Tag Archives: Shohei Ohtani

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.

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.

Ohtani gets his lucre and his wish

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Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani signs with the Dodgers for a decade, $700 million, and the thing he wants most—better chances to win. Angel fans mourn the absolute waste of the game’s most transcendent talent.

It was almost to laugh. Within an hour of the news breaking and confirmed that Shohei Ohtani signed at last, and with the Dodgers, yet, there also came the news that some Angel fans began holding burnings of one or another kind of Ohtani merchandise. It was to laugh that you wouldn’t weep, of course.

Set aside what Ohtani signed for for the moment. Yes, it’s ten years and $700 million. It’s also no opt-out clauses in the deal. It’s also Ohtani himself deferring a considerable pile of that guaranteed money the better to enable the Dodgers to continue sustaining excellence via the farm and the market.

Now, consider the abject stupidity of the Angels and some of their fans. You want to burn Ohtani merch because, as a legitimate, lawful free agent, he signed elsewhere at all? Never mind with the beasts just up the freeway? Be my guest—and stand exposed as the fools you are.

The fools who’d rather turn Ohtani merch into burnt ashes than demand better of the team that let him walk with nothing of value in return—while going for broke elsewhere at the trade deadline only to unload two of the pieces they did acquire by way of the waiver wire at September’s beginning . . . just after Ohtani’s elbow took him off the mound for the season without sitting him down as a designated hitter.

The fools who’d rather have kept Ohtani bound to a team whose administration seems clueless about the point that you need a viable team around them to enable Ohtani and whatever might be left of future Hall of Famer Mike Trout to play for chances at championships. The point that one or two players do not a championship contender make, no matter how overendowed in ability and execution they’ve been.

You want to make Ohtani an example instead of holding Angels owner Arte Moreno and his trained seals in the front office accountable for thinking the box office is the thing and if you just so happen to win it’s mere gravy? Be my guest again. And stand exposed further.

For so long as he’s owned the Angels Moreno’s marketing background, the business in which he earned his fortune, has dominated what the Angels put on the field. Whether what they put on the field could play competent or cohesive baseball up and down the lineup seemed secondary to having what George Steinbrenner used to call “name guys who put fannies in the seats.”

It was bad enough that the Angels unearthed the transcendent Trout and saw him build a jaw-dropping Hall of Fame case in his first nine seasons before the injury bug bit into him in too much earnest over the past four. It was worse that Trout showed his loyalty to the team that discovered him and turned him loose on the field by signing a glandular extension only to have too many people wondering if he hadn’t lost his marble for it.

It was worse that Trout got to play with Ohtani, himself an injury bug victim for a couple of years following his Rookie of the Year season, and formed a tandem of transcendence (when Trout could play) that proved nothing more than a two-man supershow in the middle of a sad-sack sideshow.

“Ohtani has said he wanted to win,” writes The Athletic‘s Andy McCullough.

The Dodgers have won their division in ten of the past eleven seasons and tallied more than one hundred victories in five of the past six full seasons . . . [Ohtani] has been never part of a team with a front office capable of regularly rebuilding a pitching staff with excellent results, as Andrew Friedman has often done. And he has never played for an ownership consortium like Mark Walter’s Guggenheim group, who have been willing to invest in facilities, infrastructure and ancillary considerations.

That’s putting things politely. The hottest item at last season’s trade deadline was whether the Angels would wake up, wise up, and trade him for legitimate return value on the field and in the organisation at last. No chance.

Now it’s possible that Trout will return healthy, play like something close enough to the Trout who punched his Cooperstown ticket, stir up speculation on whether the Angels finally deal him to a contender with rich return to offer, and find himself still bound and gagged to an owner who’s willing to invest in his box office alone.

Quit the hemming and hawing over Ohtani’s deal raising an unconscionable ceiling for the free agents to follow him in the current market. Instead of bellowing over the big bad Dodgers handing him what amounts to a Delta Quadrant kingdom plus safe passage through the Cardassian Empire and ownership of Ferengi Enterprises, try bellowing over other owners’ too-entrenched refusal to invest and build in the major league product and the organisation behind it.

The Red Sox unloading Babe Ruth to the Yankees was nothing like this. Then, believe it or not, the Red Sox thought they were unloading a problem child to help relieve their owner’s financial stresses, not all of which was tied to his concurrent theatrical production operation. The Ruth sale helped temporarily.

Ohtani, anything but a problem child, was allowed to walk into free agency eyes wide shut on the part of the Angels. It was perverse fun, too, watching the sports press get their proverbial panties into twists trying to figure out what was in Ohtani’s heart of hearts while he and his agent played things close enough to the vest. I couldn’t resist joining the fun for a moment, outlining a top ten list of what Ohtani was really thinking, feeling, wanting . . .

