Uncertainty suddenly surrounds one of Major League Baseball’s biggest stars, with Shohei Ohtani mired in recent days in a growing scandal linked to a federal investigation into illegal sports gambling.
The public so far has only a fragmented picture of the case. But more facts could emerge in coming days and weeks, legal experts said, as federal prosecutors try to make sense of competing claims about Ohtani’s money being used to pay down gambling debts with a suspected illegal bookmaker in California. One key question — but not the only one — is whether the Japanese slugger was, as his representatives claim, the victim of a “massive theft” by his interpreter and right-hand man, Ippei Mizuhara.
“If there has been a ‘massive theft,’ you would expect Ohtani’s people to cooperate with federal investigators,” said Jeff Ifrah, a former federal prosecutor and sports betting expert who now works as a defense attorney, including for professional athletes. “They will figure out whether or not the interpreter is lying, and whether or not Ohtani is a true victim.”
Meanwhile, the federal investigation will almost certainly inform a separate, internal inquiry by Major League Baseball into whether — potential crimes aside — there were any violations of league policies around players gambling on sports other than their own, experts said.
“There has to be an investigation,” said Andrew Brandt, a sports commentator and executive director of the Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at Villanova University. “The firing of the interpreter is not going to sweep this under the rug.”
Neither Ohtani nor Mizuhara has been charged with a crime. No betting on baseball has been alleged.
Still, the betting scandal has enveloped the MLB and one of its most high-profile — and highest paid — superstars. It has occurred so quickly that it has been difficult for observers, including many Dodgers fans, to keep track of what is being alleged and by whom.
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