MLB Avoids Worst-Case Gambling Scenario. But It’s Not Time to Relax.
On Thursday, we finally got something approaching an official account of the biggest story in baseball. The details are, somehow, outrageous and astounding, while still presenting a version of events that follows the least salacious plausible narrative.
According to an affidavit filed by an IRS investigator in federal court, Ippei Mizuhara — until recently Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, confidant, and right-hand man — stole some $16 million from the Dodgers superstar to cover sports gambling losses. It makes the case that the 39-year-old Mizuhara should be arrested for, and charged with, bank fraud. The day before the affidavit began circulating publicly, The New York Times reported that Mizuhara is negotiating a guilty plea to that charge, which carries a statutory maximum of 30 years’ jail time.
This case stems from a federal investigation into bookmaker Mathew Bowyer; several notable figures from the sports world, including Yasiel Puig, had already turned up in this dragnet before Mizuhara entered the picture.
Having searched Mizuhara’s phone, his bookie’s home and phone, as well as a victim’s phone (presumably Ohtani’s), federal investigators drew several conclusions: That Mizuhara impersonated Ohtani in order to access his bank accounts and authorize wire transfers; that he interpreted for Ohtani even in conversations with his own agents, accountants, and financial managers; and that he made 19,000 illegal wagers, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, and ended up more than $40 million in the hole.
What the feds did not find was evidence that Ohtani was ever aware he was being swindled, or that he ever interacted with or gave money to Bowyer or his people, or even discussed gambling with Mizuhara. Nor did they find evidence that Mizuhara had wagered on baseball.
As to the theory that Mizuhara is serving as a fall guy for Ohtani’s own gambling, the affidavit quotes a text exchange in which one of the bookmakers offers this exact theory, to which Mizuhara responds: “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me.”
The idea that baseball’s biggest and most inscrutable star was secretly a gambling addict gained traction because it’s a titillating narrative. Baseball can be a little stuffy sometimes; it’s fine to entertain more exciting hypotheticals. But this affidavit should quash that theory forever, at least among anyone who’s not married to their preferred story, facts be damned.
As much as MLB or the Dodgers might have cause to cover up a star’s theoretical illegal gambling debts, the IRS — as Kathryn Xu pointed out in Defector — has no such incentive. And not only is Mizuhara on the record saying he’s solely responsible, nobody I know would be willing to eat a 30-year prison sentence in order to limit a friend’s embarrassment.
Ohtani might be catastrophically naïve. His advisors might be oblivious to the point of incompetency. Mizuhara might have behaved in a fashion that is incomprehensible to most reasonable observers. But there’s no evidence that Ohtani is a crook. Oswald acted alone.
Now that the details of the investigation appear to exonerate baseball’s biggest star, MLB has once again been the beneficiary of good fortune. Baseball’s first great scandal of the online sports betting era, the Alabama incident last year, involved neither professional baseball nor illegal gambling. More than that, the criminal mastermind who placed the bet was like something out of a Coen Brothers farce and got caught immediately.
This time, when the fruits of the federal investigation came to light, they exonerated the star player under suspicion. MLB could treat this like a bullet dodged. The league should instead treat it like a warning shot. Because the worst-case scenario didn’t come to pass, but the conditions for creating the worst-case scenario were absolutely there.
Here, I’ll quote section 17.g of the affidavit, a text message from the individual marked as Bookmaker 1 to Mizuhara:
“Hey Ippie, [sic] it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you’re not returning my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see [Victim A] walking his dog. I’m just gonna go up and talk to him and ask how I can get in touch with you since you’re not responding? Please call me back immediately.”
This isn’t like the text message you get from your mom when she bumps into one of your friends at the supermarket. Bookmaker 1’s message carries the implied threat that if Mizuhara didn’t call him back, he’d expose everything to Victim A, presumably Ohtani.
If we take him at his word, that means that an illegal bookmaker had two things: First, access to Ohtani, or at least potential access. Second, compromising information about someone very close to him. Mizuhara, by all accounts, was more than an assistant. He was Ohtani’s best friend, his most trusted link to the English-speaking world; today’s complaint calls him Ohtani’s “de facto manager.”
What if, instead of threatening to expose Mizuhara to Ohtani, the bookmaker had threatened Mizuhara in order to gain leverage over Ohtani? We’re walking away from this story with Ohtani’s hands clean, but what, apart from a criminal’s discretion, prevented this situation from escalating to the point where Ohtani himself was compromised?
“Swing over a 1-2 changeup in the eighth-inning of a six-run game I have a prop bet on, or else your buddy (or partner, or sibling, etc.) gets it,” can escalate quickly from point shaving to throwing games.
Mizuhara is facing criminal charges not because of his gambling habit per se, but for bank fraud. Superstar athletes get defrauded by their friends… maybe not every day, but commonly enough that Ohtani is not the only recent MVP to have a legal dispute over money management with people who were once close to him.
And the kind of gamblers Mizuhara fell in with are not the online casinos whose ads festoon every corner of professional sports nowadays, but the kind who have been off-limits to active MLB players since the era of Hal Chase. The league, mindful of lessons learned over the past 110 years, takes great pains to impress on its players how important it is to steer clear of such individuals.
Even so, we just came closer than most people realize to a Black Sox-style scandal taking down the most important individual in baseball this century. MLB would be wise to redouble its education and enforcement efforts to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Strictly speaking, this doesn’t have anything to do with legal sports betting, but baseball’s involvement with that enterprise weakens its ability to combat scandals like this one. Mizuhara got in with a shady bookie, but only because California is one of 12 states in which sports betting is still illegal.
If for some reason Ohtani had signed with the Rockies when he first came to the U.S., and Mizuhara had become his interpreter, he could’ve stolen all this money to bet on sports in Colorado legally, and maybe nobody would’ve ever been the wiser.
Is it possible for this legal and highly profitable gambling center to exist in the world of professional baseball alongside its shadowy and illicit cousin? Perhaps. But to embrace one while abjuring the other requires specificity and discipline bordering on cognitive dissonance.
In order for competitive sports to work as an entertainment enterprise, it has to not only be irreproachably legitimate, but look irreproachably legitimate. And if the Mizuhara affair proved anything, it’s that a sizable percentage of baseball fans are willing to call the probity of the sport into question with little evidence.
A match-fixing scandal, more than any number of offenses that are more odious by any reasonable moral standard, has the capacity to threaten the sport existentially. For that reason, if I were in charge, I’d be downright puritanical in writing the rules and draconian in enforcing them. Nobody who draws a paycheck from MLB or its clubs would be allowed to bet on sports, period. Nobody who has regular access to players and managers — journalists, doctors, agents, family members — would be allowed to bet on baseball, period. Violation of those rules would come with a significant suspension, up to a lifetime ban.
But it’s hard to denounce gambling as untouchable with one hand, while taking in millions of dollars from sportsbooks with the other. In its attempt to bleed every dollar from every crevice in the game, MLB has bet that this is not an impossible contradiction to resolve.
Maybe that’s true, and there are untold hundreds of millions to be made in affiliate deals without compromising the integrity of the game or opening the door for another scandal like this one. But they’ve gotten away with one here, and getting a free spin at the wheel usually makes people less cautious, not more. Bookies know that better than anyone.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
And if the Mizuhara affair proved anything, it’s that a sizable percentage of baseball fans are willing to call the probity of the sport into question with little evidence.
It’s because what you wrote earlier in the article:
Ohtani might be catastrophically naïve. His advisors might be oblivious to the point of incompetency.
…must indeed both be true. And which may in fact be true, yet are still hard to believe. Particularly the second point, since one would think this passes beyond the point of incompetence to criminally negligible.
Indeed, we could take this further. The problem with too-rapidly washing MLB’s hands of this whole affair is not just that Ohtani is apparently an innocent rube (fair enough, I don’t expect my star athletes to be cynical Mamet characters), nor that Ohtani’s advisors (whoever they are) allowed Mizuhara to get away with it — but that two different teams looked over Mizuhara’s apparently fabrication-filled credentials and didn’t raise so much as a single question. The total lack of vetting of someone so close to the players and the game is really surprising, and you have to think that any kind of attention might well have caught him earlier, given that the guy doesn’t seem to have been an impressively adroit con man so much as a habitual liar who quickly got in way over his head.
Even if “Ippei acted alone” seems basically to be true, it’s a bit shocking how little vetting and supervision the teams seem to give their near-the-game staffers, and this is something they really ought to be thinking hard about right now, before it gets them into trouble… again. I mean, this is not even the only serious recent scandal about what kind of people were working in the Angels’ clubhouse, specifically.
Ohtani gave Mizuhara sole access to his accounts and never bothered to check anything himself, while Mizuhara correctly answered the security questions to change the contact info to himself, disabled notifications, and set up his own legitimate account in which to funnel his winnings. Exactly what “fabrication-filled credentials” were publicly accessible for others to catch?
I believe the credentials being referenced are the parts of Mizuhara’s résumé which earlier reporting found to be fabricated. College degrees, past employers, work experience, that sort of thing.
Ohtani crucially didn’t give Ippei sole access. Ippei had to impersonate Ohtani, change the e-mail associated with the account, and turn off notifications in order to gain access to the account. And it almost didn’t work, the first time he tried it the bank locked the account. The feds literally have recordings of him talking to the bank, and IP records showing it was only his devices, phone numbers, etc. And if you weren’t aware, Ohtani turned over his phone to the feds and they searched every text message between him and Ippei over the time period, found nothing. Now, you could believe they communicated some other way, but based on Ippei’s texts to the bookie he does not seem like, um, the sharpest knife. So in sum: there’s mountains of evidence Ippei acted alone, and no evidence Ohtani was involved (I grant the initial changing stories are fishy, but based on the actual evidence we have, explained by those statements coming from Ippei, and doesn’t outweigh the evidence we do have).
This is all true, but it doesn’t negate the fact that 1) Ohtani and his representatives failed to properly vet Ippei, 2) the bookmaker relied upon Ippei’s assertions/implications that his account was backed by Ohtani to authorize credit lines, and 3) the amount of money involved (over $40M in losses, over $100M in action taken over a period of just a few years) seems to be the kind that even a bookmaker would want to verify Ippei’s financial backer (and likely more than his major league salary could back, which is allegedly the source of the money in that account). Together with the initial changing stories, this is enough to make it an issue in the court of public opinion. In addition, an indictment is not the same as a guilty verdict, and without access to all of the information available to prosecutors (both in the complaint and not), we cannot know what information the prosecutors chose not to use in their complaint. There are oftentimes conflicting facts left out of complaints when they do not support the overall legal theory, and they may have thought they did not have the information to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt (which is a high standard) that is different from the one they filed.
As you said, based on the actual evidence we have, it’s pretty clear Ippei acted alone, but I think it’s fair for people to wonder (not condemn based on its absence) if there is more information out there than what has been provided, given how this all unfolded at the beginning.
No one anywhere is defending Nez Bolelo today, and if Montgomery fired Boras for not making him ENOUGH money, well, Ohtani is his own guy, but I’d sure as hell show Bolelo the door.
Judging from personal exp vetting isn’t really a thing in any line of work. They look at social media, job history, and that is it. No verification on degrees etc. I would imagine a sports team does background checks, but most major companies don’t even do them anymore because of the cost. Do mlb teams even do them? Wally Backman had multiple arrests (he was my hs coach) many domestic abuses, felonies, and back taxes and he got hired on as a mlb coach for a few days before a news article leaked stuff.
My assumption in background checks is that they are sort of to scare off people with bad backgrounds. No background check is actually sent in most lines of work. The company I work for has hired hundreds of people and made everyone fill out a background check and never sent one off. Instead we just do a social media scan. Who knows.
I work in HR for a large nonprofit organization; we run background checks for every hire, no matter the level. They are outsourced, and we don’t have the option to have people fill out a background check and not send one off- we simply provide the contact info for the new hire and have to wait for the results. Every similar organization I’ve worked for has also run on this model.
This is not to cast doubt on your personal experience, just to say: background checks are real, and the cost is accessible and considered worthwhile by organizations that aren’t nearly as resourced as an MLB team or most private enterprises. If the Dodgers or other teams are not running them, it’s pretty stupid given the clear risk involved.
Teams are way better at (and more incentivized at) predicting whose fastball/swing will be good than they at *who* will be good. That LA followed up Bauer with Ippei is proof that infinite finances do not change priorities or make you immune from exploitation (and imo, LA should be embarrassed beyond expression and as focused on not making similar mistakes in the future as they are in Ohtani himself)
I’ve honestly always been surprised teams the MLB itself even ALLOWS personal interpreters. I’ve never understood how they don’t have on staff if needed any language for any team. Just gross negligence by in this case the Angels and MLB and seems like Ohtani himself
Pretty sure he was an employee of the Dodgers. I think they paid him approximately $200k per year.
Yes, but he was only with the Angels then the Dodgers purely because Ohtani said “I want him to interpret for me”, it doesn’t matter who ‘pays’ him it matters who decides he has that job, which is the player.
Doesn’t this part strike as odd for anyone? Like I get what the narrative says now, and I see people getting blasted on social media for thinking this, but like cmon he doesn’t know anything? Even if he does, whatever, but I find it funny that everyone just assumes it was straight fraud/robbery nothing else. And because the fbi says so. The fbi the absolute beacon of truth in America. No chance any guy who owns a mlb team has a politican on speed dial. No way they are in the same social circles. No chance fbi is corrupt, they have never done anything wrong!
What’s more likely: the FBI, the IRS, and a U.S. Attorney’s Office all to cave to some pressure to whitewash Ohtani without any hint of a leak from the investigators that is what is going on, OR
A hyper-focused athlete failed to notice warning signs that his friend and business partner was embezzling from him to cover his gambling addiction?
Most FBI agents and IRS criminal investigators are straight arrows. They’re more likely to be overzealous than engaged in coverups.
This is conspiracy theorizing.
A conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. When he arrives at the Pearly Gates, God is there to receive him. “Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully.”
Without hesitating, the conspiracy theorist asks, “Who really shot Kennedy?”
God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone”
The conspiracy theorist pauses, thinks to himself, then says “Shit! This goes higher up than I thought!”
Literally no one is saying the FBI is perfect. No one.
But if you think they fucked this one up, show your work.
“I’m a conspiracy nut who thinks the FBI lies about everything just to lie about it” just isn’t very compelling to anyone but fellow conspiracy nuts.
Even if only limited to the native languages of countries where baseball is played, do you really expect every team to hire over a dozen interpreters, most of whom will have nothing to do most years?
Yes, I do, because even if you pay in your own words ‘over a dozen’ let’s be generous to you and say 18 different interpreters, pay them salary plus benefits cost of $150k a year each, that’s still a rounding error cost to any professional sports franchise. I absolutely would expect a professional organization to have interpreters at the ready. And this is being even nicer to your argument because it assumes every team works completely independently and no interpreter is ever willing to move cities and MLB has no hand in the logistics.
Your ignorance of the way MLB treats any expenses is quaint. These are people who have staffed concessions at major league parks with “volunteers”, who are people working for nonprofits that get a cut of concession sales, thereby lowering the number of jobs they promised their world class stadia would bring to the communities they’re in. “Rounding error” costs are things that give second-tier executives bonuses not to pay.
Aside from the points being made about whether MLB teams would want to keep interpreters around, being someone’s interpreter seems like a very personal job and I think it’s reasonable for the player to have a say in who interprets for him. This time Ohtani made a bad choice, but it’s not clear that there would be anything to prevent the team from making a bad choice either!
That seems especially true in a case like this, where nobody around speaks Japanese and so the interpreter is pretty much the only person Ohtani has direct contact with–it’s probably different for Spanish speakers where there will always be other Spanish speakers around.
I’ve never believed that Ohtani was a gambler simply because nothing about his public behavior suggests he has impulse control problems, but Mizuhara negotiating a plea to a crime with a 30 year maximum isn’t evidence of anything.
He has no criminal record as far as I’m aware and isn’t going to serve anything near the maximum sentence. Moreover, Ohtani is so popular in Japan that you could probably find thousands of people willing to do life with hard labor to protect him, especially if they already felt guilty about getting him involved in a scandal in the first place.
Eh I have no idea. But taking someone’s public behavior as anything seems weird. What did Bruno Mars lose, 600m? That’s around what he has made. He seemed fine public facing as well. I have spent a good amount of time in gambling, or gambling adjacent. I know of people who have a net worth of 1-5b who have also lost 1b gambling. I was in Macau a couple weeks ago and I personally witnessed a man lose over 5b yuan in like 30 minutes.
People who are the best at something want more. Michael Jordan lost more than 100m gambling, mickelson lost 100m gambling, Gretzky “wife” lost millions. I mean to me it seems a lot less reasonable to believe a guy stole all this money by faking his voice and placing all these bets than it is to think that it was actually Ohtani. If he really lost 40m well that’s like all his money after taxes. I haven’t seen a single source estimate him over 100m. Even if he doesn’t run his finances, does he just chalk it up to taxes in a foreign country? To me nothing about ohtani has ever led me to believe he is an idiot. This to me is everyone just running with the “he is an idiot” thing. I don’t buy it.
Most estimates I’ve seen are that Ohtani makes $40-50 million in endorsements each year. Ohtani makes more in a year from endorsements than he made in 6 years with his major league salary. Which is what was actually stolen from him. The account that Ippei helped Shohei set up to receive his major league minimum was the one that Ippei stole from because that’s where his salary from the Angels was deposited into.
Ohtani wasn’t an idiot. He focused on baseball. But he has limited English proficiency. He trusted his friend and business partner, Ippei. And Ippei betrayed that trust, lied to him, and stole from him.
It’s of course not a foolproof method of analysis but since none of us know Ohtani personally it’s all we had prior to the federal investigation.
Also, I don’t know anything about Bruno Mars or Wayne Gretzky, but Michael Jordan and Phil Mickelson 100% seem like people who plausibly have huge gambling problems from their public behavior.
If Ohtani was the person betting, then he managed to get his patsy to leave an extensive paper trail – including thousands of texts with the bookie, recorded phone calls of Ippei doing a federal crime, and almost 10,000 pages of texts between Ippei and Ohtani – without slipping up and making himself part of the paper trail. That seems an impressive amount of co-ordination and flawless admin, while also managing to do aspects of a very tough sport than no one else has done together this well since Babe Ruth.
“but Mizuhara negotiating a plea to a crime with a 30 year maximum isn’t evidence of anything”
Ok. But what about all the other evidence?
Baseball likes the revenue streams it gets in from the gambling (gaming, sorry, gaming) industry, and I’m not seeing any complaints about the Las Vegas goodies being handed to a disgracefully run franchise. So, where’s the moral high ground? I’d support a hard ban…but would baseball?
Maybe they should switch support to a different kind of gaming industry…competitive eSports games of “MLB: The Show”! I’d watch that on ESPN over some of the stuff they air now.
“nobody I know would be willing to eat a 30-year prison sentence in order to limit a friend’s embarrassment.” Caveat that he’ll plead and the actual sentence will be a lot less, I’m seeing three years is pretty typical, with concurrent time served if there are multiple counts. He must know that by cooperating, he’ll serve much less time, and maybe that factors into his calculus.
Yea that quote is wild. First people eat 30 year sentences all the time. Let alone what he will actually do, probably 1-10 years.
I dunno – I’m pretty sure Ray Lewis did NOTHING WRONG, and none of the friends who got convicted were carrying the water for him!
if Pete Rose had an interpreter he’d be in the hall of fame.
Not true of course, but I chose to read this as a joke, and I chuckled.
“His advisors might be oblivious to the point of incompetency.”
I don’t think there is any “might be” about it. Regardless of whatever Ohtani knew or not, his reps failed spectacularly regarding the basic building block of representation, protecting the money. You can never assume a third party like an agent will be an effective backstop to embezzlement and/or sports betting but give the absolute failure here from Team Ohtani, I agree that MLB needs to go over-the-top to stop the modern day Rose from happening. Of course, as the article points out, any Kenesaw Mountain Landis highground has been abandoned to chase the short term dollar sportsbooks so the odds of that are low. Still MLB should try something more than it has to head of an extinction-level event like this story could have been.
It’s not just his reps. He definitely has an accountant. Probably a team of them. He definitely has a wealth manager. Probably a team of them. It just really begs credibility that none of them ever raised a flag and that Ohtani never heard about it. Especially since he does actually speak English, he just doesn’t like to in public and uses his translator as a buffer.
The most logical version of this story is still the first one, i.e. the one they told when this was still all secret. The translator comes to Ohtani and says he needs help. Ohtani agrees. They make the payments. Then they realize that Ohtani making payments to a bookie is a no-no, and the story changes.
By all accounts he does not “speak English” with any sort of proficiency. My guess is his English is about as good as my Spanish, which is to say, good enough to have very basic interactions but not enough for any in-depth conversation.
Apparently, Mizuhara WAS his sole de facto wealth manager.
As for an accountant, (s)he was probably only used for taxes and never asked for actual bank statements.
An accountant is going to demand bank statements for a return as complex as Ohtanis.
“big numbers” and “complex” are not synonymous in the tax industry
But that logic doesn’t hold up. Let’s assume that Ohtani did willingly cover for Ippei’s debts. Then why would they falsely create evidence that Ippei stole the money (enough evidence to satisfy government investigations) – that means that they knew it was bad for Ohtani to pay the bookies and they needed a cover story. So the cover story is Ippei stole the money. Now Ippei gets caught… and doesn’t say the cover story, he says the truth, that they had wanted hidden and planted false evidence to hide… and only the switches to the cover story.
Ippei made 19,000 bets and stole millions of dollars in multiple transactions. He left a massive paper trail of soley him interacting with the bookies and of him defrauding a bank. But not a single text to Ohtani talking about this.
The least logical version of this story is the first one, you know, the one from the liar and embezzler Ippei Mizuhara. Giving known liars the benefit of the doubt is the least logical thing anyone can do.
So Mizuhara goes out and tells a very public and easily refutable lie that is going to get a ton of press that Ohtani is 100% definitely going to see and refute? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
The very likeliest version of this is the original one. Ippei goes to his best friend Ohtani, who is extremely rich and doesn’t seem to care about money, for help. Ohtani says “sure, take some money” and/or makes the payments himself. That was the first $4.5m that was reported.
Now however, given that we’re up to $16m, my guess is that Mizuhara, being the degenerate gambler that he is, took this gift horse and kept going. Now he is indeed stealing, hence his “Technically I did steal from him” statement to the bookie that is in the affidavit. That “technically” says a lot – it’s a qualifier, that indicates there’s a bit more going on here. And it lines up with the theory that Ohtani originally tried to help.
To be clear, I do not think Ohtani did anything illegal or that he is/was in any way part of the gambling aspect of this. I think he tried to help his friend, and it blew up in his face.
“So Mizuhara goes out and tells a very public and easily refutable lie that is going to get a ton of press that Ohtani is 100% definitely going to see and refute? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
To quote your own words, “Mizuhara, being the degenerate gambler”. I assume when Ippei was caught, he tried a hail mary, in saying Shohei loaned him the money – after all, he’s lied so many times, what’s one more lie, and maybe by some miracle Shohei decides to cover for him. I think by this point all logic had gone.
All the evidence, including which phone was used to access the money, supports that Ippei stole the money. There is a voice recording of Ippei pretending to be Shohei Ohtani! If Ohtani was willingly paying Ippei’s illegal gambling debts, why didn’t Ohtani ever actually pay the money?
It’s all speculation of course, but could an additional possibility be that Mizuhara, in an effort to get in front of this, approached Ohtani and fell on his sword about the thefts/fraud. If he was not fully honest (not a great stretch for an apparent liar) about the magnitude of the money involved, perhaps Ohtani in his catastrophic naïveté agreed to the initial narrative until the magnitude of the theft and the negative optics became apparent.
Does MLB still do the player nickname day? I hope Ohtani goes with “Victim A,” if so.