When Dodger manager Dave Roberts admitted the Dodgers talked to Ohtani and he’d have loved nothing more than to see Ohtani in Dodger silks, panties into twists turned nuclear, they thought Roberts’s honesty might have killed any deal in gestation. So much for that idea.

Too often with Trout injured Ohtani had to provide most of the Angels’ offense. Joining the Dodgers that burden is lifted. He can swing the bat comfortably and not believe every one of nine innings of baseball is on his shoulders. When he recovers from elbow surgery and takes the mound again in 2025, Ohtani has good reason to believe the Dodgers will have remodeled the starting rotation whose dissipation cost them this past postseason.

He didn’t have one millionth of a prayer of seeing that happen if he elected to re-sign with the Angels. Being a guy who makes baseball fun again is one thing. Coming home after yet another losing or short-of-the-postseason season proved something else.

So go ahead, some of you Angel fans. Burn his jerseys, blow up his bobbleheads, use his photos and posters for fish wrap if you must. You’re going to look almost as foolish for it as your team’s owner has looked for having resources unfettered and brains inoperable the entire time Ohtani wore Angels red. Almost.

Angel fans who don’t have coconut juice for brains began flocking to Angel Stadium to mourn within two hours of Ohtani himself scooping the world by announcing his Dodgers deal on Instagram. A crane already began stripping Ohtani’s mural from the side of the stadium. Fans slipped into the stadium’s team store to snap up Ohtani merch before it would disappear forever.

They came to mourn.

And one fan, Sebastian Romero, lifted a page from the books of long-suffering Athletics fans whose owner has stripped the team of credibility only to wrest approval for hijacking them to Las Vegas. Outside the stadium, Romero held up a sign before the Ohtani mural behind him was stripped, as photographed by Athletic writer Sam Blum:

As Blum noted so mournfully, Ohtani’s past three seasons have been three of the greatest the game has ever seen from a single player, on both sides of the ball, yet, with the Angels going 77-85, 73-89 and 73-89. What a waste of Ohtani hitting 124 home runs and striking out 542 batters worth two unanimous Most Valuable Player awards over that span.

A young man of few words for the press, Ohtani is on record as saying that, much as he loved the Angels, “More than that, I want to win. That’s the biggest thing for me. So, I’ll leave it at that.” Nobody can say the Angels weren’t warned. Nobody can say the Dodgers lack the resources or the brains to make that wish come true, either.

Now, I wonder. When Ohtani meets Clayton Kershaw as a Dodger for the first time, will he begin the conversation by saying, “About that All-Star Game pickoff, buddy . . . ?”

The Shoh is on hiatus

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Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout

Ohtani (left) is done for the season, an oblique injury added to his elbow’s now-reinforced UCL tear. He can walk in free agency, but Trout (right) may be entertaining trade thoughts a lot more deeply now . . .

George F. Will once wrote (in Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball) that A. Bartlett Giamatti was to baseball’s commissionership what Sandy Koufax was to the pitcher’s mound, having “the greatest ratio of excellence to longevity.” The Athletic‘s Marc Carig wrote last Satuday of Shohei Ohtani, “singular excellence is no match for collective mediocrity.”

Last Friday, Ohtani’s Angel Stadium locker was empty, and a large duffel containing his equipment and other belongings sat in front of it, after he was placed in the injured list at last—with an oblique strain. “No ceremonial sendoff,” Carig wrote. “No expressions of gratitude. Just a tender oblique and a good old-fashioned Gen Z ghosting. How appropriate. Now the credits roll on a baseball travesty.”

Ohtani has also undergone surgery on his pitching elbow at last. His surgeon, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the same surgeon who performed Ohtani’s prior Tommy John surgery—called the new procedure “reinforcement” of the torn ulnar collateral ligament, not full Tommy John surgery. It means Ohtani won’t pitch again until 2025, but he will suit up as a DH in 2024. For whom, only time and the off-season free agency market to be will tell.

“Thank you very much for everyone’s prayers and kind words,” Ohtani said on Instagram following the Tuesday procedure. “It was very unfortunate that I couldn’t finish out the year on the field, but I will be rooting on the boys until the end. I will work as hard as I can and do my best to come back on the diamond stronger than ever.”

Note that he didn’t say for whom he expects to come back after signing a new deal this winter.

A baseball travesty? The Angels had the two greatest players of their time together in their fatigues for six years, and they couldn’t support the two with a competent, competitive supporting cast who could pick it up when one or both was injured. It was as if the 1962-66 Dodgers had swapped in the ’62-’66 Mets for everyone except Hall of Famers Koufax and Don Drysdale.

Carig called it “sabotage.” You could think of far worse applications. “They did this through general mismanagement and their own brand of incompetence,” Carig continued. “Those sins endured despite their churn of managers and front-office regimes, only further reinforcing that the full credit for this failure falls at the feet of the constant throughout it all: the owner, Arte Moreno.”

