Tag Archives: Shohei Ohtani

“I’m the one probably most surprised . . . “

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Shohei Ohtani

Ohtani takes one of his curtain calls from the Miami audience Thursday evening.

If you absolutely must become baseball’s first 50/50 man, as in 50+ home runs and 50+ stolen bases in a single season, you couldn’t pay for any more earth-moving way to do it than Shohei Ohtani found Thursday evening.

A 6-for-6 day at the plate. As many runs batted in in one game as his Dodgers teammate Freddie Freeman has so far in all September. Three RBI hits serving as just the overture to both Ohtani’s history-making suite and the Dodgers smothering the hapless Marlins, 20-4, in the Fish’s own tank.

Theft number 50 after a first-inning double and theft number 51 after the second-inning RBI single. A two-run double in the third ruined only by Ohtani getting himself thrown out trying to stretch it into a triple.

Almost exactly the way Hall of Famer in waiting Albert Pujols demolished the Rangers after the sixth inning in Game Three of the 2011 World Series (three bombs: one each in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings), Ohtani’s real mayhem began in the sixth:

A man on second and one out in the sixth, Ohtani sent an 0-1 slider into the second deck behind right center field. It made him only the second Dodger behind Shawn Green to hit 49 in a season. Second and third off a wild pitch and two out in the seventh, Ohtani hit one the opposite way into the left field bullpen. That founded the 50/50 Club and earned him a loud curtain call in a road ballpark.

First and second and two out in the ninth, Ohtani slammed the best possible exclamation point upon the proceedings when he drove a high meatball from a sacrificial lamb (read: Marlins position player, Vidal Bruján) well into the upper deck behind right field. With another curtain call to follow.

“To be honest,” Ohtani told a television interviewer through an interpreter post-game, “I’m the one probably most surprised. I have no idea where this came from, but I’m glad that I performed well today.”

The loanDepot Park audience in Miami didn’t have much to root for from their own lack of heroes this year (the Marlins have already been eliminated from the postseason mathematically), so it didn’t cost them anything but netted them plenty of respect to hand history their day’s loudest ovations.

If you’re my age, you can compare it to the day the usually unapologetic rooters of the early Mets suddenly turned on their anti-heroes on that fine 1964 Father’s Day in Shea Stadium, when Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Bunning threatened to pitch the first perfect game in the 20th Century National League. When Bunning finished what he started, he was hit with a wild standing O and an invitation to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Credit Marlins manager Skip Schumaker, whose ten-year major league playing career included one season (2013) with the Dodgers, for looking into the teeth of the hurricane demolishing his club, with Ohtani potentially carrying number 50 in his bat, seeing second and third and two outs in the seventh, electing not to put Ohtani aboard to give the Fish a better survival chance with aging Kevin Kiermaier—whose bat is now as useless as his glovework remains a study—due to hit behind him.

“If it was a tight game, one run lead or we’re down one,” the manager said postgame, “I probably put him on. Down that many runs [nine], that’s a bad move baseball-wise, karma-wise, baseball god-wise. You go after him to see if you can get him out. I think out of respect for the game, we were going to go after him. He hit the home run. That’s just part of the deal.”

“A lot of us actually looked at the opposing dugout and I think a lot of the coaches were telling Skip, ‘Hey, we should walk him right here’,” said Dodger third baseman Max Muncy, who’d scored on Ohtani’s early single and final home run. “I’ve always loved Skip. When he was the first base coach in San Diego, I always talked to him. I heard all guys love to play for him. For him to do that, that’s awesome.”

“The game was certainly out of hand,” said Dodger manager Dave Roberts. “Guys got their starters out and then to take that potential moment away from the fans, Shohei himself, Skip understood that. It was bigger than that and I’ve got nothing for respect for that.”

Kiermaier striking out to end that seventh merely amplified the magnanimity of what Schumaker refused to do. A team out of any pennant race has a lot more for which to apologise to their fans than trying to stop the unstoppable force on a night he’s making history on its dollars. And leading his team to a National League West division clinch while he’s at it.

Ohtani previously entered the rareified 40/40 club by hitting a grand slam. This was different. This was a night the Dodgers used the Marlins for target practise and Ohtani proved to have the most ammunition to expend. Even MLB officials were in on the act, swapping out regulation game baseballs for pre-authenticated balls before Ohtani batted in the seventh.

When he turned Mike Baumann’s curve ball into history, those officials scurried to siphon as much memorabilia as they could carry away from Ohtani, perhaps leaving observers to ask only how they’d managed to miss his uniform belt, undershirt, and jock strap.

