A Bad Gamble

This week, the pro baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani addressed the media for the first time since his name surfaced in an investigation of an alleged illegal gambling ring. He told reporters that the $4.5 million in wire transfers from his account had been sent without his knowledge by his friend and interpreter, and that he had “never bet on baseball or any other sports.”

Opening Day is this week, and Major League Baseball can’t be happy about this cloud over its biggest star. But with gambling so deeply embedded in mainstream sports culture, and most sports leagues now in partnership with gambling operations, these kinds of scandals have become far more common. The same day as Ohtani’s press conference, news broke that the NBA was investigating a player for possible betting irregularities.

Up until this point, the most controversial thing Ohtani had done was make a surprise announcement on Instagram that he had gotten married, which happened a few months after he signed a whopping $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now his close friend and interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, is being investigated by MLB for his alleged involvement in a sports-betting ring operating out of California, where gambling on sports remains illegal.

Ohtani is Japanese, and the Dodgers hired Mizuhara to translate for him. Mizuhara’s ties to a bookmaking operation were first brought to light by ESPN and the Los Angeles Times. Depending on your level of skepticism, you may suspect that Ohtani was victimized by a scammer with a gambling problem, or that he generously covered a friend’s massive gambling debt, or, perhaps, that Ohtani was the one using Mizuhara to place bets on his own behalf.

Mizuhara initially told ESPN that Ohtani had made several large payments to a California bookmaker to help cover Mizuhara’s debt. Mizuhara was adamant that he’d never placed any bets on baseball and that Ohtani had never gambled on sports, period.

But a day after Mizuhara’s lengthy interview, a different narrative took shape. Ohtani’s lawyers issued a statement saying that their client was the victim of a “massive theft” committed by Mizuhara. Mizuhara then retracted many of the details he had provided to ESPN, but would not comment on the allegation that he’d stolen money from his friend.

At the press conference on Monday, Ohtani insisted that he had never instructed Mizuhara to wire money from his account to cover the betting losses. “I’m very sad and shocked that someone who I’ve trusted has done this,” he said.

Ohtani didn’t take any questions, and so many remain. Before Mizuhara changed his story, he told ESPN that he and Ohtani had sat down together at his computer and sent “eight or nine” transactions of $500,000 from Ohtani’s account to the bookmaking operation. Would Ohtani really send that much money and never ask any questions about where it was going? If Mizuhara acted alone, how could Ohtani not have noticed such large sums missing? But the more important question is: Why did Mizuhara, who has since been fired from the Dodgers, suddenly change his story?

Perhaps it’s because wiring money to an illegal gambling operation is against the law. And while some people have speculated that the authorities are unlikely to have gone after Ohtani for the transfers alone, it makes sense that Ohtani’s camp might have wanted to redirect the blame. Ohtani wouldn’t be the first famous athlete to have been exploited by someone close to him. But the sudden shift in narrative creates some serious doubt.

What an awkward position for MLB to be in. Ohtani is a two-time American League MVP, a three-time All-Star, and an international megastar. In recent years, even the best pro baseball players have struggled to gain the mass popularity of other American sports superstars, such as the NFL’s Patrick Mahomes and the NBA’s LeBron James. Ohtani is both a dynamic hitter and a powerful pitcher, and with him on the roster, the Dodgers are a heavy favorite to win the World Series.

The last thing baseball wants or needs is for its most marketable star to be embroiled in a gambling scandal. Baseball has a messy history with gambling, from the 1919 Black Sox scandal—which many consider to be the most notorious game-fixing incident in sports history—to the lifetime banishment of the Cincinnati Reds legend Pete Rose. Rose was banned from baseball in 1989, after an MLB investigation uncovered that he’d placed bets on the Reds to win while he was playing for and managing the team.

Rose’s punishment, and the opprobrium he faced, once served as a deterrent for athletes tempted to wager on sports, but now even the stigma around gambling seems to have disappeared.

This is the downside of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2018 to strike down the ban on sports wagering outside Nevada. Since then, sports betting has become legal in 38 states. Betting lines appear in graphics during game broadcasts. The prevailing thought used to be that Las Vegas could never be home to professional sports teams, because it was the gambling epicenter, but now the city has an NFL, a WNBA, and an NHL team, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has indicated that Vegas is on that league’s radar for expansion. Many former athletes promote wagering on betting apps. Sports-media organizations once didn’t openly discuss gambling as part of their coverage, but now ESPN has a show dedicated to gambling as well as its own wagering app. Meanwhile, other gambling apps, such as DraftKings and FanDuel, are producing sports content to further engage their customers.

Every major professional sports league prohibits players from gambling on their own sport, but most can gamble on other sports. NCAA players aren’t allowed to gamble on any sport the NCAA sponsors, but they can bet on things like cricket, horse racing, and MMA.

Such easy access to gambling means that more athletes and their associates will be tempted to partake. In 2022, the Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended for a year for gambling on NFL games. Ridley said he had downloaded a gambling app and bet on NBA and NFL games, including those of his team at the time, the Atlanta Falcons. Last summer, several Iowa college football players, as well as a basketball player and a wrestler, were charged with underage gambling. The players, who were under 21, allegedly registered on sports-gambling apps using the names of friends and family members to place wagers on games. The University of Alabama fired its baseball coach last May for providing inside information to a gambler who bet against the school.

From this standpoint, it’s probably inaccurate to look at baseball’s investigation of Ohtani as some kind of tipping point. There have been quite a few tipping points since the Supreme Court’s decision to end the ban on sports gambling. Now it’s just a matter of how bad it can get.