I think the pattern of gambling here would be very instructive. I would believe it’s Ippei if the bets escalated. The guy earns 200K per year, I would buy it being Ippei if the bets started small, and then gradually got larger and larger.
If the first bet is $2 million on the Browns or whatever, I would buy the bettor being a guy with millions in the bank.
There is actual evidence available.
Why are so many people basing their judgments about this on “ifs” that they make up specifically to tilt the probability in a particular direction.
This country has a REAL problem with information literacy.
Yes, but you see—I’m so smart, I came up with a clever trick to discern the truth in 5 minutes that probably no federal investigator ever thought of. I’m basically like one of those psychic/behavior analyst detectives on TV that are also way smarter than all the professionals!
“ The league should instead treat it like a warning shot.”
Your Bold Prediction ™: They won’t do all that much. They are in too deep with gambling to want to curtail it in any real way. I wish I could be more optimistic, but…
Few thoughts, Does anyone’s Brother or Mom have their bank account access. Well this guy was an interpreter, so he didn’t either.
Also has anyone ever gambled with big money? You can’t gamble millions like that unless someone vouches for you and willing to cover it. It just doesn’t happen.
Also Ohtani has wealth advisors, accountants, tax proffesionals, and a lawyer/agent yet they want us to believe he wasn’t aware of anything.
Do any of them speak Japanese?
And I would not be the slightest bit shocked if many NFL players have their mothers or brother manage their bank accounts.
How many times have we all heard the story of an athlete who left all of their financial affairs to someone & then 3 years after retirement, they found out the person had either embezzled the $$ or invested it in crazy stuff that went bankrupt?
Seems like it happens pretty frequently. Not sure why we would expect Ohtani to be any different. Language barrier, likely not financiallly savvy,trusted Ippei, etc.
& depending WHEN the payments were made to the bookie, it may have been too recent to be caught..or Ippei (who seemed to have his fingers in everything) gave some explanation for the payments that satisfied everyone.
From my understanding, Shohei never accessed the account his salary was paid into (the only access was from Ippei’s phone) – so I assume he was using money from accounts which were used for endorsement money for his living expenses. (There does seem to be some human logic here – as initially he was earning league minimum, and even in 2018 his endorsement deals must have been 10s of millions of dollars – so why touch the account with the salary in? If Ippei knew that Ohtani had never looked at that account, then that’s perfect for his purpose)
Plus there is literally a link in this article about another star baseball player who was in a financial dispute with his family over their management of his money!
They actually did notice, and asked repeatedly about the account, but Ippei lied to them and said Ohtani wanted it kept secret. I read the whole complaint, and this was all Ippei. I completely understand the degree of incompetence from Ohtani’s camp reads like a red flag for a cover story, but after reading through the whole thing, it’s clear – this was 100% Ippei and 100% incompetence. The amount of evidence is just staggering.
Wrong! Mizuhara was actually the one person Ohtani DID trust with his bank accounts.
100%.
Uh oh, the Guru is Goldblum-ing
We had issues with betting ads on a recent cricket test match in New Zealand.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-06/acma-foxtel-broadcast-showed-illegal-gambling-ads-cricket/103550070
Remember when every NASCAR was plastered with cigarette advertising?
And the Cup was named after a cigarette brand! The good ol’ days
19,000 bets! It works out to roughly 25 bets every day for over two years. Holy problem gambling!
It’s probably as simple as telling your bookie “hey, I want to place bets on this, this, and that today,” all while having your morning coffee.
I can’t even imagine how someone reads any of this and doesn’t conclude Ohtani wasn’t aware.
The choices are “Ohtani knew” or “everyone around him was extremely negligent”. The former is easier to believe than the latter.
Or maybe, Ippei Mizuhara was a more effective liar than many people are giving him credit for being.
those are not the only two choices though
I can’t imagine being so confident in my conclusion when I’ve read 2nd or 3rd hand sources (likely ones that reinforce my pre-conceived ideas) that I am sure I know what happened better than trained investigators.
Ohtani, I mean his interpreter , lost $182,935,206.68 since 2021 gambling. That amount just doesn’t go unnoticed.
I will pay for a membership if fangraphs implements commenter blocking.
Anyhow I know it is an aside but the Ohtani contract still seems… odd. Only way I can think it worked is Ohtani wanting to win and now. Any company would be like “where do I sign?” 10% roi on escrow means his present day contract is worth 173m now. A lot of these dudes likely know when something is going to move too, plenty of politicians average 20-200% a year and no one checks their shit. At 20% it’s 54 million. At 200% he is actually paying them to work, I realize that actually isn’t possible but like for math purposes a contract of 10k today at 200% is roughly 5 billion a year when his contract expires.
Do you know how much Ohtani makes in endorsements NOW? how much will he make in endorsements when he retires (let’s assume a lot less). Where he lives and works now is going to tax him for what he make now. if he moves to Japan in 10 years CA doesn’t get to tax him. There are a lot of reasons for him to take that contract the way he did and it makes sense and certainly doesn’t seem like what a guy millions in debt to a bookie would do.
Possibly.
But it is unlikely to save Ohtani himself much money since Japanese national income tax tops at 45% and the local tax is ~10%. Unless Ohtani decides to move to a third country, he will be paying roughly half of $68M in income tax whether in the US or in Japan.
If I owed a lot of money for gambling and/or had a gambling problem… why would I choose a tiny salary compared to what I could get? Have you ever met a gambler who would choose deferred money over all of it up front?
A lot of the commenters might have tried to read Kathryn Xu’s article Michael linked rather than continuing to speculate without facts.
Here are some salient facts, which at least in my opinion indicate a lot of gross negligence, including on Ohtani’s part, rather than anything criminal.
That’s not absolutely conclusive of Ohtani’s uninvolvement in anything with gambling, but I think it’s a pretty damn good start that can’t be countered by speculation without evidence. The advisers and the Angels and Dodgers and MLBPA were all pretty stupid in not working up some kind of back channel to communicate with Ohtani without Mizuhara. Ohtani is an adult, and he should have been demanding his bank statements on the salary account. But none of that smacks of criminality. It smacks of a lot of people not wanting to check the health of the goose laying the golden eggs.
