Tag Archives: Los Angeles Dodgers

Carl Erskine, RIP: From Jackie to Jimmy

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Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Carl Erskine.

Carl Erskine (right) congratulated by Hall of Famers Roy Campanella (left) and Jackie Robinson (center) after he no-hit the Giants in 1956.

If you consider The Boys of Summer as author Roger Kahn did, the 1952-53 Brooklyn Dodgers he covered for the New York Herald-Tribune, Carl Erskine was the last Boy standing. Which may have surprised him as much as anyone else.

If you consider them to include Brooklyn’s only World Series winners from 1955, Erskine’s death at 97 Tuesday leaves Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax (a bonus rookie on that team who didn’t appear in that Series) the last Boy standing. It almost seems sadly appropriate.

Erskine’s fourteen strikeouts in Game Three of the 1953 World Series stood as a Series record until Koufax broke it with fifteen punchouts in Game One of the 1963 Series. “Don’t worry, Dad,” one of Erskine’s sons said to his father after they finished watching the game on television. “You still hold the record for righthanders.” (He did until Hall of Famer Bob Gibson broke both him and Koufax in the 1968 Series.)

Either way, Erskine’s long and exemplary life doesn’t prevent mourning. A good pitcher who was a better man no longer lives and walks among us.

“He was a calming influence on a team with many superstars and personalities,” said former Dodger owner Peter O’Malley, whose father Walter owned the team from 1950-1979. “But getting credit was not Carl and that is what made him beloved.” No, that only began to delineate what made Erskine beloved.

The Hoosier righthander known for the kind of big, overhand curve ball Koufax himself would develop and surpass from the left side, Erskine grew up in Anderson devoid of prejudice and was a boyhood friend of eventual Negro Leagues baseball player and Harlem Globetrotters basketball player Jumpin’ Johnny Wilson.

Joining the Dodgers a year after Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson broke the major league colour barrier, Erskine was approached by Robinson, who asked, “Hey, Erskine, how come you don’t have a problem with this black and white thing?” Erskine mentioned his friendship with Wilson, saying, “I didn’t know he was black. He was my buddy. And so I don’t have a problem.”

Over two decades later, Erskine told Kahn for the latter’s fabled book, “Jumpin’ Johnny Wilson ate maybe as many meals at my home as he did at his own. With a background like that, the Robinson experience simply was no problem.”

Remembering further, Erskine also beamed when tellling Kahn of the welcome he got when the Dodgers brought him up from their Fort Worth (TX) farm in July 1948. “The team is in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I walk into the Forbes Field dressing room carrying my duffel bag.”

Just inside the door Jackie Robinson comes over, sticks out his hand, and says, “After I hit against you in spring training, I knew you’d be up here. I didn’t know when, but I knew it would happen. Welcome” . . .

. . . Man, I’d have been grateful if anyone had said “Hello.” And to get this not just from any ballplayer but from Jackie Robinson . . . I pitched that day and won in relief.

Known colloquially as Oisk by Brooklyn fans, Erskine was managed first by Burt Shotton. And Shotton made a grave mistake. During a start against the Cubs, Erskine suffered a torn shoulder muscle. He finished the game but awoke the following morning unable to lift his arm. He started next against the Phillies and could barely lift his arm after five innings.

“Why, son, you’re pitching a shutout,” Erskine remembered Shotton telling him then. “Now you go right ahead out there. If you get in any trouble, we’ll take care of that.” Erskine went on and again couldn’t lift his arm the following morning. “I did a lot of damage to my shoulder in those two starts,” he remembered to Bums author Peter Golenbock, “and I began then to have really, really severe arm problems, and it plagued me my whole career.”

Carl & Jimmy Erskine

Father and son beam as Jimmy Erskine displays his Spirit of the Special Olympics award, known to be the SO’s highest honour for a participating athlete. His father liked to hold up a World Series ring and one of Jimmy’s SO gold medals during personal appearances and ask, “Which of these means more?”

Somehow, Erskine managed to pitch two no-hitters (1953, 1956) and get credit for two wins in eleven World Series games between 1949 and 1956. “I’m very pleased and fortunate that I was not finished after I hurt my arm,” he told Golenbock, after admitting his retirement two years after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles was for just that reason at last. “But occasionally it would cross my mind, I wonder if I had not hurt my arm, how good could I have been?”

Soon after Erskine retired as a pitcher, his fourth child was born. Jimmy Erskine was a Down’s syndrome baby (they called it mongolism in those years, alas) and everyone in the Erskine orbit, practically, urged Erskine and his wife, Betty, to have the boy institutionalised. The Erskines said, “Not so fast.” They determined, in Kahn’s words, “to make Jimmy Erskine as fully human as a (Down’s child) can become.”

At that time, Down’s children had an average life expectancy of ten years. Jimmy Erskine said, essentially, “That’s what you think.” Thanks to his parents and the Special Olympics, in which he participated for decades to follow, he lived 63 years, even coming to work in the restaurant business before his death last November. His parents and his three older siblings made sure people saw him as part of their family, taking him on normal outings to the supermarket, church, and restaurants.

His father worked in insurance and then as a bank president and an Anderson College baseball coach. But his father also plunged deeply into the Special Olympics among other advocacies for the developmentally disabled. One of Erskine’s friends became Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Jimmy’s parents also created the Carl and Betty Erskine Society to raise money for the Special Olympics.

Those who watched him pitch may have believed at times that his shoulder issues kept him from a Hall of Fame career, but Erskine arrived in Cooperstown regardless. His Special Olympics work and advocacy for the disabled helped earn him the Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award at last year’s Hall ceremonies.

Erskine had a habit when speaking in public of hoisting his 1955 World Series ring, then hoisting one of the gold medals his son won as a Special Olympian. “You tell me which is the greater achievement?” he’d say. “Which of these means more?”

I’ll answer that personally. I’m the father of a developmentally-disabled son thanks to babyhood deafness (which cleared in due course) leaving him speech-language impaired. Bryan is an avid baseball fan and a near-rabid Los Angeles Angels fan, and he now works as a restaurant shift lead. He also played softball for the Southern California team in the 2018 Special Olympics in Seattle. He whacked a home run in his first-ever national SO plate appearance, and his team earned the silver medal. The only one who could have been more proud than him was (and remains) his father.

And I’ll still take that over any World Series title won by any major league baseball team, even any major league team that won one playing in the New York sunlight or under the New York stars. May Carl and Jimmy Erskine’s Elysian Fields reunion have been even more joyous than any of the times they shared on this island earth.

Shoh, it wasn’t so

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Shohei Ohtani

Ohtani conks one long distance against the Giants earlier this month. His former interpreter has all but taken him off the gambling hook—and is about to plead in a federal case.

Well, now. Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter is ready to sing. And it won’t be “An Innocent Man,” either. Ippei Mizuhara is ready to serenade the Feds with a guilty plea over stealing millions from the Dodgers star to bet on sports with an illegal bookmaker.

The New York Times said Wednesday night Mizuhara’s ready to plead guilty. The Times and several other media outlets also say the Feds have found evidence that Mizuhara tried to cover his trail by changing Ohtani’s bank account settings to deny Ohtani alerts and notifications whenever his money moved one or another way.

The Athletic reports that Mizuhara swiped more than the originally speculated $4.5. million—about $16 million plus, adding that he’s facing charges of bank fraud emanating from the Fed investigation. For which the maximum sentence is thirty years in the calaboose, though a plea deal may give him less time.

In other words, faced with riot-running speculation that he was betting on sports illegally through a California bookie, Ohtani told the plain truth when he said it wasn’t Shoh last month. That was the simple part. The hard part was acknowledging and saying his longtime friend and interpreter Mizuhara robbed him blind.

This would be the perfect moment for all appropriate social and mainstream media apologies alike for jumping Ohtani out of the gate, demanding his purge, demanding the unraveling of the obvious coverup on behalf of protecting baseball’s arguable biggest star at the moment. It would also be the perfect moment for apologies out of any and every one who said—without a shred of logic, sense, or thought—that the Ohtani case should have been Pete Rose’s get-out-of-baseball-jail-free card.

It’s not the perfect moment, yet? OK, I can wait. But not for very long. Rush to judgment? How about a warp speed to judgment. All there had to be was even one published hint that someone in Ohtani’s circle was betting on sports illegally and crowds of social media troglodytes, plus enough of a pack of mainstream reporters who are supposed to know better, couldn’t decide on the design of the noose or gallows from which Ohtani should hang.

The first such hints, which weren’t exactly hints, emerged while the Dodgers were in South Korea to play the Padres in their regular season-opening series. That’s when Ohtani first learned there was a gambling probe and that his own longtime friend and interpreter was involved.

