Why did Shohei Ohtani allegedly wire $4.5m to a bookmaker?

Baseball's greatest player might have been a victim. But there are darker possibilities, too.

UPDATE (6pm, Friday). MLB is now officially investigating the scandal; the Friday early evening timing is a classic PR strategy to minimize exposure, but still this is a good step, as I argue below. And ESPN has more details on the timing. Trying to process everything as I head to a friend's to watch some tournament games (see, that's why the Friday @ 6pm news dump works) but have left the text below unchanged.

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Sometimes I’ll just toss a headline up haphazardly, but this one I thought carefully about. Because it really gets to the crux of the matter. As reported by ESPN: “The Los Angeles Dodgers interpreter for Shohei Ohtani was fired Wednesday afternoon after questions surrounding at least $4.5 million in wire transfers sent from Ohtani's bank account to a bookmaking operation set off a series of events.”

Read that again. Yes, this paragraph is awkwardly written, undoubtedly after having been vetted with ESPN’s legal department. And yes, the “questions” are nominally about Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s interpreter but also an “inseparable close friend of Ohtani’s and a fixture in the dugout”, who seems to have had some sort of gambling problem.

But they’re also questions about Ohtani. Not to go all Ethan Strauss on you — like me, Ethan is a former ESPNer whose excellent Substack “House of Strauss” has carved out a niche in criticizing conflicts of interests in sports media — but I’m cynical about how the sports media has framed this story so far. Ohtani, the two-time MVP and two-way star, is the modern Babe Ruth, the best baseball player in the world and one of the best of all-time. He’s also by far baseball’s most marketable star, and he just signed a $700 million contract with the Dodgers in December, finally freeing himself from the comical incompetence of the cross-town rival Los Angeles Angels. The Shohei Ohtani business is a big business. And $4.5 million from Ohtani’s bank account allegedly found its way into the hands of a bookmaking operation. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

Let me be explicit about the value I think I can add here. I know a lot of high-stakes gamblers — in fact, I just finished writing a book about gambling and risk, which is in part a character study of exactly the sort of person who might wire a lot of money to settle a poker or sports betting debt. I don’t know a lot of current or former professional athletes (although I do know some). But I do know a lot of men who became wealthy at a young age, through finance, gambling or founding a business. And I’ve been around my share of degeneracy — in fact, the term “degen” is often used affectionately in the gambling world that I inhabit.

And knowing that world, I think all possibilities are on the table, including that Mizuhara, a former employee of the Angels and Dodgers, bet on baseball (something he has “100 percent” denied). Or that Ohtani was betting on sports himself. I also think it’s possible, however, that Ohtani was sloppy with his money and with his relationship with Mizuhara. Young men who become extremely rich and famous are not always known for their caution in financial matters, exactly. And knowing some of them personally, I’d say they’re even less cautious than is generally assumed.

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.

These indeed seem like the three main options on the menu. Although I’d suggest that there are also some in-between possibilities, such as that Mizuhara was doing things that Ohtani was faintly aware of and grudgingly going along with. Say, bets that Mizuhara claimed “couldn’t lose”, or “crypto investments”, or “loaning money to a friend”. Ohtani earned a total of $65 million in salary and endorsements in 2023 and had a 9-figure payday looming. It’s not against baseball’s rules to bet on sports other than baseball — itself an important clue about the high tolerance for gambling among athletes — although sports betting isn’t legal in California. Perhaps Ohtani, concerned with getting ready for his next start against the Texas Rangers or shooting another commercial, couldn’t really be bothered with the details. Paradoxically, there is often a high degree of trust in high-stakes gambling circles.

Let me cycle quickly through several points of agreement with Calcaterra or where I otherwise think the conventional wisdom about the story is correct.

First, $4.5 million is a lot of money relative to Mizuhara’s salary, which was “between $300,000 and $500,000 annually”. As Bob Voulgaris, one of the world’s best high-stakes bettors points out, it’s not easy to get that sort of money down and any bookie is going to have done some due diligence on their patron, having high confidence that the debts could be settled.

Second, we shouldn’t take much that Mizuhara or Ohtani say at face value. Ohtani and his legal team have already changed their story, flipping from Possibility Two to Possibility One:

Initially, a spokesman for Ohtani told ESPN the slugger had transferred the funds to cover Mizuhara's gambling debt. The spokesman presented Mizuhara to ESPN for a 90-minute interview Tuesday night, during which Mizuhara laid out his account in great detail. However, as ESPN prepared to publish the story Wednesday, the spokesman disavowed Mizuhara's account and said Ohtani's lawyers would issue a statement.

To put my media critic hat back on, ESPN — a big partner to Major League Baseball and now directly involved in the sports betting business, too — really ought to have aired this interview. It clearly has news value, even if Ohtani’s team have disavowed it.

And there’s no particular reason to believe Mizuhara when he claims that he never bet on baseball. Degenerate gamblers may start out with self-imposed constraints or lines they won’t cross. But they’re almost inevitably blurred, particularly when you’re $4.5 million in the hole. Inside information on baseball games, such as whether Ohtani would be scratched from his next start, would be extremely valuable and could help to explain the bookmaking operation’s tolerance for Mizuhara and his debts.

