Sports + Gambling Is Usually a Bad Bet

Our No. 18 team preview is coming up (and a character study of a certain beloved Met) but we can’t ignore the bizarre and potentially game-rattling news that broke yesterday surrounding Shohei Ohtani. At the same time, we also can’t go into any great depth on that story because, at the moment, we have absolutely no idea what the story even is.

Here’s what we know about the Shohei Ohtani mess: While in South Korea for Opening Day on Wednesday, the Dodgers fired Ohtani’s interpreter and dear friend, Ippei Mizuhara, over questions related to $4.5 million in illegal gambling debts that were paid out of Ohtani’s account.

Here’s where it gets so much stranger: At first, an Ohtani spokesman seemed pretty eager to frame this as, I don’t know, the heartwarming story of Shohei Ohtani bailing out a friend who had gotten in way over his head in debts accrued while betting on soccer and other non-baseball sports. Is that a heartwarming story? I don’t know, but I do know that the spokesman was so eager to get this particular story out there that he impulsively (and quite naively) had Mizuhara sit for a 90-minute interview with ESPN.

“Obviously, [Ohtani] wasn’t happy about it,” Mizuhara told ESPN, “and said he would help me out to make sure I never do this again. He decided to pay it off for me.… I want everyone to know Shohei had zero involvement in betting. I want people to know I did not know this was illegal. I learned my lesson the hard way. I will never do sports betting ever again.”

Then, just before the story came out, the spokesman did a 180, denied everything Mizuhara had said, and announced instead that Ohtani’s lawyers would handle things. Because, yeah, of course they will.

And the lawyers, in a very brief statement, offered a very different account of what happened: