Take two of the biggest acquisitions by the Dodgers during the off-season, start their regular season in Korea before every other team, and add 24 hours. What do you get? A win on the field and a scandal, as well as your star pitcher getting blown out of their first Start and a loss. But .500 ball isn’t all that bad to start, right?
All jokes aside, The Dodgers front office and PR are working double-time with what has happened. Is their star Two-Way player in Shohei Ohtani possibly a degenerate gambler who’s pinning $4.5M in debt on their interpreter? Did they get a $325M bust of a Japanese Pitcher in Yoshinobu Yamamoto? To start with the easiest one, let’s go with Yamamoto.
He only Started in 3 Spring Training games before the “regular season” started for the Dodgers and Padres in Seoul, Korea. In those three games, he had an 8.38 ERA in just over nine innings, but struck out 14 Batters. The trend of being shelled continued from his last two March Starts, where he gave up four and five earned runs, respectively. But there IS one outstanding difference from what happened this morning and those other two games. He only managed to throw ONE inning before being switched out; however, he did get two of his outs by way of Strikeout, if you’re looking for some sort of silver lining. In that one inning, he gave up four Hits and one Walk to go with the pair of Strikeouts, throwing a total of 43 pitches, and he may have been a tiny bit scared of the bright lights, as only 23 of those ended up being Strikes. He’ll have to throw a lot more strikes, or effective pitches out of the zone, at least, if he wants to make this $325M deal look worth it. If I could put it anymore lightly, I would, but Yamamoto’s debut with the Dodgers was an epic disaster.
Running it back a day, and to a bigger name, we have the Shohei Ohtani scandal, or Ippei Muzahara scandal, depending on how you look at it. Either way, in the end, this DOES have Ohtani’s name in it as it was his $4.5M Dollars that supposedly went missing, and $500,000 checks that were given to an illegal bookie in California signed by Ohtani to cover some sort of gambling debt (as of writing, its reportedly Ippei Muzahara’s). The odd timeline of events is what has everyone scratching their heads, wondering if Ippei is simply the fall guy for Shohei Ohtani, especially given the fact that Ippei was allowed to speak with ESPN for 90 minutes, just to have Ohtani’s camp disavow everything he said to ESPN, and lawyer up. Betting through a proxy is not something new in sports, and betting done by baseball players and employees is legal, as long as it is done via legal means, AND not betting on baseball. The big thing here is that sports betting is still not legal in California, so using this illegal bookie is what triggered red flags (seeing as this bookie is under federal investigation). People have gone so far as to having “#ShoheiOhtaniForPrison” a trending hashtag on X/Twitter, having already sentenced him as the true perpetrator in this growing scandal.
As I said to start off, it hasn’t even been 24 hours in the Dodger’s 2024 season, and the wheels are already starting to fall off. I guess the only thing that you can ask yourself is, “What’s next for the Dodgers?”