Third, it’s ridiculous that Major League Baseball is not officially investigating Ohtani’s involvement. I mean, sure, some of this is semantic game-playing: MLB is “looking into” the matter and “gathering information,” according to reporting by Ken Rosenthal and Andy McCullough. But this isn’t some overblown deflated football scandal. There were allegedly $4.5 million in wire transfers sent from Ohtani’s account to an illegal bookmaker! And nobody has their story straight! It would be hard to come up with better parameters for a story that demands an investigation. MLB is running a big risk of looking foolish for some short-term PR victory, especially if Possibility Three is true.

Fourth, as Calcaterra points out, this story is not really about the legal sportsbetting industry, i.e. the world of FanDuel and DraftKings and ESPN Bets, since the bookmaking operation that Ohtani allegedly wired money to is illegal. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to buy the industry’s inevitable spin: “see, this just proves the need for legal sportsbetting!”. There have been problems with that too, especially in the NFL, which has stricter rules for its players. But the backlash to the proliferation of legal betting apps is somewhat orthogonal to the Ohtani story. It’s germane in the sense that it raises the stakes, and affects the motivation of the various parties, but journalists ought to focus on figuring out what happened here first before drawing too many moral lessons.

So why did Shohei Ohtani allegedly wire $4.5m to a bookmaker?

Calcaterra seems to think that Possibility Two — that Ohtani was doing his friend a solid by covering his debts, the story that Ohtani’s team was originally circulating — is the most likely one. But here’s where I’m going to push back a bit on his otherwise excellent post. I think Possibility One and Possibility Three are plausible as well.

Look, people in the gambling part of my world routinely need to exchange large amounts of money, and wire transfers are a convenient method for accomplishing this. And contrary to what you might think, and what I’ve seen assumed elsewhere, they won’t necessarily trigger that much due diligence from your bank, particularly for domestic wires. (Foreign wires are a different story.) Especially if you have a track record of doing so, you can log onto your online banking portal and send a wire without ever getting a phone call or otherwise hearing from a human being. Different customers will have different limits, but a VIP like Ohtani is likely to have high limits. It’s not quite as easy as sending a payment by Zelle or something, but sending a wire isn’t that much harder, either.

So say that Mizuhara, serving as a de facto personal assistant to Ohtani, has access to his online banking accounts. That seems plausible. If you’re as wealthy as Ohtani, time is a much greater constraint than money. Here’s someone you trust, and he says he can make your life easier if he has access to your Wells Fargo account or whatever, whether it’s to “make investments” or handle your taxes or book travel arrangements or whatever else. There’s nothing really preventing him from routinely making wire transfers from that account.

Would Ohtani notice the missing money? Well, maybe. Or maybe he was duped; Mizuhara may have had some ostensible above-board purpose for the transfers. But I have to tell you: the very wealthy people I know are all over the place in terms of their financial hygiene, from having a high level of fastidiousness to being downright sloppy or unconcerned. A lot of things operate on a just-trust-me basis. It does not seem that wild that Ohtani, who was about to sign a $700 million contract, wouldn’t notice $50K or $100K gone missing here and there, which eventually accumulated to $4.5 million. (California taxes alone are going to cause some high-magnitude swings in your bank balance if you’re making regular quarterly payments.) So the idea that Mizuhara stole from Ohtani, as his team is now alleging, is plausible.

But I also don’t see how we can rule out Possibility Three, that Ohtani was betting himself. Calcaterra, after calling it “the biggest baseball scandal since the Black Sox”, is skeptical of this:

My speculation: I seriously, seriously doubt it. Like, it’d be crazy and, to stick with the theme, would offend Occam’s Razor even more than the current official story does. Again, I know none of us know anyone, but nothing we know about Ohtani suggests that he’s reckless, impulsive, or, frankly, stupid enough for this kind of business. It’d be the biggest heel-turn in the history of sports (non-professional wrestling edition), and it just does not compute for me at all.

I’m not so skeptical. I don’t know Ohtani, obviously. But as a world-famous professional athlete, he’s almost by definition an extremely competitive, wealthy young man in an industry known for being tolerant of gambling (again, MLB players are allowed to place legal bets in sports other than baseball). That profile checks a lot of boxes for someone with a high propensity to gamble. And $4.5 million is money that he can more than afford to lose. His ability to hit a 99-mph fastball, or to throw one, doesn’t particularly provide testament to his character or judgment — and for that matter, Ohtani has shown some considerable lack of judgment no matter which story is true, even if it’s just by trusting Mizuhara too much.

Then there is the fact that a huge percentage of Ohtani’s compensation in his new contract is deferred — all but $2 million of the $70 million. But I’m not so sure that reads well for him either. It’s actually pretty irresponsible financially, since you are giving up a lot of expected value by not investing in e.g. index funds. It may be suggestive of someone who is trying to impose constraints on himself — a gambler self-limiting — because he has had problems in the past.

And in contrast to Calcaterra, I think Occam’s Razor — the precept that the simplest explanation is the most likely one — argues in favor of Possibility Three. $4.5 mllion from Ohtani’s bank account wound up in the hands of a bookmaker! The simplest possibility is that Ohtani was betting himself. I’m not sure if it’s the possibility I’d bet on, in part because if there’s any fig leaf of an excuse for Ohtani, I’d imagine that Major League Baseball will indulge it. But it’s obviously a live possibility, however much headlines from MLB and its business partners might obfuscate it.