Days later came Ohtani’s March presser. The one in which he denied flatly that he bet on baseball or any other sport in any way, shape, or form. The one in which he admitted he was now very suspicious that Mizuhara wasn’t exactly straightforward in his original statements about his ties to southern California bookie Matthew Bowyer.

“According to the [federal] complaint,” The Athletic‘s Andy McCullough writes, “Mizuhara manipulated Ohtani’s bank accounts beginning in 2021, around the time Mizuhara began wagering on sports. Mizuhara controlled an account that collected Ohtani’s baseball salary. He shielded access to the account from others in Ohtani’s orbit saying the player wanted the account to be private.

“Mizuhara also impersonated Ohtani in conversations with bank officials, the complaint read.”

Not brilliant, especially since whenever you call a bank on any matter involving an account, the bank usually records such conversations. That’s whether you want to double-check a deposit, a withdrawal, a credit card matter, your checking account, your savings account, your car or home loan, anything.

Just how Mizuhara thought he could get away with portraying Ohtani to the bank long term hasn’t been determined. Yet. If I were him, I wouldn’t think about seeking work as a professional impressionist any time soon.

Unlike Rose’s longtime lies and his sycophancy’s continuing yeah, buts, Ohtani didn’t flinch at that March presser, even if he looked and sounded as though he’d been shot in the back. He could have delivered a mealymouth self-defense, he could have thrown this or that one under the proverbial bus. But he didn’t. He didn’t take questions at the presser, but he didn’t waver from his statement or his position.

The U.S. Attorney in California’s Central District, the IRS, and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating Mizuhara and Bowyer. There was no case against Ohtani. There still isn’t. Even though everything known until now pointed far more directly to Mizuhara than to Ohtani, it didn’t stop take after take from those willing to drink of the full he-must-be-guilty-somehow nectars.

Except that Ohtani himself wasn’t named in the legal probes into Mizuhara and Bowyer. Even Bowyer through his own attorneys said Ohtani never did business with him in one or another way but that Mizuhara did plenty. And we’re probably not done learning just how deeply Mizuhara inserted his siphon into Ohtani’s lucre.

“Ohtani on March 25 said he learned of the issue on March 20–the day the reports from the Los Angeles Times and ESPN would break–after the Dodgers’ first game in South Korea, when the team held a meeting in the clubhouse,” say CNN reporters Joe Sutton and Jason Hanna.

Ohtani said the team meeting was in English and he didn’t have a ‘translator on my side’ but he got a sense that something was wrong.

He said he met one-on-one after with Mizuhara at the club’s hotel. Ohtani said up until then he didn’t know Mizuhara had a gambling problem and was in debt.

“When we talked . . . that was when I found out he had a massive debt,” Ohtani said March 25. “Ippei admitted that he was sending money from my account to the bookmaker.”

The translator had told the media and Ohtani’s representatives the player had paid off gambling debts on behalf of a friend, according to the superstar. Ohtani said he was not aware of the media inquiries.

Mizuhara was fired after the Dodgers beat the Padres in that 20 March game, of course. Another spokesman for Ohtani said the two-way star was indeed the victim of theft. Those running rampant saying there was no way that could have happened betrayed ignorance, willful and otherwise, of how often athletes, entertainers, and others of vast wealth get  fleeced by those close to them, electronically or otherwise.

Just how and why Mizhuhara got in so deep with Bowyer (who’s been reported out of the bookmaking business since last October) despite his not-so-high salary and overall monetary value remains to be seen.

Presumably, too, MLB’s investigation into this mess will wrap up soon enough. It would have to, now that we can determine beyond reasonable doubt that Ohtani was telling the truth when he said he doesn’t bet on any sports, and that Mizuhara told anything but the truth when he first tried claiming he was betting on Ohtani’s behalf. U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada is quoted as saying Mizhuara’s sports betting didn’t involve baseball, anyway.

More important would be MLB’s other teams broadening their vetting processes regarding interpreters for foreign-born players who speak little to no English or who speak the language competently enough to get by at the market or meeting fans but not comfortably enough to speak it during formal press interviews. The next Mizuhara may already be lined up among them.

That’d be the second best outcome of this mess. (The best, of course, is Ohtani’s demonstrable innocence in the matter.) That’d be more important than any social media apologies for trying to find Ohtani’s needle in a mud haystack.

