On Monday, ESPN announced a new podcast series on the gambling scandal that engulfed baseball’s best player just a few years ago.
“The Betrayal of Shohei Ohtani” will debut on July 28, the network said.
The teaser: “Hosted by ESPN investigative reporter Tisha Thompson, the six-part series examines one of the biggest scandals in baseball history and the collapse of the relationship between Shohei Ohtani and his longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara.”
Ippei went to prison for crimes related to his illegal gambling activity and taking money from Ohtani.
The official story is that Ohtani never knew of his close friend’s illegal gambling. Some people have expressed skepticism of this story, including Mathew Bowyer, the illegal bookmaker who took Ippei’s bets.
Bowyer, who also went to prison, told USA Today in 2025: “If this is true that Ippei was the guy, and gambling all by himself the whole time, I don’t know how you could hide that from your best friend, someone you were with almost 24 hours a day? They were inseparable. And if you really could hide that from his best friend for so long—then how could Shohei Ohtani not see $17 million gone from his account?”
Typically, people addicted to gambling are adept at hiding it, but not always, especially when it becomes a crisis.
Some people have argued “who cares” whether or not Ohtani knew about his friend’s gambling addiction, and that’s a somewhat fair sentiment. Virtually no one is accusing Ohtani of betting illegally himself, let alone betting on baseball.
Regardless of the theory one may hold, ESPN isn’t super trustworthy when it comes to gambling scandals involving the leagues, as it has a $550 million-per-year media rights deal with MLB. For what it’s worth, ESPN also once sold its brand to a gambling company.
MLB wanted the Ohtani gambling scandal to blow over, and it did. The league wanted its future Hall of Famer to be cleared of any connection to gambling. He was (astonishingly quickly) cleared by federal investigators.
But the skepticism justifiably lingers.
ESPN has a conflict of interest in this story, and the title of the series, “The Betrayal of Shohei Ohtani”, appears to tell us that there will be no question that Ohtani was nothing more than an innocent bystander to Ippei’s illegal sports gambling. That may be the truth, but I’m not confident that ESPN will give the other side the oxygen it deserves.
I won’t be tuning in to the podcast series due to ESPN’s conflict of interest.
