“I’m very saddened and shocked that someone who I trusted has done this,” Shohei Ohtani said — through a translator, of course; Ohtani’s lack of comfort speaking English is increasingly becoming a plot point in this ongoing story — at a press conference on Monday. It was his first response to a potentially massive scandal involving $4.5 million in gambling debts that were paid off in Ohtani’s name by his former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara. “I never bet on baseball or any other sports. I have never asked someone to do that on my behalf. I have never gone through a bookmaker to bet on sports. Up until a couple of days ago, I didn’t know that this was happening. Ippei has been stealing money from my account and has told lies.” This is the most interesting thing Shohei Ohtani has said in his entire career. Which may be part of the problem.
One of the best things I’ve read about modern sports media came from former ESPN NBA reporter Tom Haberstroh on his Substack late last year. Haberstroh’s piece made some minor headlines because it revealed leaked audio of troubled Memphis Grizzlies superstar Ja Morant calling a referee a “ho,” but that was the least interesting thing about it. What was truly fascinating was Haberstroh correctly labeling Morant “the NBA’s first Zoom superstar.”
Essentially, Morant represents a new trend of athletes who, unlike LeBron, Jordan, Jeter, Brady, or anyone before them, have never faced any real adversarial questioning from a powerful independent media. As Haberstroh notes, Morant’s NBA career has taken place in an entirely post-COVID world: He won his Rookie of the Year Award (playing in small-market Memphis where there are only two full-time beat reporters) in September 2020 (his press conference was held over Zoom), and he spent the next two and a half years of his career with no reporters allowed in the locker room. And it was during this precise time frame that Morant went from small-school-kid success story to a player suspended by the league multiple times for a variety of infractions, a shocking fall for someone the league had clearly planned on building into one of its signature superstars. Haberstroh’s point wasn’t that the probing eyes of the media were some sort of moral restorative; it was that in a world where a player like Morant had no one to question him about anything, he had no reason to check any of his worst instincts. He began to feel indestructible. He had no incentive to grow up at all. As Haberstroh put it: “Morant has demonstrated that he struggled to develop the necessary judgment a superstar needs to manage a public career on the big media stage. A good explanation for why that might be is, up until recently, he rarely ever performed on a small one.”
I’ve been thinking about Haberstroh’s theory ever since the Ohtani story broke. As my colleague Ross Barkan noted last week, there are three possible explanations for what happened with Ohtani, his interpreter, and the $4.5 million in gambling debts:
1. Mizuhara stole the $4.5 million from Ohtani without him knowing. This is what Ohtani and his handlers are claiming, to the point that they even claim Mizuhara gave Ohtani wrong translations to cover his tracks.
2. Mizuhara asked Ohtani, his close (and in many ways only) friend, to bail him out, and Ohtani obliged. This was the original claim from both Mizuhara and Ohtani’s camp until they changed their stories, perhaps after realizing that writing wire transfers to illegal bookies is, in fact, illegal.
3. The gambling debts are Ohtani’s and Mizuhara is taking the fall for him.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this story is how incompetent Ohtani’s public-relations team has been from the beginning despite his status as one of the richest and most famous athletes on the planet. When ESPN’s excellent reporter Tisha Thompson originally came across the wire transfers in Ohtani’s name (actually, Otani’s name, misspelled), she reached out to him and received a response from a representative claiming that “the slugger had transferred the funds to cover Mizuhara’s gambling debt” and, incredibly, offering up Mizuhara for a 90-minute on-camera interview. The next day, with the interview complete and the story ready to air, a new, different Ohtani representative (hired from a crisis-PR firm who appears to have shown up a day late) denied everything Mizuhara had said and referred Thompson to a fancy law firm representing the superstar, which claimed, “Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities.” The changing explanations have led to widespread speculation of a nightmare scenario: that baseball’s biggest transcendent superstar has a crippling gambling addiction and may even be, gasp, the next Pete Rose. It is sort of the sports world’s version of the Kate Middleton Photoshop story; combine inconsistent, muddled messaging with a lack of concrete evidence and you’ve got the perfect recipe for rampant, unhinged theorizing.
Precisely for the reasons Haberstroh mapped out, Ohtani is particularly vulnerable to this kind of rumor-mongering. As with Morant, his rise to superstardom has happened entirely in a post-COVID era in which he has been able to stonewall media members at every turn. (Ohtani, unlike Morant, has been followed by reporters for years, but mostly by a reverent Japanese press until his arrival in the U.S.) Remarkably little is known about him: It was only three weeks ago that he announced, out of nowhere, that he was married, though he did not name the woman and no one really pushed him to. (She got an Instagram rollout two weeks later.) After his injury late last year, which ultimately led to Tommy John surgery, and which will keep him from pitching until 2025, at the earliest, both the media and the Angels were left entirely in the dark about what the injury was, how he intended to fix it, and why he was still hitting with such a serious physical problem. When he hit free agency this offseason, his whole camp went radio silent, to the point that even his potential teammates were tracking his flights to see if he was going to play with them. He even had a mystery dog. There has been no one to sketch him out, no profiles written, no humanizing details that weren’t orchestrated by his team. This has allowed Ohtani to hide in plain sight, essentially as an empty vessel for everyone to pour into him whatever they think he is, whatever they want him to be. For a long time, it worked out great: People loved Ohtani, a man doing something no one has ever done in baseball history, and thus the vessel was filled with positive things (including $700 million). But the minute the story turned on him, we had nothing to fall back on, because we collectively realized, as with Morant, that we didn’t know him at all. The vessel is now full of DraftKings and Pete Rose jokes.
This of course makes him like many athletes: We fool ourselves into believing we know them when we don’t. That our lack of real familiarity fools us is particularly ironic because, as ridiculous as the “Mizuhara stole the money” explanation is, it strikes me as far, far more likely than the “Ohtani is a degenerate gambler” explanation. For as little as we know about Ohtani, the one thing everyone is certain of is his relentless, almost maniacal focus on baseball itself. The evidence for this is that he is one of the best pitchers and one of the best hitters in the game simultaneously, which had previously been thought entirely impossible, even inconceivable. According to what Mizuhara told Thompson, many of the wagers in question were placed on the NFL, the NBA, international soccer, and college football, and, well, while I suppose it’s possible Ohtani is a Georgia football obsessive, it sure seems unlikely. (Imagine Ohtani calling into Finebaum.) As a rich and famous athlete, Ohtani is far more apt not to know what’s going on with his finances than he is to be an obsessive gambler on sports he didn’t know existed until five years ago. Which is more likely: that Ohtani is the sort of tunnel-visioned near-billionaire who has been coddled from a young age and thus is prone to missing huge details of his life the rest of us never would? Or that he’s Pete Rose? (Who wasn’t even “Pete Rose, baseball gambler,” until the end of his career, when he was out of money entirely and thus turned to betting on baseball, the sport he knew best.)
This is not to say that Ohtani’s explanation entirely makes sense, either. Ohtani claimed in his statement that the first he had heard of the gambling debts was when Mizuhara took him aside after a team meeting during the team’s series in Korea. That would be a day after Ohtani’s handlers offered Mizuhara for the ESPN interview. Why would Ohtani’s people put out Mizuhara for an on-camera interview with ESPN without even mentioning it to Ohtani? It’s fair to say that this strains credulity.
“To summarize how I’m feeling right now, I’m beyond shocked,” Ohtani said at the “press conference.” “It’s hard to verbalize how I’m feeling at this point. I’m going to let my lawyers handle matters from here on out.” Which means this is probably the last we’re going to hear from him on this, in front of a microphone, anyway. Which, again, may be part of the problem.
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