I have five accounts in three countries. I can honestly tell you that I don’t check any of my bank statements with any regularity, and it wouldn’t be that hard for someone to siphon 10k out of one of them if they had access to my passwords and phone number.
I would also say it’s probably unreasonable to expect Ohtani to have the life skills of an average adult. He has almost assuredly lived a very sheltered life with someone to take care of everything outside of baseball ever since he was a top high-school prospect, just like top teenage prospects in soccer, or Latin American baseball prospects.
About 20 years ago, my father-in-law ran his own business selling mobile homes. His girlfriend worked for him & ran the office, including the books. She embezzled $500K from him by having 2 sets of accounting (a real one & a fake one she would keep where he could access it).
She eventually got caught when the bank called him & said “you have a lot of debt out there on these homes you’ve sold”. He figured he WAS paying them off..but, his girlfriend was making minimum payments, cooking the books to make it look like she was doing what he had always done & had instructed her to do & blowing the $$ at the casino.
He’s a pretty smart guy, has run multiple businesses for 50 years..but, it’s easy to trust someone too much, get lazy/not verify things, etc. And he didn’t have a language barrier, was a businessman, etc.
I had a client once who ran what would have seemed to be one of the most successful asbestos removing businesses in our area. He was working all the time, he didn’t have any sense that his customers weren’t paying, and yet he never seemed to make any money. It turns out his bookkeeper was skimming off all his profit. He had no one checking her.
But she made two mistakes. One, despite her just about screaming about it, she couldn’t stop him from deciding to sell the business. And the buyers found her embezzlement in a New York minute. Two, just before this, she and her boyfriend had paid cash for a house. Thus, the house was sold, he was made whole, and she and boyfriend got to spend some lovely times as guests of the state.
MLB has some very basic, and very minimal, programs for helping ballplayers pick up language and financial skills, as does the MLBPA. I read somewhere (here? The Athletic?) about this loss of host families in MiLB as being an issue because the host families (a) often were really helpful in helping the players navigate through simple things like budgeting and finding healthy food; and (b) had developed a network with prior players who would take the newbies under their wing, even if they were hundreds or thousands of miles away, because Mrs. Host Family asked them to.
Oswald acted alone?
This is much more akin the official story being that JFK was shot… and people saying “maybe it was bomb planted inside his head, did ya ever think about that!?!?!”
All of it’s hard to believe. If it wasn’t Ohtani and it was say, Zac Gallen, he’d be in jail.
Lol truth hurts huh?
I dare you to go read that affidavit.
I was skeptical about the whole thing coming into that filing — I didn’t have enough information about the whole situation based on just the public reporting.
The IRS, in particular, would love to have an Ohtani-sized trophy to show off to justify their budget.
The evidence is pretty damning, and there’s a lot of it.
The trophy they got is the same exact trophy, just not Ohtani himself. The IRS doesn’t care about who goes down, as long as someone does.
Eh, no, they can collect a lot more money if they bag Ohtani than Mizuhara, who most assuredly has no ability to pay any fine at this point.
They wouldn’t be able to take all of Ohtani’s money. They can only take what’s in the lawsuit… They can’t just say ‘your guilty now let me take every last penny you’ve earned in your job’…
They can take some money, compared to no money from Mizuhara, because all Mizuhara has is debts.
They are going to get their money from Mizuhara. Whatever they so please. They don’t care about what’s in your bank account… They’ll set up some type of way to make payments. It happens literally every day to normal people – it’s not different for these pieces of garbage.
Did you think Mizuhara can make money appear out of thin air? Do you understand how money works?
Do you think the government and IRS are just going to let debt go uncollected? Do you understand how our government works?
& Ohtani has whatever is in the accounts with all of his endorsement $$. Remember, he makes $40-50M a year in endorsements!! Over the last 5-6 years, that’s $200-$300M!!
Now, he’s paid taxes on it, paid living expenses, agents fees, etc, but, I’d bet (pun intended) that he comfortably is in the 8 figures in that account. I’m sure the IRS would love a chunk of that then a big fat zero for Mizuhara.
What evidence do you have to explain your truth?
Zac Gallen needs an interpreter?
So Ohtani’s interpreter needs access to his bank information?… Makes total sense… Don’t be so naïve.
Ohtani opening an American bank account with his translator present seems pretty likely. Ippei essentially used his position with Ohtani to have enough information to steal Ohtani’s identity to gain access to one of his bank accounts.
Other MLB translators have talked about how much stuff they did for players, including opening bank accounts. And these were people who didn’t have anywhere near the close and lasting relationship that Ippei and Shohei had.
‘Pretty likely’ isn’t facts. There’s no factual evidence to Ippei being there when the account was opened. The dude was a scape goat and Ohtani has MUCH more behind this than any one is acting. He’s not innocent in this is all I’m saying, and anyone thinking that is just insane. All here say. But I’ll take my 50 downvotes and go my way for being the only one thinking logically.
I completely understand the logic of not bringing your interpreter to open a bank account in the US when you don’t speak any English.
Plus, it’s not like there were witnesses at the bank or anything when Ohtani opened the bank account. Even if there were, what are the chances that federal investigators would have interviewed those witnesses?
Like I said – if you could read – I’m yet to see any evidence that anyone was there with Ohtani opening his bank account. It’s no more than that. Your – valued – opinion. You claim to have all the answers so give me the fact. Give me the witness. Something… Anything…. I mean I get it, you have an Ohtani jersey hanging on your wall. Can’t see past fangirling.
I’ve literally had freight drivers speak no English and use their phone to translate what they are saying to me and what I’m saying to them…. This interpreter wasn’t attached to Ohtani’s hip. He hold it for Ohtani when he went piss too?
To think that this dude was stealing money for 4 years and placed 19,000 bets without Ohtani having ANY clue about it while also claiming they do basically everything together is completely and utterly illogical.
“f. In or about 2018, MIZUHARA accompanied Victim A
to a Bank A branch in Arizona to assist Victim A in opening the
x5848 Account, and translated for Victim A when setting up the
account details.”
