When news broke that Shohei 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........