Three Thoughts: Shohei Ohtani and Manti Te’o

1. Shohei Ohtani Is 2024’s Manti Te’o

Every now and then over these last six and a half years, we’ve been told Shohei Ohtani is a private guy. We heard it the most this offseason, as his free agency took center stage around the baseball-watching globe. Theoretically, little should have surprised us about Ohtani, given how little we knew. There were few known traits from which he could deviate. And yet when news broke last month that the greatest baseball player alive was potentially the victim of a massive gambling-related theft, a loud current cried, “Him?????” It went beyond the general shock of the situation. The shock was, for a lot of us, greater because it was Ohtani, specifically. Despite knowing we didn’t know him…we thought we knew him.

The legal complaint from the case is now public, and it tells the following story:

• Ohtani first met Ippei Mizuhara in Japan in 2013. In 2017, when Ohtani’s intent to cross the Pacific and join Major League Baseball became known, Mizuhara contacted Ohtani and offered to be his translator.
• Once in the States, Mizuhara became a “de facto manager and assistant” for and to Ohtani.
• In 2018, Mizuhara went with Ohtani when Ohtani opened up a bank account. We’ll call this bank account the Arizona Account, because Mizuhara and Ohtani went to a location in Arizona to open said account.
• Mizuhara also accompanied Ohtani to all meetings with his agent (Nez Balelo), who didn’t speak Japanese. Ohtani believed Balelo and a Balelo-assembled team of accountants and financial advisors who also didn’t speak Japanese monitored all his financial matters. This team did mostly do that, but they did not have access to the Arizona Account, which Mizuhara told them Ohtani wanted to keep private.
• In 2021, Mizuhara began betting on sports with a bookie. He was given login information for an online account with this bookie on September 8^th of that year. By that October, that bookie and that bookie’s team were contacting Mizuhara about settling debts. Eventually, Mizuhara accumulated an all-time deficit of more than 40 million dollars betting with this illegal book.
• The Arizona Account was “almost exclusively funded” by Ohtani’s paychecks from the Angels.
• On November 15^th, 2021, the Arizona Account transferred $40,010 to “Xoom.com, a PayPal service.” This, after 15 days of texts between Mizuhara and the bookie’s team about trying to make a $40K transfer. This was the first time the Arizona Account was accessed through the internet since 2018, the year it was created.
• In early February of 2022, Mizuhara tried calling the bank multiple times to wire funds using the Arizona Account, falsely identifying himself as Ohtani.
• In 9,700 pages of text messages sent between Mizuhara and Ohtani between 2020 and 2024 through the Signal app, there was no mention of sports betting, odds, or bookies. There was no mention of keeping the Arizona Account private from Balelo’s team.
• No baseball bets were ever placed with the illegal book using Mizuhara’s account.

There is more, but that seems like the backbone of the case. One last quote, from after the story was published reporting on Mizuhara’s alleged theft:

On or about March 20, 2024, MIZUHARA messaged BOOKMAKER 1 stating, “Have you seen the reports?” BOOKMAKER 1 responded, “Yes, but that’s all bullshit. Obviously you didn’t steal from him. I understand it’s a cover job I totally get it.” MIZUHARA then responded to BOOKMAKER 1, “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me.”

Based on all of this, my impressions of the situation are these:

• The bookie in question thought he was dealing with Ohtani, at least in part, and not only Mizuhara. This is partly evidenced by his belief Mizuhara would be capable of paying off millions of dollars of debts.
• There is nothing unrealistic about the story as Chris Seymour, IRS senior special agent, presents it. The story Seymour’s legal complaint tells adds up, every step of the way. This doesn’t mean it is entirely accurate, but there is no reason to disbelieve it at its face. There is also no reason to believe the IRS would want to protect Shohei Ohtani if the IRS believed his story to be false.
• The alternative to Seymour’s story, accepting Seymour’s evidence as true, is hard to believe. Were Ohtani and Mizuhara discussing gambling on a messaging service besides Signal? Were they covering their tracks? Was Mizuhara falsely identifying himself to a bank as a smokescreen? All to protect a scheme in which whoever was picking the bets was losing something like 56% of them?
• At this point, the simplest story is that Mizuhara opened a gambling account, quickly got in over his head, lost increasingly more money in a textbook “problem gambling” way, and then stole the money from his boss to pay off his debts. He paid off roughly $16 million of those before an investigation into the bookie led to the scandal breaking.

