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Major League Baseball has launched an investigation into allegations of illegal gambling involving an interpreter for one of professional sport’s highest paid players, Shohei Ohtani, in a scandal that has rocked the league and one of its most marketable stars.
On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times and ESPN reported that Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, was fired by the Los Angeles Dodgers after allegedly placing bets with an illegal bookmaker. The reports alleged that Ohtani transferred wire payments worth millions of dollars to Mizuhara to cover a debt.
Many details around the case remain unclear, including the extent to which Ohtani was aware of the alleged gambling and the nature of the wagers. While sports betting is legal in 38 US states and the District of Columbia, it is prohibited in California.
In its statement on Friday, MLB said the league had been “gathering information” since the news reports surfaced and that “our Department of Investigations began their formal process investigating the matter”.
According to MLB rules, players, umpires, club and league officials are forbidden from betting on baseball games, with penalties ranging from suspension to permanent bans. Furthermore, any baseball player or official found to have placed wagers with an illegal bookmaker is subject to sanctions “as the commissioner deems appropriate”.
A lawyer representing Ohtani did not immediately return a request for comment.
The scandal is a major setback for MLB, whose 2024 season began this week with Ohtani and the Dodgers playing their opening games in Seoul, South Korea, as part of a broader push to expand the league’s popularity in Asia featuring baseball’s most prominent star, who hails from Japan.
It is also a shock development for Ohtani, a once-in-a-century baseball talent whose pitching and hitting prowess earn him comparisons to Babe Ruth, and who in December signed the most lucrative contract in modern professional sports worth $700mn over 10 years. The vast majority of its value — some $680mn — will be deferred until after his playing days, a decision the Dodgers said at the time was Ohtani’s idea.
The alleged gambling scandal is among the first big controversies in sports betting in the US since a federal ban on the practice was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2018. Since then, betting companies have proliferated and big media companies such as Disney and sports leagues have aligned themselves with betting operators through marketing agreements.
On Tuesday, Tyrese Haliburton, an All-Star player for the National Basketball Association’s Indiana Pacers, said that he works with a sports psychologist in part because the proliferation of sports betting has obscured his role in professional basketball.
“To half the world I’m just making them make money on DraftKings,” he said, referencing a popular betting app. “I’m just a prop.”
On Wednesday, the coach of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers said he had received threats from gamblers who found his phone number and have intimidated him.
“It brings a distraction to the game that can be difficult for players, coaches, referees, everybody that’s involved in it,” JB Bickerstaff told reporters. “And I think that we really have to be careful with how close we let it get to the game and the security of the people who are involved in it,” the coach for the Cavaliers added.
Last year, each of the North American professional and collegiate sports leagues as well as Fox and Comcast’s NBCUniversal formed a coalition to encourage responsible gambling among the public.
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