MLB
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.
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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 “a massive theft,” and the Dodgers fired Mizuhara, who walked back his initial comments to ESPN.
On Friday, MLB announced it had begun a formal investigation into accusations involving a reported sum of at least $4.5 million sent from Ohtani’s accounts to pay off debts to a bookmaker who is under federal investigation. On Monday, Ohtani gave a statement at Dodger Stadium, though reporters were not in the room to ask questions. Through new interpreter Will Ireton, Ohtani forcefully denied making illegal bets on sports or paying money to the bookmaker.
As MLB looks into the Ohtani matter, the situation highlights the ongoing entanglement between sports, media and gambling. Many professional leagues and media outlets, including The Athletic, have relationships with gambling companies. On the day before the Ohtani news broke, the NBA said it would infuse betting into live games on NBA League Pass, allowing viewers to track betting odds on games as they watch on the app and then click through to wager through the NBA’s betting partners. MLB and FanDuel struck a partnership last year that allows fans to watch games and place bets through FanDuel’s app. ESPN has its own sportsbook, ESPN Bet, linked from the main navigation bar on ESPN.com.
“The lines are really blurred in today’s society,” said ESPN and YES Network MLB analyst David Cone before Ohtani spoke on Monday. “We have partnerships with gambling now. I remember playing in Mexico in the winter league where you’d see people betting in the stands every pitch. That’s going to be a major-league park pretty soon where you can go to a window and make bets on every pitch. The lines are very blurred right now on just the nature of the partnership between Major League Baseball and betting.”
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Ohtani, of course, is not just another baseball player. He is the sport’s modern-day Babe Ruth. He sells tickets for opposing teams and his own, as well as subscriptions for the MLB.TV streaming service, and is central to baseball’s national media rights holders recouping audience. The Dodgers are scheduled to appear on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” this week (against the St. Louis Cardinals) and April 14 (against the San Diego Padres), as well as for a potential mega-viewership game on June 9 against the New York Yankees. TBS’ second national telecast of the season involves the Dodgers (against the San Francisco Giants on April 2), and they’ll feature them again on May 28. Ohtani and Co. will appear on FS1 twice in April, then in prime time on Fox on May 25 against the Cincinnati Reds, then again against the Yankees on June 8.
“He moves the needle for us,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told Sports Business Journal before the Ohtani story broke.
Where and how ESPN and other outlets cover the Ohtani story from here is important. Neither Fox Sports nor Warner Bros. Discovery/TBS have the 24/7 news infrastructure of ESPN, nor do they have ESPN’s sports journalism ambitions. Multiple ESPN reporters and editors from its investigative/enterprise team are currently working on the Ohtani story. ESPN broke into its regularly scheduled “Pardon the Interruption” Monday to cover the Ohtani conference live.
“We will cover the story aggressively,” said an ESPN spokesperson. “ESPN is well-positioned to cover this story with a deep roster of investigative journalists and MLB reporters.”
You can expect its digital site to feature more stories, as will the company’s shoulder programming, such as “SportsCenter.” But what about game coverage? For ESPN’s broadcast of the Dodgers and Padres in the Seoul Series, the broadcast team of Karl Ravech, Daniel Kim and Eduardo Pérez discussed the story on three occasions. Kim has served as an interpreter for baseball players and gave a particularly compelling account of how deeply an interpreter is involved in a player’s life. Coverage on game broadcasts can be more influential since they draw more eyeballs than online stories.
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Phil Orlins, ESPN’s vice president of production for Major League Baseball, said that the Seoul broadcast team took great pains to be as accurate as possible with its language. He said ESPN game broadcasters will have no restrictions discussing the Ohtani story, but they are unlikely to have long discussions in-game unless the reporting is advanced.
“Our perspective is that we are absolutely going to cover it and not ignore the story,” Orlins said. “We did that three times in the game we did in Seoul. But unless there is a real measure to advance it, our philosophy generally is not to override the documentation of the game with that type of story. He’s still playing. It’s still a baseball game. If there’s new information about the story, we will absolutely document it. But unless there’s something actually breaking that has to do specifically to the game and our coverage, I wouldn’t try to force five minutes of it into the game coverage. I think our audiences have expectations that we’re not going to ignore stories, but I also don’t think we want to overwhelm the game coverage.”
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Orlins said he did not give MLB any heads up that Ohtani would be discussed during the Dodgers-Padres game in Seoul, but ESPN would inform a league partner that a major story was coming as a courtesy.
“They have not been heavy-handed with us in general,” Orlins said of MLB officials. “If something rises to a point where I feel like there is major exposure or an extreme, delicate subject, we will let them know that it’s coming. That’s not to say that it changes what’s coming. Being in a business relationship, there is a little bit of a respect where if something difficult is coming, they are not blindsided by it.”