It seems the hardest question for people to answer here is how Ohtani did not notice sixteen million dollars going missing. The answer from Ohtani’s camp, repeated in the Seymour complaint, is that Ohtani knew his agent’s team was handling his finances, and that his agent’s team thought Ohtani wanted the Arizona Account kept private because Mizuhara told them so. This is, again, a believable story. Mizuhara had a lot of leverage in Ohtani’s life.

A bigger question, to me, is how Ohtani got conned by Mizuhara. It doesn’t seem Mizuhara came into his relationship with Ohtani with evil intentions. The goal was likely not to con Ohtani. But fraud was the ultimate result. Ohtani handed much of his life over to a man who would defraud him. He had no team of translators. He—naively, in hindsight—had only one. This is where it gets similar to Manti Te’o.

In 2012, Manti Te’o was also conned. Manti Te’o also had the wool pulled over his eyes. In the immediate aftermath of the revelation Lennay Kekua was not a real person, Te’o was believed by many to have perpetrated the hoax himself, in no small part because the initial report recklessly relayed speculation from an anonymous source accusing Te’o of being “in on it.” There was fraudulent behavior involving a famous athlete, and the public learned the core of the fraud, and in the absence of more information, belief began to turn towards the athlete being a participant in the fraud himself, because “Could he be so stupid?” To be a little mean (though there’s no moral problem with being naïve), the answer was yes. Both Te’o and Ohtani were dumb enough to be the victim of clumsy fraud. This was shocking. People thought they knew the guy.

2. Will Scott Boras Adapt?

Jordan Montgomery fired Scott Boras this week, reportedly signing with a different agency, Wasserman. Why? We’ve had no statement from Montgomery, but the pitcher was expected to sign a five-year contract this offseason worth about $100M, and he instead signed a one or two-year contract worth $25M or $50M. Making matters worse, he signed that contract so late in spring training that he has yet to make his first start of the year.

We wrote at the time about our perception that Boras sometimes places his best interests over those of his clients, sacrificing player happiness and sometimes even money in his effort to build his own brand. Extensions before free agency? Not what Boras wanted. A reasonable contract at a place Montgomery felt comfortable? Not what Boras wanted. The limelight on him in a perceived push for player empowerment, one likely viewed by Boras as a good bit of marketing to other professional baseball players? We’d guess that’s what Boras wanted. One doesn’t need to think Boras lies to his clients or directly acts against their instructions to believe Boras tries to steer them towards massive free agency deals, pursuing the top overall dollar number, another notch in his belt.

So, we’re interested in whether this is a one-off thing or the beginning of a trend of players empowering themselves by ditching Scott Boras. If it’s the latter, or if Boras fears it is, we’re curious how he’ll react.

3. Who Winds Up at Kentucky?

So far, Scott Drew and Dan Hurley have both said no to massive contract offers from Kentucky, preferring their own kingdoms over Camelot. Nate Oats seems rather off-limits, having already accepted an Alabama extension. Names still being seriously speculated include Billy Donovan, Mark Pope, Bruce Pearl, Chris Beard, Sean Miller, Shaka Smart, Will Wade, and Rick Pitino. That isn’t a list of who’s being considered. That’s a list of who’s being speculated. If you’d like to add a name to it, you very much can, if you speculate hard enough. Here’s one: Dusty May. What if Kentucky tried to buy the guy out from Michigan already? It’s pretty unbelievable, but speculation is a game, not a science.

