Shohei Ohtani and Jontay Porter are both called two-way players. But the term means very different things in the highest level of Ohtani’s pro sport, Major League Baseball, and Porter’s, the National Basketball Association.
In Ohtani’s case, it’s because (when fully healthy) he is great at hitting and pitching — an extreme rarity in MLB, with the only real comparable player in baseball history being Babe Ruth, who starred as a pitcher and then with a career home run record that lasted 34 years.
In the NBA, a two-way player is pretty much the opposite, a scrub. If you have a two-way contract in hoops, it’s because you’re not good enough to be a full-timer on the 15-player roster, but you are one of up to three guys who can play on the NBA team, or its G-League affiliate (basically, the junior varsity).
Other than the irony, what does any of this have to do with … well, anything?
Ohtani and Porter are linked because they are at the center of the biggest off-field and off-court story in sports right now.
They are involved in investigations that might reveal them to be three-way players, as key figures in brewing sports gambling scandals that so far have generated plenty of questions and few solid answers.
Monday was Say It Ain’t So, Sho’ day at Dodger Stadium. Ohtani, baseball’s biggest superstar, claimed he has never bet on sports, and that his now former interpreter and friend (also former, I am guessing), Ippei Mizuhara, stole millions from him to pay off Mizuhara’s sports gambling debts.
“I never bet on baseball or any other sports or never have asked somebody to do that on my behalf,” Ohtani said, through a new interpreter. “I have never went through a bookmaker to bet on sports. Up until a couple of days ago, I didn’t know that this was happening.”
Mizuhara was fired by the Dodgers last week, after questions arose about $4.5 million in wire transfers from Ohtani’s bank account to a bookmaker in California (where sports gambling is illegal, and the bookmaker has been under investigation since last year).
On March 20, Mizuhara told ESPN that Ohtani knowingly transferred the money, himself, to pay gambling debts incurred by Mizuhara. That story was refuted the next day by a law firm representing Ohtani, in a statement claiming the Dodgers star was a victim of “massive theft.”
Mizuhara then changed his story and told ESPN that Ohtani had no knowledge of his debt, or the transferred money.
“Ippei has been telling everybody around that he has been communicating with Shohei on this account,” Ohtani said Monday. “To my representatives, to the team — and that hasn’t been true.”
It’s important to note here that Ohtani, himself, has not been accused of gambling — at least not yet — by anyone in any official capacity.
But even if you just signed a 10-year, $700 million contract, might you notice that $4.5 million was missing?
People in that stratosphere have other people to keep track of things like that, right? But to believe Ohtani is to believe that his interpreter was also his money person — either that, or Mizuhara knew how to get his boss’ money without him knowing, and whoever was supposed to keep an eye on Ohtani’s finances failed at that job.
Stay tuned.
As for Porter, a reserve center for the Raptors, his sports gambling story is very different but just as strange — and quite possibly, just as bad or worse for the integrity of pro sports, if the source of considerable smoke is indeed a fire.
In most states, you can bet on almost anything related to sports, including the stats that a backup player will accrue in any given game.
On Jan. 26 against the Clippers and March 20 against the Kings, Porter played just a few minutes for the Raptors, before sitting out the rest of the game, claiming injury. Because he scored zero points and his other stats were negligible, he made winners out of people who bet on him to produce less than the betting lines on apps like DraftKings and FanDuel.
Everybody has a bad game once in a while — especially end-of-the-bench guys like Porter. But the problem here is that those apps keep better track of their money than Ohtani apparently does his. Red flags were raised when people tried to make bets of $10,000 and $20,000 on Porter under-performing in the Clippers game, and the same thing happened in the Kings game, according to ESPN. Bets of this type are usually limited to $1,000 or $2,000.
Porter, who has played in 26 games for the Raptors, averaging 13.8 minutes and 4.4 points, has sat out the past two games for “personal reasons,” according to the team.
As bizarre as all of this is, can anyone truly be surprised? Gambling scandals have been a regular part of sports going all the way back to even before the Black Sox and the 1919 World Series.
They’re just easier to detect now — or they should be.
