Many in the baseball community are speculating about how engaged Los Angeles Dodgers sensation Shohei Ohtani was in the gambling controversy, in which it is claimed that his former translator took $4.5 million from him in order to pay off his debts.
Ohtani said he never wagered on sports and that he never used a middleman to do so on Monday, when he first publicly addressed the issue. He went into detail about his version of events, claiming that rather than Ohtani consciously paying off his gambling debts to support his close friend, Ippei Mizuhara, his English-Japanese interpreter since breaking into MLB, stole money from him.
MLB and the IRS launch investigations into the matter as the narrative develops on both fronts, and Major League Baseball’s hit king Pete Rose had an interesting comment about it all.
“Well, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I wish I’d have had an interpreter. I’d be scot-free,” he said in a video posted to social media on Monday night.
Of course, “Charlie Hustle” is not in the National Baseball Hall of Fame today because he was deemed permanently ineligible from baseball amid accusations that he gambled on baseball games. He vehemently denied the accusations up until 2004, when he admitted he placed wagers on games only in which he managed.
Ty Cobb’s 4,189 career hits was surpassed by Rose’s 4,256 to become the most in MLB history.
Rose is obviously conjecturing that Ohtani is not as involved in this gambling issue as he claims to be. Whether or not Mizuhara was betting on Ohtani will eventually be determined by MLB’s investigation, but there have been rumors circulating on social media that he was the fall person since Mizuhara was betting on him. They are all just opinions in the end.
When Mizuhara was in South Korea for the Seoul Series against the San Diego Padres, Ohtani said he was “beyond shocked” to discover that she had a gambling addiction. He detailed how he learned about it, beginning with the media’s question to a “representative in my camp” regarding possible involvement in the sports betting scandal.
