Major League Baseball has the precise problem it doesn’t want to have right now. Shohei Ohtani, the Japanese two-way superstar who is the most interesting baseball player in modern memory, is at the center of a gambling scandal. The gist of what’s known: someone wired $4.5 million from Ohtani’s bank account to a sports betting operation run by Matthew Bowyer, an Orange County bookmaker whose operations have attracted the attention of the FBI.
From here, it gets murky. Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s longtime friend and now-former translator, claimed in an interview with ESPN that he had gotten in deep with Bowyer, and that Ohtani, who recently signed a $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, merely helped to get him out of the hole when he feared for his safety.