From the criminal complaint filed. Not my opinion.
Are you accusing federal agents of complicity, or are you accusing them of stupidity?
Appreciate that.
No I’m accusing you of stupidity, not the feds. If you really think these 2 were basically attached at the hip but Ohtani had zero clue about his gambling issues then I don’t have much else to say. I don’t spend every day with my friends and I know who’s actively betting, let alone 19,000 times over 4 years…. Ignorance is bliss I guess?
I see, that’s why you’re defending that criminal scum. He reminded you of your friends.
Murf. Gambling is legal where I live. Not criminal one bit. But keep on keeping on buddy. Eventually if you keep trying something will stick…
Hang on, you live in a state where sports gambling is legal, so your friends are probably a lot more open about it. Ohtani and Ippei were is a state where gambling wasn’t legal… and also from a country where sports gambling isn’t legal – so I’d imagine there is some ingrained cultural reluctance to openly admit losing $10,000 on a UCLA soccer game. Also, Ohtani was Ippei’s boss – their friend dynamic was probably quite weird before Ippei started stealing from Ohtani. Obviously these are all my opinions and not facts, but my question is: how do you know your friends are actively gambling, and who isn’t? Because I’d imagine you’re not as accurate as you think you are. People hide things – and can be quite good at hiding things, while others can be good at missing the “obvious” signs, which in retrospect are obvious.
The evidence? It’s in the affidavit, and comes from Ohtani’s statements during his interview with investigators:
The witness is Shohei Ohtani.
You have provided even fewer facts that “pretty likely.
Go over to reddit. They’ll love you reasoning skills over there.
The point of using a bookie versus legal online gambling is that with a bookie you can bet with money you don’t have. Even in states with large legal sports wagering in place, bookies are prevelant. In this case, he was playing with money he didn’t have, he’d still have used a bookie even if in Colorado.
This is a very important point, and is how some gamblers dig a very deep hole
Visited MLB.com today. There is zero mention of this. Anyone surprised?
Mizuhara charged with bank fraud; criminal complaint filed (mlb.com)
Thanks for pointing that out. MLB.com should cover this story, and I was mistaken. For those who missed it, go to the News tap and scroll down a ways.
“I’d be downright puritanical in writing the rules and draconian in enforcing them. “
Top shelf rhetoric. Well done.
It’s hilarious how the reaction to this story has become so tribal. I don’t pretend to know exactly _what_ happened but something doesn’t add up. First it was $4M and Ohtani said he was paying off a debt for a friend. Now it’s $16M and that friend is a thief? Ippei was able to impersonate a celebrity athlete in the country with the strictest Know Your Customer banking guidelines in the world?
I will literally pay you $400 if you find me a source where Ohtani said he was paying off a debt for a friend.
Agreed. This is the lie that has become repeated so much that some people thinks it’s true.
Random bank employee may not even know who Ohtani is — it seems ludicrous to you or I, maybe, but it’s true.
It also helps when you are a close friend of the individual you’re stealing from and can answer security questions, as there is recorded evidence of Ippei doing. At one point, he allegedly got the specific account locked, but called back and got it unlocked by answering the security questions which he himself helped set up.
The fact that Ippei also used fluent English while making these calls to the bank might have tipped someone off if they knew full well who Ohtani was.
I appreciate this article’s thorough summary of the IRS affidavit and related critical analysis. Also enjoyed perusing the comments — both pollyanna and cynical. It’s interesting to observe the varying levels each person sets their intrinsic BS detector. Or how one balances what’s plausible versus what’s likely. Thank you
One blink and you’ll miss it item in the story gone uncommented on that I think is worth reiterating is that the feds — with their unmitigated access to the books — confirmed that none of the bets were on baseball. So even if one continues to indulge in speculation (right up to unadulterated belief) that Ohtani was the “real” gambler behind the gambler, only the most ardent conspiracy theorist wouldn’t agree that this case is largely peripheral to MLB jurisdiction. MLB wouldn’t bother suspending a player charged with failing to pay parking tickets, or who owed unpaid taxes to the IRS, or who dined and dashed for kicks, or who gathered with teammates to play technically illegal poker games on road trips, or any number of crimes punishable by legal authorities.
Co-mingling with an illegal bookie certainly requires MLB to get out of its metaphorical La-Z-Boy and tell the overzealous kids in the basement to knock it off down there. But in this case, with no evidence of compromised competition, to this fan the scandal is a bit of a nothing burger regardless of which story you believe is truthier.
Agree with most of what you say.
MLB already has a gambling policy in which MLB players are permitted to place LEGAL bets on non-baseball sports. They can also participate in non-baseball fantasy leagues.
But any bet placed with with an illegal bookmaker, baseball or not, is absolutely prohibited. The punishment for such a bet is at the discretion of Rob Manfred, which I guess provides him the opportunity to sweep it under the rug if it is low-profile enough.
While a non-baseball bet with an illegal bookie provides no evidence of compromised competition in itself, it sets the groundwork for compromised competition to occur if the player becomes indebted to the bookie.
Agreed. Meaning this incident calls for Manfred/MLB to simply re-stress: “c’mon guys, keep the gambling legal, all right? All right.”
As we’ve seen recently in NBA, even legal gambling carries risk of players (especially fringe players) throwing games to make money/get out of debt. Which is why this would become a completely different ball of wax if betting on baseball had occurred. In that case I’d be more inclined to possibly accept the notion that an elaborate cover-up is at play here. But Ippei is only facing serious prison time because he got busted stealing, not because he illegally gambled on soccer. Thus, there’s not much for Ohtani and Co. to bother lying about.
Some people far overestimate the average American’s ability to manage their own finances, even people with college degrees. How many people rack up credit card bills that are several times their net worth? How often do people actually check their monthly paychecks to make sure that it’s the right around?
Very wealthy people are generally not in the habit of managing their own bank accounts. I would actually be mildly surprised if Ohtani knew how to use an ATM.
To liken this to the JFK assassination is inappropriate. You already made your point earlier. There was no need to further that by starting down such a new path. In addition, while it is apparent that Mizuhara acted alone, we will never really know that about Oswald.
