Baseball hoping Shohei Ohtani stays on right side of uncrossable line

For now, it seems, Major League Baseball has avoided the second arrival of the onrushing locomotive that nearly killed the sport 125 years ago. For now, it seems, the most famous baseball player on the planet remains on the correct side of the one uncrossable line that would blow the sport apart at its core.

For now, the story is this:

Shohei Ohtani was duped, possibly by his best friend, Ippei Mizuhara, a 39-year-old native Japanese whose family moved to the United States in 1991, who has served as an interpreter for league players since 2006, not long after graduating from UC-Riverside, serving that role both for Japanese players in America (beginning with Boston’s Hideki Okajima) and also for Americans playing in Japan. Since 2017, he has been Ohtani’s interpreter as well as his constant companion.

These things we know for sure: Mizuhara has a taste for gambling — and, worse, a propensity for losing. This we also know: His debt, by last year, working through a California bookmaker named Michael Bowyer, reached $4.5 million. And that debt was paid off thanks to funds transferred from Ohtani’s bank account.

This is less certain, based solely on Mizuhara’s word: He did not lose that small fortune betting on baseball.

And what’s murkier still is how this all came to be. At first, a spokesman for Ohtani told ESPN that Ohtani himself had covered the debt. Later, after Mizuhara gave an interview to ESPN, Ohtani’s legal counsel issued a statement that altered the narrative significantly.