Breaking down the Shohei Ohtani-Ippei Mizuhara gambling scandal

Baseball Bar-B-Cast

On an emergency episode of the Baseball Bar-B-Cast, we react to everything we know so far about the shocking gambling scandal between Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher/DH Shohei Ohtani and his now former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara.

When the story broke on Wednesday, the initial report was that Ohtani’s good friend and interpreter Mizuhara, who was also employed by the Dodgers, admitted that Ohtani helped him in paying off an illegal gambling debt of $4.5 million. Since then, however, Ohtani’s representatives have changed the story and claim it was theft on Ippei’s part and that Ohtani was not aware of the happenings.

In addition to laying out the timeline of events, including Mizuhara giving two different stories leading many to be confused with what’s the actual truth, Jake Mintz & Jordan Shusterman discuss what the best and the worst case is for the Japanese mega-star at this point, the questions they have about this story & where baseball goes from here.

The guys also quickly talk about the second game between the San Diego Padres and Dodgers from Seoul, if there's any concerns about Yoshinobu Yamamoto after his poor start and why they'd still like to see MLB games played in foreign venues.

1:37 Initial reaction to the news

7:49 Timeline of events

16:17 Questions we have

30:48 Talking through the possibilities

46:46 Dodgers-Padres game 2 recap

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