With Ohtani's name at stake, MLB has a ready scapegoat

For now, everybody needs to take a deep breath. There is no indication that Shohei Ohtani gambled on Major League Baseball games; no indication that he has stepped on the sport’s third rail.

This isn’t Pete Rose gambling on games. It’s not the Black Sox scandal. It’s not BALCO. Heck, it’s not even banging on a trash can. Not yet.

But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a horribly unsettling situation for MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Ohtani and the game itself.

The initial handling of this matter by the player, his advisers and the Dodgers certainly raises questions about the team’s due diligence in blindly going along with Ohtani’s demands. That’s especially so considering reporting by Sam Blum of The Athletic that Ippei Mizuhara, who is as much Ohtani’s valet and fart-catcher (to borrow a nuanced word for lackey) as he is interpreter, went to the George Santos school of CV polishing. I guess you drop your guard a bit when you’re essentially handing a guy a blank cheque and agreeing to bring on board an entire entourage and ecosystem and probably the odd flunky, but if I was giving out $700 million to anybody, I’d be making some calls about his hangers-on. The Dodgers seem to have handled this whole thing like excited little kids.

And if I was going to hold a clubhouse meeting to alert my players about the matter — as Dodgers president Andrew Friedman reportedly did — I certainly wouldn’t have told the players that all Ohtani did was wire some money to a bookie to help cover Mizuhara’s $4.5 million in gambling debts, even if that was the ham-handed first 'official' explanation allegedly run out by Ohtani’s camp. Not sure you need a law degree to realize wiring money to an illegal bookmaking operation from a bank account with your name on it is a good way to get the attention of federal investigators.

As for the player himself? While we’ve all marvelled at Ohtani’s abilities and basked in the fact that baseball finally has a star player able to cross genres and cultures, it’s also obvious that he has been coddled, cuddled and spoiled by the game and the people around him. It’s possible he only does three things well — pitch, hit and smile — and that’s OK; he wouldn’t be the first celebrity to be over-matched by events off-stage. Charitably, I’m going to assume that Ohtani’s representatives think he’s so perfect that there was never going to be any need to crisis manage anything, and that’s why they were so ham-handed when the story first emerged that Mizuhara was being investigated for his connections to a Southern California bookmaker named Matthew Bowyer. (And hands up if you knew sports wagering wasn’t legal in California.)

Predictably, MLB has been pilloried for being slow off the mark in announcing their own investigation into the situation, but Manfred has a pretty thick playbook on which to fall back. As then-commissioner Bud Selig’s labour point man, Manfred was charged with answering the difficult questions during congressional hearings into the game’s steroid scandal. He doesn’t need reminding that a good portion of the federal investigations surrounding the steroid scandal and evidence gathered came about because of work done by the Internal Revenue Service — and it’s the IRS doing the legwork into Bowyer as part of a larger investigation into bookmaking.

From Manfred’s point of view, the most important thing is limiting the damage done to Ohtani. He knows the same thing his predecessors knew: you can lock out players and screw around with union leaders, but you must at all costs avoid personalizing matters to the point where direct damage is done to the most marketable commodity — your star players. I mean, the fact that no Astros players received discipline in that whole sign-stealing thing owes to more than the fact they were protected by their membership in the MLB Players Association. Manfred dropped the hammer on executives and coaches and managers because they were ready-made scapegoats whose absence wasn’t going to damage the on-field product or ticket sales.

Go back to the steroid scandal, too: other than the obvious big names that found themselves implicated — Bonds, Clemens, Rodriguez, et al. — it's remarkable how in the end much of it was painted as a systemic failure. And the much-ballyhooed Mitchell Report contained a bunch of names of players who, no disrespect, weren’t exactly bound for Cooperstown. My guess is there are Hall of Famers and players still in the game from that era who breathed a sigh of relief that their names were not in the report.

The good news? Manfred has his scapegoat in Mizuhara, who was said to have known Ohtani for more than a decade before being fired by the Dodgers last week. Swing away, Rob. The bad news? The Feds are going to do what they always do: they will pick away at each thread and follow the money and whatever paper trail or electronic message chain exists.

