Don't Bet on Major League Baseball
In either sense of the word.
Dear readers,
We hope the basketball fans among you are enjoying the latest edition of March Madness, which, depending on how things shake out for the NCAA, could also be the last. (We’re kidding, mostly . . . )
With MLB’s Opening Day just around the corner, though, our eyes are squarely fixed on baseball — and thanks to a brewing gambling scandal, so are everyone else’s. Let’s get to it.
-Calder and Ian
It’s been about 35 years since Major League Baseball had an honest-to-God betting scandal. Fans older than we may remember the last one, back in 1989, when MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti banished would-be Hall of Famer Pete Rose amid accusations that he was betting on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds. The resulting scandal was so big that it transcended baseball. Standing behind a lectern at the New York Hilton, Giamatti not only denounced Rose’s illicit activity; he also railed against the “corrosive” effects of gambling on American society. And, at least for a time, it seemed like Giamatti’s invective had served its intended purpose. For the past three and a half decades, baseball has been free of gambling-related scandals.
Now, thanks to a player whose star power has quickly surpassed Rose’s, that improbable streak may be coming to an end.
Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times and ESPN jointly broke the details of a potentially explosive gambling scandal involving the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, the 29-year-old “two-way” hitting and pitching phenom who’s taken MLB by storm. The story is quickly evolving, and the whole thing is still a bit convoluted, but here’s what we know: Since 2013, Ohtani — who is Japanese and speaks limited English — has used his close friend Ippei Mizuhara as his professional interpreter. In 2021, Mizuhara met a sports bookie named Mathew Bowyer at a poker game in California (where sports gambling was and still is illegal), and over the next few years, proceeded to wrack up somewhere north of $4.5 million in gambling debts to Bowyer. In October 2023, the feds raided Bowyer’s home as part of an investigation into his alleged illegal gambling activity, and in the process, they discovered two $500,000 wire transfers to Bowyer from — drumroll please — Shohei Ohtani.
A reporter at ESPN caught wind of all this and reached out to Ohtani’s spokesperson, who agreed to make Mizuhara available for an interview. During that interview on Tuesday, Mizuhara told the reporter that he had wracked up the debt betting on international soccer matches, and that when he told Ohtani about it, Ohtani agreed to pay it off. (He also insisted that Ohtani had nothing to do with the gambling itself.) But on Wednesday — before ESPN published its story — Ohtani’s spokesperson contacted the ESPN reporter again and disavowed Mizuhara’s account. A few hours later, Ohtani’s lawyers released a statement: “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.” When contacted by ESPN after that, Mizuhara abruptly changed his tune, denied that Ohtani had known about his gambling debts, and declined to comment further. (Ohtani’s handlers’ explanation for this about-face is as hilarious as it is unbelievable.) Shortly thereafter, the Dodgers announced that they had fired Mizuhara, MLB announced that it’s conducting a formal investigation, and otherwise, it’s been radio silence, leaving the baseball world to speculate about what the hell is going on.
The truth is, we don’t know — and we may not know for a while. It’s possible that Ohtani paid off the debts without realizing that it was illegal and is now covering it up. It’s possible that Mizuhara did steal the money from Ohtani. But while everyone’s itching to get to the bottom of it, the truth of what happened is more or less beside the point. In terms of the scandal’s impact on Major League Baseball and the rapidly growing legal sports gambling industry, the damage is already done.
For both parties, this scandal could not have come at a worse time for MLB. Ohtani and sports gambling represent the two primary pillars of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s plan for the future of baseball: exciting young stars and cool new ways to liven up baseball’s soporific reputation. Ohtani’s fate is unclear, but the scandal is very bad for the second part of Manfred’s plan, which depends on cultivating the perception that betting on sports is a normal and respectable thing to do. What does the Average Joe do on his way to the big game? He grabs his cap and his jersey, buys a hotdog and a beer, and puts half his last paycheck on the line. Totally normal. Cool, even!
Even if this case turns out to be a straightforward instance of theft, the scandal reinforces the impression that the whole sports gambling thing isn’t as kosher as MLB and the mainstream sportsbooks would like you to believe. (After all, if you end up stealing a million dollars from your friends to buy hot dogs and replica baseball jerseys, something much worse has gone wrong in your life.)
That said, the scandal will almost certainly fail to slow the rise of sports gambling, given its deepening popularity (and the billions of lobbying dollars that the industry has poured into making it legal). The more likely — but undoubtedly worse — outcome is that this sort of thing will soon become routine. As the leagues integrate gambling more and more closely into their business models, and fans hope on board, more and more big-name stars will get implicated in shady gambling deals. For a while at least, leagues will slap them on the wrist and pontificate about “maintaining the integrity of the game” — but what kind of moral authority will they have to shame players when they are collecting millions of dollars from deals with sportsbooks? (And don’t expect Congress or any other legislative body to step in anytime soon.) There will always nominally be a “red line” — gambling on your own sport — but the line will get fuzzier and fuzzier over time. Eventually, the red line will just be a red smudge.
If we were gamblers, we’d bet that in 20 years, the Ohtani scandal will not be remembered as the moment that professional sports woke up to the dangers of gambling. Instead, we’d wager that it’ll be remembered as the final fulfillment of Giamatti’s warning — the moment when baseball looked squarely at the dangers of gambling and said, “Eh, not so bad.”
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