The earliest no-hitter for his team’s first win

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Ronel Blanco

The Blue Jays got Blancoed for the record books on Monday . . .

You know a man of my ability
he should be smokin’ on a big cigar.
But ’till I get myself straight
I guess I’ll just have to wait
in my rubber suit rubbin’ these cars.

–Jim Croce, “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues”

I have no idea if Ronel Blanco knows who Jim Croce was, never mind if he’s heard the old troubador’s music. But the Dominican righthander who worked at a car wash in his homeland before the Astros handed him a $5,000 bonus when he was 22 can smoke all the big cigars he wants now.

You earn such spoils if you become only the fourth pitcher in Show history to throw a no-hitter for your team’s first win of the regular season, a club that includes Hall of Famer Bob Feller (who did it in 1940, on Opening Day) plus Burt Hooton (Cubs, 1972) and Hideo Nomo (Red Sox, 2001). You earn them when you break Nomo’s record for the earliest regular-season no-hitter in Show history by two days. (Nomo: 4 April; Blanco: 2 April.)

But you might care to share them with your catcher, Yanier Diaz, since he also became the first since 1901 to call a no-hit game from behind the plate and hit a pair out in the same game: solo blasts with two out in the second and one out in the seventh. And, with your left fielder Kyle Tucker, who joined Diaz going long in both innings, a solo in the second and a two-run shot in the seventh.

And pass one to your manager, Joe Espada, who’s become the first manager in Show history to be on the bridge when his first major league win comes with a no-hitter. You might have needed to wait until age 28 to get to the Show at all but Espada ground away a very long time as a minor league infielder turned minor and major league coach before becoming the Astros’ bench coach after 2017.

All that plus a changeup described politely as nasty kept the Blue Jays’s bats from hitting anything past Astro fielders when not striking out while the Astros dropped a ten-run, twelve-hit assault upon last year’s AL wild card victims. (They lost two straight to the Twins in that set.)

All the Astros wanted in Minute Maid Park was to shake off the season-opening sweep the Yankees dropped on them that included three comeback wins for the latter. They couldn’t have gotten a better shake-off if they’d hired a scriptwriter and his number-one script doctor at once.

Fairly enough, the Jays exacted a little revenge the following day. José Altuve wants to open the proceedings with a leadoff bomb against José Berríos in the top of the fourth? We’ll just see about that, said Davis Schneider, with two out in the top of the ninth and Daulton Varsho pinch-running for Justin Turner, hammering Josh Hader’s slightly hanging slider more than slightely beyond the center field fence. Thus the 2-1 Jays final.

But it wasn’t enough to dull or diminish Blanco’s blanking Monday. Nobody can take that from him.

MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE IN THE RECORD BOOKS

Slumpbusting Thumps Dept.—Bryce Harper opened the season 0-for-11 with only a pair of walks placing him on base. Then he took it out on Reds started Graham Ashcraft on Tuesday for openers, hitting a 1-2 service over the Citizens Bank Park center field fence in the bottom of the first. He abused Ashcraft opening the bottom of the fourth, too, hitting the first pitch into the lower right field seats.

Harper wasn’t even close to finished, either. With the bases loaded, one out, and Brent Suter, the second Reds reliever of the night, on the mound, Harper unloaded on a full count and sent one two-thirds of the way up the lower right center field seats. Making the score 8-1, Phillies. They needed all that insurance plus Brandon Marsh’s solo bomb in the top of the ninth, after all, since the Reds pried three more runs out before expiring on the wrong end of a 9-4 Phillies win.

Harper became the 56th player and third Phillie to hit three home runs including a salami slice in the same game. The previous two such Phillie phloggers: Should-be Hall of Famer Dick Allen (29 September 1968) and Jayson Werth (16 May 2008). All three such games have something else in common: thirteen runs scored total, though Allen’s and Werth’s resulted in 10-3 Phillie wins.

OH, BY THE WAY . . .

Place Your Betts Dept.—Mookie Betts has now played eight regular-season games this year. He has five home runs, fifteen hits in 38 plate appearances, and eight walks. The only problem there is that four of the five times he hit them out there wasn’t a Dodger to be found on base ahead of him, and the Dodgers have been 3-2 in the games he’s dialed the Delta Quadrant so far.

But the Mookie Monster has also scored fourteen times, and other than by himself it seems Freddie Freeman has shown him the most love after he’s reached base: Freeman has sent him home five times over those first eight.

Did I mention that, as of Wednesday morning, Betts leads the National League in hits, bombs, walks, and total bases? That he leads the NL with a .605 on-base percentage thus far? That he leads the entire Show with his 1.772 OPS?

He said it ain’t Shoh

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Will Ireton, Shohei Ohtani

“I do want to make it clear that I never bet on sports or have willfully sent money to the bookmaker . . . The season is going to start so I’m going to obviously let my lawyers handle matters from here on out, and I am completely assisting in all investigations that are taking place right now.”—Shohei Ohtani (right), accompanied by new interpreter Will Ireton, Monday afternoon.

Carp all you like about his disinclination to take questions afterward. But don’t ever make the mistake again of mentioning Shohei Ohtani in the same breath, maybe the same pages, as Pete Rose.

However long it took since the uproar first roared, accompanied by his new interpreter, Will Ireton, Ohtani delivered a statement saying no, he didn’t bet on baseball, never has, and by the way isn’t all that much for sports gambling, anyway. That was the easier part for him.

The harder part for him was Ohtani saying he believed his now-former interpeter, Ippei Mizuhara, flat stole from him. For a fleeting few moments, Ohtani looked like the poor soul who came home from work early and discovered his children incinerated his house.

Maybe you don’t remember without the help of assorted books about it or about the man, but Rose wasn’t that candid when he was first put under baseball’s microscope for gambling. Knowing full well that he was guilty of everything the game’s formal investigation was going to expose . . .

He lied through his teeth. He attacked and smeared those who sought the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. He threw associates under the proverbial bus who’d aided and abetted his longtime bookie gambling up to and including the April-May 1986 period when he began betting on baseball itself and the Reds for whom he still played as well as managed.

That was before the 1989 ruling from commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti that sent him into baseball’s Phantom Zone on the grounds he’d violated Rule 21(d) up and down.

Ohtani on Monday didn’t try to throw anyone under the proverbial bus. Mizuhara already threw himself there, between his clumsy initial responses when the uproar erupted and the discovery that he’d been anything but entirely honest in the past regarding some of his academic and professional credentials.

But Ohtani didn’t say this was all a figment of somebody’s perverse imagination. He didn’t deflect. He added almost as flatly that he was cooperating with any and all investigations into Mizhuara’s activities, including Mizuhara’s betting on sports through an Orange County, California bookmaker, in violation of California law which doesn’t allow sports betting of any kind in the state.

We still don’t know just how Mizuhara was able to pay off that SoCal bookie. We still don’t know for certain just how he might have lifted over four million of Ohtani’s dollars to do it. Ohtani himself hasn’t suggested how, which may or may not be an indication that he’d sooner run head first into a lava pit than throw Mizuhara all the way under that proverbial bus.

But Ohtani wouldn’t be the first sports or entertainment figure to be fleeced by someone close to him, either. You want to ask how Mizuhara ripped him off? It might prove to be simpler than you suspect.

A few music legends could tell you. Billy Joel sued his former manager (and former brother-in-law) Frank Weber for $90 million in damages in 1989, accusing Weber of diverting millions of Joel’s dollars into his own other interests. Weber filed for bankruptcy and the pair had to settle out of court. The Piano Man reportedly retrieved only $8 million.

Sting was relieved of about $7.4 million (six million British pounds, if you’re scoring) by his longtime advisor Keith Moore—who’s said to have used fake investments abroad to send that money into his own purse.

Alanis Morissette was cleaned out of $4.8 million by her business manager, one Jonathan Schwartz, whom she accused of moving her money straight into his own account. Schwartz landed six years behind bars for such movements.

A few ballplayers could, too. Baseball and other sports were littered long enough before the Ohtani-Mizuhara mess with stories of players robbed almost blind by advisors, by lawyers, even by relatives.

Both the FBI and the IRS are on the trails of Mizhuara and the bookie in question, Mathew Bowyer. “I do want to make it clear,” Ohtani said near the end of his statement, “that I never bet on sports or have willfully sent money to the bookmaker.” If those investigations prove to support Ohtani’s contentions, Mizhuara will be buried alive in federal charges and likely to spend more years that he might like to count behind federal bars.

This entire noise should also prod MLB teams to vet their interpreters even more closely. It’s not impossible that those engaged by other teams for other foreign-born players might also be taking advantage of their proximities to their charges. Or would you like to discover this Yankee or that Astro or that other Cub or that Ranger, Brave, Met, Oriole, or Phillie yonder being ripped off Ohtani-like by their interpreters?

From the moment the hoopla began over the Ohtani-Mizhuara mess, there’s been quite the rush to presume the Dodgers’ $700 million man guilty. The early communication clumsiness of it all didn’t help, but now that Ohtani’s legal beagles have things under reasonable control it should be simpler to say and stand upon: Find and show the evidence if it exists that Ohtani’s anything other than a slightly surrealistic victim.

Until or unless real evidence shows, one and all otherwise should cork it. And, stop raising Pete Rose’s name as if this mess means Rose (against whom there was a convoy worth of evidence) finally gets his get-out-of-baseball-jail-free card.

Ohtani-Mizuhara vs. Rose

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Ippei Mizhuara, Shohei Ohtani

Did Mizuhara steal from Ohtani to cover his gambling debts through an illegal bookie? Did Ohtani naïvely agree to pay Mizhuara’s debts without knowing the legal and MLB trouble he’d see?

Barely a week after I received an advance copy of Keith O’Brien’s Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, there comes a scandal that provokes yet another round of social media demands that Rose be let off the hook for that which does not yet apply incontrovertibly to baseball’s biggest contemporary star.

Barely did the Dodgers come away from their unusual regular-season opening in Korea with a 5-2 win over the Padres when news exploded that the Dodgers handed a pink slip to Shohei Othani’s longtime friend and interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, over accusations involving sports gambling.

The least confusing portion is that Mizuhara used Ohtani’s money to cover gambling debts incurred in California, where sports betting remains illegal. But one moment, Mizuhara claimed Ohtani wired the money to cover before. In another moment, Ohtani’s attorneys claimed Mizhuara somehow stole the money from Ohtani’s account.

What seems to be the unspoken-but-agreed-upon point is that, until now, nobody had Othani on any gambling radar. Right there it should drive the Rose case comparisons away. As O’Brien’s book reminds us, Rose had a gambling habit rooted in childhood excursions to race tracks watching his father bet the horses and matured into gambling with street bookmakers. Gambling that was on his team’s and then his entire sport’s radar long before he graduated to the kind of betting that prompted baseball to investigate him formally and banish him permanently.

Mizuhara may face legal penalties for his sports bettings through an Orange County bookie, but nobody’s yet accusing him of betting on baseball itself—either on his own or on behalf of Ohtani—and making it stick. Everything tumbled out both so quickly and so clumsily that building a timeline must be a chore for those who try.

Rose’s remaining partisans aboard social media (and elsewhere, perhaps) seem to think the foregoing alone should mean re-opening the Rose case and ramming him into the Hall of Fame. To many of them, Rose could shoot someone on Cincinnati’s Vine Street and still not lose sycophants. They seem blissfully devoid of accepting that only one man is responsible for Rose’s continuing status.

I don’t know if O’Brien’s book will change the minds of those who insist, despite that mountain range of evidence, that the Rose case deserves a review whenever any scandalous baseball behaviour—gambling or otherwise—comes to light. More’s the pity. A longtime journalist from the Boston Globe to NPR, O’Brien has provided a deeper look into the wherefores of Rose’s life in and out of baseball than just about any previous volume.

O’Brien is a Cincinnatian himself who admits right out of the gate that he, like most Cincinnatians are presumed to do, has “felt every emotion” about Rose: “[P]ride, disgust, frustration, pity, and confusion. Only one thing hasn’t changed over the years: my fascination with his story. He was Icarus in red stirrup socks and cleats. He was the American dream sliding headfirst into third. He was both a miracle and a disaster, and he still is today.”

It’s arguable that no great player of Rose’s time was quite as self-made, quite as bent to play above and beyond his natural endowments. Maybe no great player was as solipsistically reckless, either. The longer Rose proved and re-proved himself at the plate and on the field as the junkyard dog who could hang with and overthrow those snooty Westminster Kennel Club hounds, the deeper became his belief that he was invulnerable to accountability for his risky, rakish, and reckless off-field pursuits.

His own Reds employers feared for his safety once they began catching the winds that Rose’s gambling habits weren’t just limited to the racetracks. Betting with bookies, betting on sports, gradually betting through a Brooklyn bookie named Michael Bertolini who placed Rose’s bets with other New York bookies and kept meticulous notebooks recording Rose’s baseball betting—including on his own team—at least as early as April 1985, when he was the Reds’ player-manager.

“A manager betting on his own team could harm the game—­even if he was bet-
ting on the team to win,” O’Brien writes, well aware that Rule 21(d) does not distinguish between betting on or against one’s team.

He could overuse a pitcher or refuse to rest a starter in pursuit of his own financial gain, and what he ­ wagered—or didn’t wager—­ could move markets in the underworld. Bertolini’s bookies in New York surely noticed when Berto was betting against Pete. Any bookie in that situation would have been justified to wonder if Berto had inside information that would make it worthwhile to go against the Reds that night. The bookies also surely noticed when Pete didn’t bet on the Reds at all. He wasn’t betting against his team; he just wasn’t betting on them. On multiple days, according the notebook, Pete sat it out, not wagering on the Reds after having done it the day before or earlier that week. It was another thing that could move markets in the underworld. And his debts—­ his mounting debts recorded in the notebook—­were especially troubling. An athlete in arrears to a bookie is an athlete in danger of being owned by that bookie, a kept man, beholden. It was the reason why baseball had its rule against gambling in the first place and the reason why that rule—­Rule 21(d)—­was posted in every clubhouse, including the Reds’ clubhouse at Riverfront Stadium.

Independent journalist (and former NBC Sports analyst) Craig Calcaterra says there are three possibilities regarding the Mizuhara-Ohtani situation:

Possibility 1) “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.” Which is, Calcaterra acknowledges, is the story Ohtani’s legal team presents.

Possibility 2) “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 . . . If this is what happened, Ohtani will be in pretty big trouble both with the feds and with Major League Baseball.” Rule 21(f) gives baseball’s commissioner discretion in punishing a player, manager, coach, clubhouse worker, front-office person who’s gambled or otherwise associated with illegal bookmakers. (Leo Durocher once learned the hard way, when then-commissioner Happy Chandler suspended him for 1947.)

“A player paying a bookie for a team employee’s illegal gambling debts, and doing so via means that represent federal crimes, creates an astounding amount of risk and would seriously damage the game,” Calcaterra writes. “If this were to be born out and Manfred did nothing, he’d basically be [urinating] all over baseball’s single most important off-the-field rule.”

Possibility 3) “These were Ohtani’s gambling debts and Mizuhara is taking a bullet for his patron . . . If this were the case it would be the biggest baseball scandal since the Black Sox, right? Ohtani would not only be in criminal jeopardy for illegal gambling but he’d probably face a permanent ban from the game. It’d be absolutely massive and would upend professional sports for a very, very long time.”

Having presented those three possiblities, Calcaterra thinks of them thus:

1) Too many assumptions must be made to make stick a thought that Mizuhara managed to mulct Ohtani’s money without a proven say-so.

2) It’s the simplest of the three prospects, not to mention it “flows with what we all want to think about Ohtani being a decent guy and a loyal friend which is something none of us know for a fact, obviously, but we’ve never been given reason to doubt it either, all of my usual ‘we don’t know anyone, not that well’ disclaimers notwithstanding.”

3) Highly doubtful, sans evidence. “Again, I know none of us know anyone,” Calcaterra continues, “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.”

Meanwhile, it’s wise to remember that just because MLB has entered into promotional relationships with legal sports betting outfits on and offline, that doesn’t mean players, managers, coaches, clubhouse workers, or front-office personnel can just bet on baseball any old time they choose it. Fans can bet on baseball to their heart’s content, anywhere and any time they want. Baseball personnel can’t.

They can bet on anything else they want, from March Madness to a college fraternity’s cockroach races. But they can’t do it through unauthorised or illegal bookmakers. And Rule 21(d) hasn’t been and won’t likely be superceded or repealed.

I repeat: Nothing credible has emerged to show Mizuhara or Ohtani betting on baseball, even though Ohtani’s partisans (they, too, are legion) know what a terrible look this week’s eruption holds. But the concurrent noise insisting that this, too, is yet another reason Pete Rose deserves a pardon and his plaque in Cooperstown, is just that. Noise.

If Rule 21(d) plus the Hall of Fame’s block on Hall ballot appearances for anyone on MLB’s permanently-ineligible list can’t quell such noise, you’d like to think Mr. O’Brien’s forthcoming book should. Should, but, alas, probably won’t.