Again, for those in the back: it has been suggested on and off the record that Mizuhara gambled on NBA, NFL and international soccer games — not MLB games — and no evidence has emerged that Ohtani himself gambled on any sport. It doesn’t matter whether we believe Ohtani really didn’t realize he was missing $4.5 million or whether any of us buy into the sudden change in narrative from "he was just covering for a friend" to he was the victim of a “massive theft” of $4.5 million. Neither does it matter whether we buy into the idea that Ohtani didn’t realize what was being written and said about his role until after he’d heard Friedman’s clubhouse message, that stuff was lost in translation because Mizuhara, like some sort of Svengali, was controlling the message.

In a statement to the media on Monday, Ohtani said he never bet on sports and Mizuhara stole from him and told lies.

It is now a matter of public knowledge that the first contact between Bowyer, the bookmaker, and Mizuhara came at a poker game in San Diego at which Bowyer was invited by an acquaintance of a teammate of Ohtani’s, David Fletcher. Again: nothing untoward other than another name somehow connected to MLB. And that’s what will keep Manfred up at night: the feds will not care how long their investigation takes or where it goes. They care not for the narrative, and it’s difficult to see how Ohtani doesn’t emerge from this at least a little diminished.

The MLBPA does the right thing. Unfortunately.

Morally, it was a fine thing done in 2022 by the MLBPA when it helped gain financial and practical concessions for the 5,500 minor leaguers who for so long had been indentured workers.

Strategically and organizationally? It’s a calamity. In giving minor leaguers 34 seats on the MLBPA’s executive board — just four less than Major League players — it helped set the stage for what appears to be a coup that could result in the ousting of chief negotiator Bruce Meyer and MLBPA executive director Tony Clark.

Suddenly, the strongest union in sports — the template for other sports unions — is split between two groups of players with vastly different realities and interpretations. I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of Clark, but I’m not certain where this goes or what he can do. The warning signs were there in the last round of collective bargaining when all eight members of his executive board, five of whom were Scott Boras clients, recommended against accepting ownership’s offer only to have the wider body of players go against their wishes and vote in favour of it.

This winter, we saw Boras clients settle for less term and, in some instances, less money in free agency and that has implications for other players, since salaries at the top end of the market (which Boras controls) impact salaries at the lower and middle end. So, there might be a revenge of the nerds thing at work.

But here's the thing: MLBPA founder Marvin Miller always warned the players that ownership’s primary negotiating tactic was driving as many wedges as possible between player groups. It would be something if this thing neuters itself while all Manfred and the owners do is simply stand back and watch. But I fear that’s where this is going…

New order?

I’ll admit it: Blue Jays analyst Buck Martinez made me sit up a little straighter Saturday afternoon when he related a conversation with manager John Schneider in which the skipper suggested Bo Bichette might find himself hitting third or cleaning up in 2024, even though most everyone seems to agree that if all is going to plan he’ll be in his usual No. 2 spot behind George Springer — who, according to people in the know, doesn’t take kindly to even a hint he ought to move out of the lead-off spot. We know Bichette prefers consistency and he’s earned the right to say his piece. So, bear that in mind if Schneider starts fiddling around with the lineup…

Dumbing down the discourse …

For someone who remembers season ticket holders using the annual state of the franchise gathering to grill then-CEOs Paul Godfrey and Paul Beeston about why there wasn’t any hot water in the washrooms, I’m shocked at the way people dismiss the work Mark Shapiro, Marnie Starkman and their team has done on renovating the Rogers Centre.

For someone who remembers spit-balling with Godfrey how, when and where a new ballpark might be built and whether it would require public money (woof), I’m confused about the reaction to an investment that not only keeps the damned roof retracting, but also offers the team a means of increasing the number of revenue streams that will give Shapiro or whoever is in charge down the road a reasonable hope of maintaining a payroll in the top eight or above.

I mean, I get it: I’d trade a few Loonie Dogs and live music and some fancy cocktails for somebody else at third base, but let’s be clear: this was a necessary investment that should not be summarily dismissed or used to score cheap points in the court of public opinion. There’s no shortage of on-field stuff on which to judge this front office. Hey, we’d have all liked Ohtani to be a Blue Jay, I bet (sorry, I had to.) Some of us would settle for Bichette being locked up long-term. But neither is closer without this overhaul. Farther away, in fact …

Jeff Blair hosts Blair & Barker daily on Sportsnet 590 The Fan, Sportsnet 360 and on-demand as a podcast. The show switches to its new time, 2-4 p.m. ET, on Tuesday.