It isn’t every day that a player has a ten-RBI, six-hits, five extra-base hits, three home runs, two stolen bases day. No player had done all of those over a career, according to OptaSTATS. Not Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig, not Ted Williams or Stan Musial, not Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, not Henry Aaron or Roberto Clemente, not Dick Allen or Mike Schmidt, not Barry Bonds or Ken Griffey, Jr.

Ohtani did all five in a single day.

“With this game of baseball, it was a win for Major League Baseball,” said Roberts. “I know people all over the globe were watching this game and we’re excited to see that they got a chance to witness history.”

Roberts and Schumaker understood what too many forget, including among those who administer the game, but which longtime New York Times baseball writer George Vecsey got, watching then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti getting it, too, when Giamatti almost gave in and pumped his fist watching Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan ring up his 5,000th lifetime strikeout at Hall of Fame outfielder/base larcenist Rickey Henderson’s expense: “baseball is about rooting, about caring.”

Nowhere was that more evident than when Ohtani popped out of the visitors’ dugout to take one of a couple of curtain calls after his blasts. A young fan on the other side of the side rail, holding a sign up just above the rail, but level with Ohtani’s face:

I SKIPPED MATH
TO WATCH
HISTORY.
OHTANI 50/50.

If I’m that boy’s English teacher, I give extra credit for the school-age pun of the season.

ASG: As (almost) usual, show biz yields to baseball

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Jarren Duran

Red Sox center fielder Jarren Duran hoists the clear bat awarded the All-Star Game’s Most Valuable Player. His tiebreaking two-run homer held up to give the AL the 5-3 win.

God help us all, everyone. The All-Star break began with a pre-Home Run Derby singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” Monday night (by country star Ingrid Andress) that made youth cringe and elders think wistful thoughts of Roseanne Barr. It ended with a tenth American League All-Star Game win in eleven seasons.

In between, of course, was much to ponder and much to dismiss as patent nonsense, which seems to be far more the norm than Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, who initiated the game in 1933, might have imagined.

Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm could be seen having to labour to keep from laughing (presumably, that he might not weep—or wish to commit manslaughter) when Andress tackled “The Star Spangled Banner” as though too well besotted. It turned out that appearance was everything: She copped the following day to being drunk and having enough issue with it to seek rehab and recovery.

Wish her well, but demand to know why nobody in baseball’s administration noticed she was drunk as she took the mike in the first place.

That was then: The Derby rules were, a participant had ten outs to hit as many homers as they could, the hitter with the most such bombs advanced, and that was that. So simple that, in fact, even Mark Belanger (human Electrolux at shortstop, but a spaghetti bat who hit three fewer homers in eighteen major league seasons than the late Hall of Famer Willie Mays hit in the first half of 1965) could have done it.

This is now: Round One—three minutes or forty batted balls, whichever came first, followed by an old-style three outs to hit as many bombs as possible. Round Two—the top four floggers moved to a bracket-like semifinal. Round Three—the two semifinal winners head to head. The net result: Teoscar Hernandez (Dodgers) defeating Bobby Witt, Jr. (Royals), who nearly forced a playoff with a ICBM-like blast stopped only by the left center field fence.

Some of us still wonder why we’re supposed to tolerate three-hour long Home Run Derbies but arise armed against two and a half hour-plus real baseball games. Or, why we had three-minute commercials aboard Fox’s All-Star Game telecast Tuesday before seeing supersonic relief pitchers blowing the side away in order in a minute and a half if that long.

Perhaps commissioner Rob Manfred might have an answer to that one. At least he has a sort-of answer to the question (posed by The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner) of when the ever-more-hideous generic All-Star Game uniforms of the past several years will be disappeared in favour of returning the fine old tradition of All-Stars wearing their own uniforms and thus representing their teams.

“I am aware of the sentiment and I do know why people kind of like that tradition,” Commissioner Pepperwinkle told Kepner. “There will be conversations about that.” The proper two-word answer to that, of course, is, prove it. About knowing why people (more than kind of) like that tradition and holding serious conversations about it.

Well, take the proverbial pause for the proverbial cause. That very first All-Star Game featured the American League representatives wearing their own teams’ home uniforms with the National League wearing road threads, as modeled below by Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett:

Gabby Hartnett

Behold now this year’s threads for each league:

Yes, we have seen far worse for generic All-Star uniforms.

Except for each league’s colour scheme, is it really that radically different from the 1933 NL haberdashery? Now, this year’s threads would look far nicer if the American League jersey was done with red-on-white (the AL was the home team in Globe Life Field) and the National League was done with blue-on-gray (since the NL is the visiting team). And worn over either white (home) or gray (road) pants.