I think it says a lot of the current level of discourse that I don’t think anyone who read your first sentence though “bdengler is right – it is completely inappropriate to compare the cold blooded murder of a man to a person making illegal bets.”
Full Disclosure +1200
Cover-up -1500
I don’t really understand this statement: “to embrace one [gambling regime] while abjuring the other requires specificity and discipline bordering on cognitive dissonance.” Why would it lead to cognitive dissonance to embrace legal gambling while abjuring illegal gambling? Seems like a straightforward distinction. Would like to hear more about this argument.
The text from the bookie to Ippei you mentioned is absolutely the thing that jumped out at me in all of the details in the affidavit.
There’s some additional context to this other part that I think is worth mentioning:
This exchange happened on March 20, 2024 — the day of the first Seoul game and when this story completely blew up. It also wasn’t a regular old text message, it was sent over Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app. Part of Mizuhara’s cooperation involved handing over the password.
The other primary takeaway from this for me is this: if you are a sports agent with as high profile a client as Ohtani, you should absolutely hire your own interpreter to speak with the man himself. It’s sheer negligence otherwise.
As far as this specific bank account goes: apparently almost every single deposit into it was from the Angels’ payroll department. I suspect that most of his finances were handled in Japan, but maybe the Angels didn’t want to deposit his income directly into a Japanese bank? I honestly don’t know — I’ve never been paid by an MLB franchise.
But considering you have more than enough to live on from other income sources, why would you micromanage that account?
Paying an employee’s salary into a foreign bank account is a hornet’s nest of legal and tax issues. The Angels would have been veritably insane to do that when Ohtani could easily open an account in the US.
I have not read the affidavit and maybe there is enough in there to convince me otherwise, but I have a hard time believing Shohei had zero knowledge of Ippei’s gambling. That carries too huge of an assumption of ignorance and lack of accountability from managers, bankers, accountants, advisors etc. My bet (and I am a gambler so I would take this theory at -500) is that Shohei was aware and offered to cover Ippei’s losses at some point.
As goes the saying, no good deed goes unpunished. Instead of repaying his debts, Ippei watches Ohtani send a few wires (as he described in his initial tell-all interview) and promises he is done gambling. Instead, he continues gambling and loses apparently a ton more, and starts stealing.
To assume that NOBODY pointed this out to Shohei without his interpreter somehow disguising it is just too farfetched.
Who can point this out to Ohtani without going through his interpreter?
So, Ohtani offers to help pay off Ippei’s gambling debts. And he chooses to: 1) use an account he hasn’t used before. 2) use Ippei’s phone, not his own, to make the transaction. 3) he now ignores all further transactions from that account (There is a big difference between ignoring all account activity, and knowing that you’ve paid off someone’s illegal gambling debts using their phone and then ignoring all further account activity). 4) in the nearly 10,000 pages of text messages, Ohtani never at any point mentions this, or Ippei’s betting habits.
Also, about Mizuhara’s initial story…
I don’t know which bank Ohtani uses, but very few banks in the US offer services in Japanese. None of the top 10 banks in California have Japanese websites.
So, I actually don’t think Ohtani could send a wire on Mizutani’s behalf if he wanted to. I doubt he has ever sent a wire transfer in his entire life. And the part about Ohtani using a computer to do so is also unusual, given that Japan overwhelmingly prefers smartphones over computers.
I am Japanese, although I use smartphones, My first choice to use would be my home PC. As do most of my colleagues.
He could have known Mizuhara was gambling too much, but, did he know the amounts? Did he know he was losing?
I’ve known some heavy gamblers in my life & 3 things they have in common is they ALWAYS make it sound like they’re doing better than they are & that they undersell how much they’re betting & they always think they can win back their losses.
If Ohtani sees Mizuhara is gambling a lot & asks Mizuhara how often/how much he’s betting, wouldn’t Muzhara just say “Yeah, but, they’re all small bets, I keep it under $100 a bet..& I’m actually UP a little bit this year” or some such BS. There is no way Ohtani would know until he gets the call Mizuhara is millions in debt.
I fully agree that that is a reasonable way this could have played out – and gamblers being the opposite of an angler who always overstates the size of their catch makes a lot of sense.
But, given how much they messaged each other, if Ohtani knew about the gambling, at some point there would be a text about it? Or Ohtani doing some googling on if gambling is legal – because as I’ve just found by googling, it appears it wouldn’t be legal to bet on most sports in Japan, and I’d be a little concerned that a guy who I rely on has just admitted to doing something illegal in our native country.
I’m trying to think of topics I’ve talked about with my friends in person that I would not text them about once in 9700 pages of text messages.
Maybe read the affidavit then?
Excellent article. Certainly looks like Ohtani was just a victim here and Ippei a criminal. But it is concerning that gambling debts this large could be incurred by a team employee this close to a star player. The Dodgers just hired Ippei recently without uncovering any of these issues.
The complaint indicates Mizuhara lost $40 million with this bookie, and stole $16 million for Ohtani’s bank account. Where did the other $24 million come from?
Did the bookie really extend that much in credit to a guy making maybe $300,000 a year?
From the affidavit, Ippei owed the bookies $24 million – and they were happy from him to continue betting as Ippei was sending them $500,000 a week. As long as he did that, they were happy to extend him infinite credit. The time he did pay, there was a threatening text about the bookie seeing Ohtani walking his dog.
So I think it is very lucky that the bookies got caught now. I don’t know how much was in the account Ippei was stealing from exactly, but it wouldn’t take too long to burn through it at half a million dollars a week. And it would only be credited with $2 million this year, because of the contract structure. So when that moneys gone – and I don’t think Ippei would have stopped or decreased the frequency or scale of the betting,so the debt would likely be bigger – who knows what would happen. Maybe Ippei would confesses all and come clean. Or he maybe would have tried to blackmail Ohtani in some way, and get Ohtani involved in paying the bookies. In quite a short space of time, this could have gotten far far worse for Ohtani and MLB.
I really hope someone high up on MLB has explained how serious this could have become to Manfred. Then again, his solution would probably be to ban deffered money contracts.