After 48 hours of silence, Major League Baseball is finally doing something with respect to the Shohei Ohtani-Ippei Mizuhara theft/gambling reports.
They just announced that they have started an investigation:
This was the BARE MINIMUM that MLB simply had to do, because you’re talking about an MLB employee involved in massive amounts of illegal gambling, attached in some way to the biggest superstar in the sport, and with a tremendously confusing set of stories trying to explain it all away. How could MLB credibly say it was all clean if they didn’t at least look into it?
That said, because there’s a federal investigation ongoing of the allegedly illegal bookmaker at issue, and because there could be other criminal investigations taking place at some point, it’s possible there isn’t a whole lot MLB can actually do for a while. We’ve seen this in other cases, where MLB kinda-sorta conducts a parallel investigation, but mostly defers to law-enforcement authorities to do their work first.
In any case, I’m just glad MLB isn’t TOTALLY trying to ignore this story and act like it’ll somehow magically go away.
Meanwhile, I strongly recommend you read the full, just-released, behind-the-scenes timeline of how things played out at ESPN this week. It gives you MUCH more insight into how and why the crazy conflicting stories emerged, and how it’s at least CONCEIVABLE that Shohei Ohtani really did have no idea what was going on: