I can’t say that I expected, three days away from the first game of the season for the St. Louis Cardinals, that I would be writing about something that has nothing, at least in terms of its literal nuts and bolts that have been reported so far, to do with the St. Louis Cardinals. But the Shohei Ohtani gambling controversy is both the biggest story in baseball at the moment and a story that I think is not being covered enough. It is very plausible that this will be the only story that people will ever associate with baseball in 2024, as synonymous with its year as the cancellation of the World Series is to 1994.

For those of you who only follow Major League Baseball through the prism of the St. Louis Cardinals, let me provide some of the details of what’s going on: early on Thursday morning in Seoul, South Korea (early afternoon Wednesday in St. Louis; late morning Wednesday in Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Dodgers fired Ippei Mizuhara, the longtime interpreter for Shohei Ohtani, the former Los Angeles Angels superstar who signed a record 10-year, $700 million (with sizable deferrals) contract with the Dodgers in December. Mizuhara himself has confirmed that he lost at least $4.5 million in illegal sports gambling (as is the case in Missouri, legal and regulated sports gambling is not present in California)–Mizuhara has acknowledged illegal gambling on sports, but has denied gambling on baseball. While both are in violation of Major League Baseball rules, the gap in severity is something akin to the difference between yelling back at an umpire over a strike call and beating an umpire to death with a baseball bat over a strike call.

Shohei Ohtani reportedly supplied the money to Mizuhara to cover the debt, though there have been substantially different reports about significant details, ranging from that Mizuhara is a fall guy for Ohtani’s gambling to that Mizuhara stole or somehow extorted the money from Ohtani. These are among the more salacious Ohtani theories, and there is a ton of relatively benign territory plausibly between these extremes.

It’s an unusual story with a ton of twists that continue to unfold: that player and interpreter had been seen laughing and socializing six-and-a-half hours before the firing at the Dodgers’ Seoul game against the San Diego Padres, that Ippei Mizuhara had kept his gambling debts a secret from his wife, that he had lied about attending/graduating from the University of California-Riverside. I understand the temptation to try to connect the dots, but I’m mostly inclined to let the process play out, as somebody who is extremely uninformed about these matters. But damage has already been done. There are already some major takeaways for the sport.

#1–We don’t know Shohei Ohtani

To say that most American baseball fans don’t have intimate knowledge of Shohei Ohtani is a dramatic understatement. A majority cannot say more than a few words in Ohtani’s negative tongue. Ohtani, despite being by far the most popular and followed baseball player in the world, has kept his personal life legendarily secretive–until he was awarded his second unanimous American League Most Valuable Player award in November, it was not widely known that Ohtani had a dog, and even then, his name remained a secret for another month; when Ohtani announced in February that he was married, it was not even known that Ohtani had a significant other, and it was on Ohtani’s own terms that he revealed her identity, former professional basketball player Mamiko Tanaka.

None of these things should be an indicator of anything nefarious; players have a right to their own privacy. But the persona that Shohei Ohtani has presented to the world is one which is carefully manicured and curated. He is not a man that most of us know. I have enjoyed watching and following Shohei Ohtani’s career ever since he was known as Shohei Otani and began to make waves as a superstar two-way player in Nippon Professional Baseball. I have no reason to believe he is a bad person (frankly, it would take a pretty extreme version of this story for me to change my mind on the matter), so my inclination is to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this is just a generally good disposition to take with any person, rather than making me a capable character witness.

#2–This is absolutely a potential crisis for Major League Baseball

Here are what I consider the relatively plausible truths around this story, sorted from the least to most bad for baseball.

• Ippei Mizuhara made some (illegal) bets on sports, but never on baseball. Shohei Ohtani, as his financially secure friend, gave Mizuhara some money to cover the debts with full knowledge of what he was doing, and the conjecture about Mizuhara stealing from Ohtani was based on Ohtani being concerned that his action could cause increased scrutiny on himself.
• Ippei Mizuhara, an employee of a Major League Baseball team, made some (illegal) bets on sports, but never on baseball. He proceeded to defraud Shohei Ohtani out of millions of dollars.
• Shohei Ohtani has gambled large sums of money illegally and used Ippei Mizuhara as an intermediary. Ohtani gambled on non-baseball sports, but not baseball.
• Ippei Mizuhara gambled on baseball and Ohtani provided him money to cover the debts, though Ohtani was unfamiliar with the nature of the bets.
• Ippei Mizuhara gambled on baseball and Ohtani knew it the whole time.
• Shohei Ohtani bet on baseball (non-Angels games).
• Shohei Ohtani bet on baseball (Angels games, for them to win. The high amounts of debts would certainly be explained by prolonged betting on the Los Angeles Angels).
• Shohei Ohtani bet on baseball (Angels games, for them to lose). Though based on his performance, he probably wasn’t very good at the scam.

Of these eight possibilities, #1 is the only one that isn’t a massive, massive deal. There is precedent for Major League Baseball taking action against employees who engage in illegal non-baseball gambling–Miami Marlins pitcher Jarred Cosart was fined in 2015 for illegal gambling, though he was cleared of gambling on baseball. And a team employee gambling, particularly in a manner that results in massive debt, is not a good thing, but it’s not a complete disaster for the health of the sport.

But #2 involves an employee doing crimes against another employee (a non-union employee defrauding a union employee, even if these designations are mostly irrelevant in this particular case, is not exactly a great look). #3 involves cooperative crimes. Numbers 4 through 8 would be, without exaggeration, the biggest scandal to rock baseball since Pete Rose (and in the case of #8 would be the biggest scandal since the Black Sox of 1919). Worse than steroids, worse than Houston Astros sign-stealing, an absolute disaster for the sport. Numbers 6 through 8, in addition to major reputational damage for the sport at large, would assuredly lead to the most marketable star in a sport that has for so long been devoid of such players, being banned for life from the sport.

I’m not sure that everybody understands how easy it would be to use inside information to inform gambling. To use a real-life example, I know at least one Cardinals writer who, in 2014, was made aware of the Cardinals’ acquisition of Jason Heyward before the news was reported by the team or by any media members for a relatively innocuous reason–Cardinals prospect Tyrell Jenkins had a texting relationship with said writer and he told the writer that he was part of a trade for Jason Heyward. Said writer, in addition to being an ethical person, didn’t live in a state with legal sports gambling, but if they got this information today, they could almost instantly place a legal sports bet on the St. Louis Cardinals to, say, win the division the next year. Once the news was reported that Heyward had been acquired, it was overwhelmingly believed that this made the Cardinals better in the immediate future, so the futures markets would inevitably swing in the Cardinals’ direction.

I think when most people think of inside betting information, they think of particularly salacious versions of it–the knowledge that a player is taking a dive or something like that. I think it’s virtually impossible that any Major League Baseball player in the modern era has intentionally screwed up due to gambling influence because it’s relatively easy to get caught and it would potentially cause damage to a player’s future income-earning potential. But if I were friends with a member of the Cardinals’ medical staff (to my knowledge, I am not) and one told me in passing that, say, the Sonny Gray injury situation was looking dire and that he would likely miss the entire 2024 season, it would make sense to bet money on the Chicago Cubs before that news became public and their NL Central odds increased.

A massive part of the appeal of major league sports is the fact that the results are inherently unknowable. There is a popular still image that goes viral every so often of a Las Vegas odds boards from 1995 noting the odds of who shot Mr. Burns on The Simpsons–this was very much not really used for taking bets because perhaps hundreds of writers, animators, cast members, and Fox executives would know the answer (and those Maggie Simpson odds were quite long). There are increased restrictions on gambling on semi-scripted events–for instance, in Illinois (which has legal sports gambling), one cannot bet on the Academy Awards, as the knowledge of who received the most votes is known by at least an auditor. Frankly, if sports were scripted, why would you watch them? I am not a professional wrestling enjoyer, but why would I watch scripted bat-and-ball sports when I could watch scripted “dudes beating the absolute bejesus out of each other” sports?

#3–Major League Baseball can’t be held directly responsible for this, but they can be held responsible for the new sports gambling culture

By all accounts to this point, the gambling in question here was not done through a legal sports gambling partner of Major League Baseball–it was done through the kinds of illegal bookmaking operations which have existed as long as the sport of baseball itself. If anything, the omnipresence of DraftKings or ESPN Bet has rendered illegal operations much less significant.

But it would also be absurd to pretend that widespread legal sports gambling has not led to a national explosion in sports betting. I placed my first sports bet (outside of small-scale March Madness pools and fantasy football leagues) in 2018 in Las Vegas, when sportsbooks were a novelty. By contrast, I drove 15 minutes from my office to a legal sports gambling operation three days ago (I placed two total sports bets for a grand total of fifteen dollars). I enjoy occasional sports betting, but I have set strict limits–although I have the DraftKings app on my phone out of curiosity about statistics, I refuse to set up an account or place a single bet through it because I want bets to be inconvenient enough that I won’t be inclined to place them casually.

I have tended to hold a relatively libertarian stance on sports gambling, that it should be legal for adults to spend their money as they choose so long as it doesn’t harm anybody else. But if a Japanese-English interpreter who wasn’t broke but was hardly wealthy was able to accumulate a $4.5 million tab, that says a lot about how easily some people can fall into gambling addiction. On an individual level, it is easy to attribute this to a series of individual choices, but on a societal level, legal gambling is effectively a regressive tax–losses disproportionately impact those who cannot easily afford to shoulder them while enriching a casino industry that has a ton of money as it is. Ultimately, I still lean on the side of sports gambling should be legal, but unless we want to succumb to a dystopian future in which we accept a permanent underclass where poverty can permeate in the blink of an eye, society is going to need to address gambling addiction in a serious way.

#4–No, this doesn’t let Pete Rose off the hook, stop it

I don’t care if Pete Rose makes it to the Hall of Fame. I truly don’t. Pete Rose retired from playing before I was born and I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed him–he seems like a combination of a player type I like (multi-positional singles hitters) and one I dislike (try-hards). He seems like a pretty rotten guy outside of the gambling scandals, but there’s some pretty rotten guys in the Hall of Fame already. Would the presence of Pete Rose make Cap Anson’s Hall of Fame diminished? Certainly no more than Anson’s presence does.

But I am an ardent supporter of Pete Rose being prohibited from employment in Major League Baseball. Though given what Pete Rose has now admitted to doing, it is hard to imagine a club hiring Pete Rose for pretty much anything other than maybe Cincinnati Reds paid appearances. When I listed out the eight potential Shohei Ohtani scandals earlier, we know for a fact that Pete Rose did the thing I considered the second-worst–betting on the Cincinnati Reds to win baseball games. And because Pete Rose was the manager, it could be argued he had even more of an impact–while sabermetricians generally do not believe that managers have an enormous impact on games, it is generally accepted in this hypothesis that the managers being discussed have identical incentives.

Let’s say Pete Rose gambled on a bunch of Cincinnati Reds games he managed, though not all of them. Although he almost certainly did not intentionally try to lose games on which he did not have money, he did have gambling incentive to lose those games, as this would give Pete Rose more favorable odds in games where he did place a wager by making the team appear worse. By not placing a bet on a certain game, it provides implicit knowledge to bookies, that even a degenerate gambler like Pete Rose is not interested in placing a bet so perhaps they should have longer odds. Probably the most innocent version of Pete Rose betting on games he managed, somewhat paradoxically, involves him betting on every single game he managed, but this also gives him an outsized incentive to make the Cincinnati Reds good right now. Managers have an obligation to care not only about winning games but about player development. They have an obligation to not overextend pitchers and to protect their long-term prospects. Tom Browning was Rose’s major workhorse pitcher while he was manager, and Browning battled all sorts of arm injuries in his early thirties. Are these two things related? Maybe not. I’d even venture to say probably not. But I couldn’t swear it.

What Pete Rose did was and still is extremely illegal by the rules of Major League Baseball. He spent a decade and a half proclaiming his innocence and made his greatest admirers look like giant suckers. Get this guy as far away from MLB employment as possible.