Baseball wonder Shohei Ohtani, who recently signed a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers nominally worth $700 million, is involved in a gambling scandal involving $4.5 million from his bank account winding up with a bookie.
Sports gambling is still illegal in the state of California (although it is recently being heavily promoted by the sports leagues). But Major League Baseball allows its players to bet on other sports. Then again, it bans for life players for betting on baseball (e.g., Pete Rose is still not in the Hall of Fame for betting on ballgames, despite no conclusive evidence that he was throwing games like Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other Chicago Black Sox did in the 1919 World Series).
Election analyst Nate Silver, a long-time gambler, writes:
Craig Calcaterra has a good roundup of the allegations and the various possibilities. He outlined three main explanations, which run from better to worse for Ohtani.
Possibility One: Ippei Mizuhara is a compulsive gambler who got in way, way over his head with a bookie. To pay the bookie off, he effected either one or several massive wire transfers from Ohtani’s account without authorization. He got busted, he got fired, and he’s about to be in a world of federal legal trouble and will almost certainly be permanently banned from holding a job in Major League Baseball.
Possibility Two: These were Mizuhara’s gambling debts and, as per his and the spokesperson’s comments to ESPN, Ohtani felt bad for him, wanted to help him out, and covered his debts by transferring the money to the bookie.
Possibility Three: These were Ohtani’s gambling debts and Mizuhara is taking a bullet for his patron.
Perhaps Shoeless Sho Ohtani will suddenly discover his love of basketball (he is 6’4″) and enroll at Gonzaga U. to play basketball next season in the NCAA, before dramatically returning to baseball the year after?
I mean, something a lot like that happened thirty years ago when Michael Jordan, having won the last three NBA titles, played minor league baseball in Birmingham in 1994, before returning and leading the Chicago Bulls to three more.
(The most plausible-sounding explanation for this extremely weird sequence of events is that the NBA secretly suspended its biggest star for one year over his notorious consorting with ethically dubious professional gamblers on the golf course. And then the parties concerned made up a story about Jordan being so broken up over his father’s murder that he took a year off to honor his dad by playing his dad’s favorite sport of baseball. By the way, was it just a coincidence that Jordan’s dad got murdered?)
And it’s not unknown for famous golfers, such as Phil Mickelson, to have a gambling addiction.
A lot of great athletes like action.
Personally, I can only recall making up two bets in my life (as opposed to participating in office March Madness pools and the like to be a good sport), both of which I made sure were rip-offs that my less cunning friends couldn’t imaginably win.
In fifth grade in 1968, I bet a friend from Detroit even odds that his Detroit Tigers couldn’t come back from a 3 games to 1 deficit in the World Series. What I knew was that even if Detroit won the next two games, in the seventh game the St. Louis Cardinals were starting the greatest World Series pitcher of all time, Bob Gibson, who had posted a historic 1.12 ERA that season and had won seven straight World Series games.
Gibson lost.
Then in late 1974, I bet a friend from Pittsburgh even odds that his Pittsburgh Steelers wouldn’t win their next five straight games. What I knew was that if the Steelers won their last two games of the seasons, they’d make the NFL playoffs and then if they won their next three games, they’d win the Super Bowl. And no way, no how was a perennial bad franchise like the Pittsburgh Steelers going to win the Super Bowl.
The Steelers won the Super Bowl (and three more in the following four years).
At that point, I realized that gambling was A) bringing out my most predatory side and B) deservedly punishing me with historic upsets.
