You’d be hard-pressed to find a worse news cycle for Major League Baseball than the one currently involving Shohei Ohtani, the new Los Angeles Dodgers star and global face of the sport engulfed in a scandal involving Ippei Mizuhara, his closest companion since arriving in MLB in 2018 and his longtime interpreter.
The story features conflicting and changing accounts of what happened. Both Mizuhara and a spokesperson for Ohtani told ESPN enterprise reporter Tisha Thompson in an interview on March 19 that Ohtani wired millions to a bookmaking operation to cover Mizuhara’s gambling debt. But as ESPN prepared to publish its story the following day, the spokesman disavowed Mizuhara’s account, Ohtani’s lawyers said he was the victim of…