Over at the league-owned MLB Network, the Ohtani news conference aired live, followed by a discussion between on-air staffers Matt Vasgersian and Dan O’Dowd.
“It’s a significant story and we will cover it as it develops,” a spokesperson for MLB Network said. “When the story broke this past week, our reporters Tom Verducci and Jon Morosi both joined ‘MLB Tonight’ multiple times to provide insight.”
How exactly that coverage looks — particularly from ESPN, given its resources and previous reporting on Ohtani — will be a big part of where the story ultimately goes. ESPN has long provided daily coverage of its media-rights partners for all major sports, but this is a unique situation given the subject (Ohtani), the specific allegations and the company’s gambling interests.
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The day before Ohtani spoke, ESPN’s Rece Davis, appearing on “College GameDay,” referred to one of ESPN Bet analyst Erin Dolan’s picks as a “risk-free investment.” He later said the comment was “tongue-in-cheek,” but the segment drew more attention to the ethical issues of normalizing sports betting as gambling continues to entrench itself in the sports mainstream. Ohtani had barely finished speaking Monday when ESPN reported that Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter was under investigation by the NBA following multiple instances of betting irregularities around prop bets involving him. Two weeks before that, The Athletic reported on irregular betting patterns discovered in Temple men’s basketball games.
The nightmare scenario for leagues — the integrity of their games being compromised by the gambling industry they’ve embraced — is not hard to imagine. Even if Ohtani and Porter are cleared, stories like these won’t be going away.
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If you were wondering about the many shots of Mamiko Tanaka, the wife of Ohtani, during ESPN’s coverage of the Seoul Series last week, Orlins said ESPN had to use the world feed for the game. They did not have control of crowd shots.
“I think he would have shown her if we had our own game cameras,” Orlins said. “It was a bit of a challenging world feed, to be candid. In the best of circumstances, the world feed is pretty neutral and conservative. I don’t know if there was more fascination about her in Korea, but that is also the ultimate example of the Ohtani secrecy.”
— The College Football Playoff finalized its agreement giving ESPN exclusive rights through 2031-32.
— Andrew Marchand examined ESPN’s flurry of potential deals as it prepares for its direct-to-consumer launch.
— The Red Zone channel is coming to the Paris Olympics.
— The last three Sports Media podcast episodes have featured author and longtime Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum, New Yorker writer Louisa Thomas, and an NCAA viewership conversation with Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal and Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch.
— The consumer measurement platform Antenna said that by the end of February, nearly seven weeks after the Peacock-exclusive game during AFC wild-card weekend, 71 percent of those who had subscribed to NBC’s streaming service related to the date of the NFL playoff game had stuck around.
Some things I read over the last week that were interesting to me (Note: there are a lot of paywalls here):
• Caitlin Clark and Iowa find peace in the process. By Wright Thompson of ESPN.
• Geno Auriemma’s year of reckoning. By Chantel Jennings of The Athletic.
• How one fan came close to a perfect March Madness bracket. By Ryan Hockensmith of ESPN.
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• Miranda’s last gift. By David Frum of The Atlantic.
• Alex Sherman, Tala Hadavi and Darren Geeter of CNBC spent months reporting, editing and examining how ESPN is trying to stay relevant as cable declines. The result is a 25-minute CNBC documentary available online.
• The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck on NASCAR feeling the “Netflix Effect.”
• Empty Frames and Other Oddities From the Unsolved Gardner Museum Heist. By Tom Mashberg of The New York Times.
• Scammers posted obituaries declaring them dead. They were very much alive. By Faith Karimi of CNN.
• The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal on Peter Angelos.
• Good thread from former AP investigations editor Ted Bridis on Kim Mulkey and The Washington Post.
• Meet NC State’s Jannah Eissa, the ACC’s first hijab-wearing basketball player. By Lindsay Gibbs of Power Plays.
• Ex-employee tells how and why he stole $22 million from Jaguars. By Katie Strang of The Athletic.
• Damien Hirst formaldehyde animal works dated to 1990s were made in 2017. Via The Guardian’s Maeve McClenaghan.
• What makes Caitlin Clark the best shooter in college basketball? The physics behind her shot. By Ben Pickman of The Athletic.
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With old interpreter gone, Shohei Ohtani and Dodgers begin life without a ‘buffer’
(Top photo of Shohei Ohtani and interpreter Will Ireton at Monday’s press conference: Michael Owens / Getty Images)
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Richard Deitsch is a media reporter for The Athletic. He previously worked for 20 years for Sports Illustrated, where he covered seven Olympic Games, multiple NCAA championships and U.S. Open tennis. Richard also hosts a weekly sports media podcast. Follow Richard on Twitter @richarddeitsch