It may be wasting breath and writing space to recycle that Moreno brought a marketer’s mentality to a baseball team, aiming once and forever at what George Steinbrenner used to call “name guys who put fannies in the seats,” without stopping first to ponder whether they’d equal a cohering team on the field and at the plate and whether his true baseball people had other such cohering parts in mind. And, whether it was always good for a player’s health.

Baseball people who did stop to ponder such things didn’t last long under Moreno’s command. Whether by way of the owner’s caprices or by way of their own mistakes turned into impossible-to-ignore disaster, Moreno’s Angels have been the Steinbrenner Yankees of the 1980s as you might have imagined them if The Boss hadn’t been so shamelessly public a nuisance.

Think about this: It took an oblique strain almost four weeks later for the Angels to do what should have been done when Ohtani’s ulnar collateral ligmanent tear took him off the mound but not out of the batter’s box. The adults in the room should have overruled Ohtani’s understandable desire to continue at least with his formidable bat, disabled him entirely, and placed his health at top priority.

You can only imagine the look when last Friday came with Ohtani’s packed duffel in front of his locker. Don’t be shocked at it. If he can’t play the rest of the season, he can come to the park in moral support without having to unpack it or bring it from home.

Someone had to find the adults in the Angel room in the first place. Apparently, there were none to be found. Whether draining the farm at the trade deadline for one more run at it that proved impossible, whether turning right around and waiving most of what they drained the farm for, whether managing the health of their two supermarquee presences, the Angels room remains bereft of adults.

Oft-injured third baseman Anthony Rendon, who’s had little but injury trouble since signing big with the Angels as a free agent, developed a habit of discussing his injuries with a wary sarcasm, until he finally cut the crap and said the shin injury incurred on the Fourth of July wasn’t the mere bone bruise the Angels said it was but, rather, a full-on tibia fracture—and that he only learned it was a fracture in mid-August.

Now, Rendon was asked whether he was actually considering retirement from the game. “I’ve been contemplating it for the last ten years,” he said. If he actually does it, it would give the Angels something other teams would love but might raise fresh alarms in Anaheim: financial flexibility. Just what they need, more room for fannies-in-the-seats guys assembled with no more rhyme, reason, or reality.

Mike Trout, the player of the decade of the 2010s and still formidable when healthy, has been injury riddled the past few seasons. He may not be jeopardising his Hall of Fame resume, but something is badly amiss when he feels compelled to return perhaps a little sooner than he should return, then ends up back in injury drydock yet again after one game.

Once upon a time it was impossible to think of Trout anywhere but Anaheim. But trade speculation and fantasies around him have sprung up now more than in the recent past. Trout himself has dropped hints that he’s exhausted of the team doing either too little or not enough (take your pick) to build a genuinely, sustainingly competitive team around himself and Ohtani.

That’s not what he signed up for when he signed that blockbuster ten-year, $370 million plus extension a year ahead of what would have been his first free agency. That’s not what he signed up for when he showed the world he wasn’t that anxious then to leave the team on which he fashioned and burnished a jaw-dropping Hall of Fame case.

It was Trout, too, who welcomed Ohtani to the Angels with open arms and personal charm, then had to find too many ways to grin and bear it as the pair—when healthy—performed transcendence while surrounded by unimportance. If Trout now questions the Angels’ commitment to competitiveness and their regard for the health of those in their fatigues, pondering himself as well as Ohtani, only fools would blame him.

Most major league teams would kill to have even one such king of kings on their roster. Two of this year’s affirmed division winners (the Braves, the Dodgers) have at least one each. (Ronald Acuna, Jr., Braves; Mookie Betts, Dodgers.) The Angels had the two most singular such kings of kings and blew it higher and wider than the Hiroshima mushroom cloud.

“What remains stunning in all of this,” Carig wrote, “is the level of waste. The Angels have succeeded like nobody else in doing so little with so much.”

Sound organizations create a plan and then follow it. These Angels, not so much. A throughline can be drawn from Albert Pujols to Anthony Rendon, with Ohtani and Trout’s extension in between. What’s clear is that all of these big-ticket transactions weren’t part of some grand plan. Rather, they were the product of a billionaire collecting baubles, just faces to slap on a billboard.

Ohtani’s free agency is still liable to become a bidding war of stakes once thought unfathomable. With or without his recovery time limiting him to a DH role, Ohtani’s going to have suitors unwilling to surrender until he does. Which one will convince him they know what they’re doing to fashion truly competitive teams around him? We’ll know soon enough.

But considering that baseball medicine can still be tried by jury for malpractise, whomever plans to out-romance the Angels for Ohtani and seduce them into a deal for Trout had better come with adults in the room to manage them and their health prudently. There’s no point telling the billionaire with his baubles and billboards to grow up otherwise.