I’m going to divide the list above—excluding May—into names who make sense and names who don’t. I am going to give you my reasoning. These are my personal thoughts. I have no sources at Kentucky, nor any good sources at other schools on this list.

Those who make sense:

• Billy Donovan: He’s a really big name, and probably even bigger to Kentucky fans than he is to the country as a whole, because he came out of the SEC. My doubt here about the plausibility of the hire is that being an NBA head coach is a lot less demanding than being a collegiate head coach. That is a tougher lifestyle to take on. Still, it would come with a substantial pay raise, and Donovan would likely win more.
• Mark Pope: I know Kentucky fans aren’t enthused about this, but I do think it makes sense. He’s a 51-year-old Kentucky product who just earned his team an effective 5-seed in their first season as a power conference program. He went 25–10 at Utah Valley. He’s had two other very good BYU teams. His downside is lower than the rest of this list. His upside is higher. Would he take it? I could see him deciding BYU is a more comfortable place. But it seems more likely he’d take the chance at being the biggest thing in college basketball, as most of these coaches would.
• Bruce Pearl: Love him or hate him, Pearl has won a lot of basketball games in his career. He knows the SEC well and is presently successful in the SEC. He’s old (64), but he has some years left in the tank. It is believable that Pearl could win a title in Lexington.
• Chris Beard: We condemn domestic violence. With that established. Beard was the biggest rising star in college basketball coaching 18 months ago for a reason. Mississippi already wore the bruise of being the school that brought him back into the game after Texas justifiably fired him. It’s always easier in terms of publicity to go second with these things.
• Will Wade: Wade is a good foil for Pope. Pope’s got a squeaky clean identity. Wade does not. Both are good, young, rising coaches. Wade wasn’t all that successful at LSU, but LSU’s not exactly a basketball school, and it does seem he’s capable of coaching, not just recruiting. He seems like a coach who would navigate the booster ecosystem well.

Those who don’t:

• Sean Miller: Sean Miller isn’t that dissimilar from Billy Donovan in that it’s been a long time since he’s been a highly successful college coach. The difference is that Miller has continued coaching college basketball over the last decade, whereas Donovan’s absence from the top has come from existing in the NBA. Does Miller have good things in him? Yes, on both the coaching and program management side. Is Arizona similar to Kentucky? A little. They’re both big, basketball-centric schools, though Arizona doesn’t measure its worth off of its NCAA Tournament finishes. This feels like a retreat for Kentucky, a shot at a younger, less-proven Pearl.
• Shaka Smart: Smart is one I could see not taking it, not because Marquette could give him a ton of money but because he and his family seem to be supported at Marquette to a degree they weren’t at Texas. I’m curious how Smart’s relentless positivity with his team would play at Kentucky, too. Marquette is a good place for that in terms of reception from the fans. Kentucky fans wouldn’t view a season that ended with a loss to an 11-seed as a success, even if it was a very impressive performance from their coach, overall.
• Rick Pitino: This would play in some circles, but it’s the kind of thing you do when you’re running a zoo. Pitino is still a good coach and could undoubtedly recruit well. But it took him a while to get his team together this year at St. John’s, and he’s 71, which makes quick success important. Also relevant: We just watched John Calipari and Mark Stoops feud over program support. Is Pitino going to recognize and accept that this isn’t the Kentucky he left?

In terms of good and bad hires: I think Pearl might be the safest guy to choose. Donovan would play the best with the boosters. Pope, Beard, and Wade have the highest upside. Beard has the worst downside, but it’s in a way that would set an interim up well. If I had to guess, it’ll be Pearl if it isn’t Donovan. I think there are probably very smart corners of Kentucky that want to take a shot on Pope, knowing the program will have the resources to return to competitiveness quickly if he flops. But I think they’ll be outnumbered by those who’d rather make a Final Four in the next five years and then do this all again soon.