The Ohtani Interpreter Gambling Scandal Is Big Trouble for MLB

Wednesday was supposed to be a great day for Major League Baseball. Shohei Ohtani, the 29-year-old megastar, made his debut with the Los Angeles Dodgers during a game against the Padres played in South Korea. Instead, Wednesday was memorable for a very different reason. ESPN and the Los Angeles Times reported that Ohtani’s translator, Ippei Mizuhara, was fired after racking up millions in gambling debts to a bookmaker who is under federal investigation in California — a state where sports betting is not legal.

According to ESPN, Ohtani sent two wire-transfer payments of $500,000 with his name and the word “loan” on them from his account to “an associate of” a bookie named Matthew Bowyer, whose home in California was reportedly raided by federal investigators last month. While the money came from Ohtani, his camp is claiming that he was paying on behalf of his translator Ippei Mizuhara, who had a total of $4.5 million in gambling debt.

The story gets stranger from there. At first, the Ohtani camp told ESPN that he had sent over the money to cover for Mizuhara. But after Mizuhara sat for a 90-minute interview with ESPN, Ohtani’s spokesperson turned around and changed their story. On Wednesday, his PR people issued a statement that said, “In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities.”

Ohtani and Mizuhara are close, or at least were prior to this week. Ohtani, who speaks some English but prefers Japanese, travels pretty much everywhere with Mizuhara. One of Ohtani’s former teammates said the two Japanese men had more of a “brotherhood” than a friendship. Mizuhara was even in the dugout on Wednesday before his firing.

As expected, Mizuhara has denied that Ohtani was involved in the gambling itself. “I want everyone to know Shohei had zero involvement in betting,” he told ESPN. “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.” Bowyer the bookie also denied that he was ever in direct contact with Ohtani. But whatever emerges from this complicated dynamic involving baseball’s greatest talent in decades will most likely loom over the sport for much of the season — in which fans are barraged with opportunities to gamble with official MLB partners like DraftKings and FanDuel.