could scarcely be worse. The Padres and Dodgers, with Ohtani in tow, just completed a triumphant two-game series in Seoul; it was the first time an MLB game has ever been played in South Korea. For all the declinist narratives that perpetually dog baseball, the sport is financially healthy and arguably more consequential around the globe than either the NBA or NFL. If the NBA has won the hearts of France, Eastern Europe, and China—though failed to manufacture an Asian superstar since Yao Ming—baseball is the national sport of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and extremely popular in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Curaçao. Many of baseball’s greatest players, unlike the NFL, grew up in other countries. Lording over them all is Ohtani, baseball’s first two-way star since Babe Ruth and the only player ever to simultaneously hit and pitch with so much success. He makes $50 million annually in endorsements alone. In Japan, his celebrity is unmatched. When I went there last year, Ohtani was like Elvis and Taylor Swift mashed up into one.

Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, has every incentive to look away. Arguably, it wasn’t such a hard decision to ban Pete Rose in 1989 because his playing career was over and, as a manager, he was only worth so much to baseball. But in 2024, MLB’s future rides on Ohtani’s otherworldly bat and arm. Manfred would love to do absolutely nothing — let Mizuhara face his own consequences in the shadows, let Ohtani fully distance himself, let the Dodgers chase a World Series title in peace. That, however, will be untenable, because cash was wired from Shohei Ohtani’s bank account to a bookie under federal investigation. Manfred answers to MLB’s owners, who all, beyond Los Angeles, have little incentive to safeguard Ohtani.

Manfred can only hope Ohtani’s story holds. A 29-year-old generational superstar with access to every professional and legal resource imaginable is the victim of theft—his interpreter, without his knowledge or consent, wiring at least $1 million out of a bank account without that institution checking with Ohtani. It’s almost possible.

If the scandal takes a more nefarious turn and Ohtani ends up getting suspended, what definitely will not happen is any greater reckoning with sports betting in America. Many states, including New York, have legalized gambling, and all the professional leagues, including baseball, heavily promote mobile sports betting. California is an outlier. Proponents of legalization will argue gambling scandals date back more than a century, and laws forbidding gambling couldn’t keep Rose from betting on Reds games. What has changed, though, is the relentless advertising. Sports leagues themselves tell their own players to never gamble while zealously pitching every last fan on that insane parlay or prop bet that can instantly win you a small fortune. What the league commissioners are slowly learning is that it’s inordinately hard to stay clean this way. One bet is obvious: This will not be the last gambling scandal baseball, or any other American sport, endures.