My normal position is to be all-in on returning to the practise of each league’s All-Stars wearing their own teams’ uniforms, representing their teams and fan bases, as their forebears did for so many decades. If Commissioner Pepperwinkle insists ultimately upon keeping generic league uniforms, this year’s style just might be the right way to go, switching the core white and gray each year depending upon which league is the All-Star host.

The wherefores of this year’s uniforms mattered less when the game got underway, and rookie NL starting pitcher Paul Skenes (Pirates) got to face Aaron Judge (Yankees) after all, thanks to Judge’s teammate Juan Soto wringing himself into a walk. The bad news: Judge forcing Soto at second with a grounder to third for the side.

AL manager Bruce Bochy (Rangers) was well aware of the marquee appeal of Skenes versus Judge while penciling Judge into his cleanup slot. But he sent three lefthanded swingers with impeccable on-base credentials up against the righthanded Pirate phenom to open, hoping precisely to get that marquee match without sacrificing his best chances to start winning the game.

Joe and Jane Fan insist, “This is just an exhibition, dammit!” Maybe they’re right. Maybe the metastasis of regular-season interleague play to a full-season thing has left the All-Star Game bereft of meaning, as opposed to such artifices as the period when postseason home field advantage went to the league who won the Game..

But maybe a Hall of Famer in waiting who’s won four World Series as a skipper knows, however the game’s been kicked around like a commissioner’s plaything for too damn long, that himself, his NL counterpart Torey Lovullo (Diamondbacks), and the players on both sides, actually do play this particular game as baseball, not show business.

Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani detonating a three-run homer in the third inning. “To be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”—Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes. Ohtani is now the only player in Show history to earn a pitching win in one All-Star Game and a home run in another All-Star Game.

So Bochy got Joe and Jane Fan their marquee matchup the old fashioned way, and Skenes came out of it on top, but Bochy’s diligence left him the only manager in major league history to win a World Series and an All-Star Game in each league. And, the first since Hall of Famer Joe McCarthy to manage an All-Star Game at home the season after he won a World Series.

Putting baseball ahead of show biz has enriching payoffs, of which Commissioner Pepperwinkle seemed as unaware as both managers were reminded soon enough en route the American League’s 5-3 win Tuesday.

Lovullo got the first such reminder when Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) faced Tanner Houck (Red Sox) in the top of the third with nobody out, two men on, and sent a 2-0 splitter a few rows back into the right center field seats. (The last Dodger to hit one out in All-Star competition? Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, 28 years earlier.) Bochy got his in the bottom of that inning, when Soto shot a two-run double to center and David Fry (Guardians) singled him home to tie the game at three after another Judge ground out.

Two innings later, Lovullo got the reminder that ended up counting for the game, when Jarren Duran (Red Sox) batted with two out and one on, took a strike from Hunter Greene (Reds), then caught hold of a Greene splitter and sent his own message into the same region of seats where Ohtani’s blast landed.

“It won’t hit me until I try to go to sleep tonight,” Duran told The Athletic postgame. “Who knows if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

A guy in his fourth Show season who entered this All-Star Game leading it with ten triples and the AL with 27 doubles, then detonated what proved the winning bomb Tuesday, deserves to sleep the sleep of the just. So does the rookie whose first two months in Show have made him a name and an arm to reckon with as it was, without giving him the additional gift of being an Ohtani teammate even for just one game—thus far.

“I tried to enjoy the three hours I had on a team with him,” Skenes said postgame, “because that’s probably only going to happen once a year. It was really cool to watch him do that, really cool to watch him go about his business and get to meet him and all that. You know, he’s—I don’t know of any hitters I’ve faced that’s better than him in my career. So, to be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”

The only thing better for either would have been an NL win, of course. Nobody had to tell Skenes it was neither his nor Ohtani’s fault the NL came up two bucks short Tuesday.

An ESPN writer gets religion . . .

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Shohei Ohtani

Hitting the first of his thirteen Dodger home runs to date, Ohtani’s overall plate value may force the Dodgers to think of him as a one-way player—at the plate, exclusively. May. And one ESPN writer thinks it’s not a terrible thought at all.

Some of us have dared to ponder long enough whether Shohei Ohtani’s two-way viability was all that viable in the long term. Well, now. At least one ESPN writer asks and answers the same question. Sort of.

“Like [Babe] Ruth in the late 1910s, Othani might be getting so good with the bat it no longer makes sense to deal with the complications of a two-way act,” writes Bradford Doolittle.

Would Ohtani be open to giving up pitching at some point if the Dodgers ask? It’s the 21st-century version of the Babe Ruth Problem that confronted the Red Sox long ago. But if the team ever does make that request, it will be because a franchise that employs a small army of analysts has untangled some very complicated math around the decision.

Thanks to his recovery from a second Tommy John surgery performed late last year, Ohtani on the mound is a non-starter this year. Ohtani purely at the plate, as the Dodgers’ designated hitter, is something else entirely. Emphasis on something else: As of this morning, he leads the entire Show with a .646 slugging percentage, a 1.069 OPS (his on-base percentage is a solid gold .425), and 128 total bases. He also leads the National League with his 200 OPS+.

Shall we look at Ohtani’s 2024 thus far according to my Real Batting Average (RBA) metric? (Total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances. P.S. Ohtani as of this morning led the entire Show with his .356 traditional batting average and his 69 hits, too.)

2024 through 5/22 PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Shohei Ohtani 226 128 24 0 2 1 .686

WARriors may care to note that Ohtani’s 3.2 through this morning is behind only his Dodgers teammate Mookie Betts and a shade ahead of the Cubs’ import pitching star Shota Imanaga’s 3.0. (Imanaga is knocking the league on its can on the mound: he leads the NL with a 2.21 fielding-independent pitching rate [FIP] and leads the entire Show with an absolutely extraterrestrial 497 ERA+ so far this year, not to mention his 0.84 ERA.)

Doolittle runs down the prospects of Ohtani coming off the mound to stay and reasons why the Dodgers might want to make the move: his sick seasonal stats to date, his improved overall batting metrics, his increase in line drive hitting, even career high baserunning figures.

But it takes Doolittle a good while before he notes the injury that keeps Ohtani at the plate alone this year. And he almost brushes it to one side in order to address what he calls “the biggest consideration of all.” That would be, as he sees it:

To what extent is Ohtani’s current leap at the plate a byproduct of not having to worry about pitching? And how much better might he be doing, if that were at all possible, if he didn’t have to worry about rehabbing another pitching injury? Could his baserunning value be maintained or enhanced if he didn’t have to consider mound work?

A lot of people, myself included, wondered just how viable Ohtani’s two-way baseball life would prove in the long term. Enough of us who did so nearly had our heads handed to us. Three years ago, it happened to Ahead of the Curve author Brian Kenny, co-hosting MLB Now (MLB Network), courtesy of New York Post writer Joel Sherman, who co-hosted that day.

Kenny suggested the Angels should think of limiting Ohtani to one or the other full-time role, pitcher or designated hitter/occasional outfielder. Sherman demanded to know why. Kenny replied, “One could damage the other.” Oops. “So,” Sherman rejoined, “you would like one of the fifteen to twenty best starting pitchers in baseball to stop starting because you’re worried about something that could happen?”

Well, something that could have happened, did happen.

It’s kept Ohtani off the mound since last August, but that’s all, folks. That’s not wonderful news for the rest of the league’s pitchers, but it’s certainly wonderful news for a Dodger team sitting seven games up in the National League West while leading the entire Show in team total bases and team OPS and the NL in home runs, team slugging, and team batting bases on balls.

Once upon a time, Babe Ruth himself, the only other man to play even one season (1919) as both a starting pitcher and full-time (130 games) slugger/outfielder, thought the idea of continuing in that tandem role wasn’t too realistic even for him.

“I don’t think a man can pitch in his regular turn, and play every other game at some other position, and keep that pace year after year,” said Ruth in 1918, when he started twenty games for the Red Sox and played part-time (95 games) as a slugging outfielder. “I can do it this season all right, and not feel it, for I am young and strong and don’t mind the work. But I wouldn’t guarantee to do it for many seasons.”

Ruth had to be dragged kicking and screaming somewhat into the idea that his number-one value was and would be at the plate. But once he joined the Yankees he never again tried to be a pitcher, except for five games spread between 1920-21, 1930, and 1933. From 1920 through 1934, of course, you could say (with apologies to Casey Stengel) that Ruth was rather splendid in his line of full-time outfield work. Even if he was far more valuable at the plate (transdimensional in his time) than in the outfield (roughly league average).

It wouldn’t be untoward if the Dodgers began to think Ohtani might want to ponder Ruth’s 1918 remarks and take them seriously for the sake of his longer term baseball health. He already proved he could do the two-way job at a breathtaking level, not to mention doing it that way longer than Ruth actually did.

If the Dodgers are worried about the box office, they shouldn’t. Ohtani at the plate is still more than enough gate attraction. He’s liable to stay that way for a good number of years further. One way to ensure that as well as his real value in a pennant race just might be to keep him off the mound from now on.

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.

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.