Shohei Ohtani: The Victim of His Sports Betting Scandal?

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00:00We go over the top story of the day, which does appear that Shohei Otani was very much

00:08a victim in this sports betting situation with his interpreter, Ipe Matsuhara.

00:14And you know, Matt, in the end, you know, it does, you know, certainly look like Matsuhara

00:19was just a really bad sports bettor, someone who was clearly, if all this is true, addicted

00:26to sports betting, wasn't getting any help from the bookmaker in this case, because he

00:30kept asking for increases.

00:32They kept giving it to him.

00:33And in the end, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars is going back and forth here, at

00:37least in credit.

00:39And Otani is apparently the victim of all of this without any knowledge whatsoever that

00:44the money is leaving his account.

00:46It's sort of a crazy story.

00:48But if the district attorney is saying this, what else is there to say?

00:51Right, right.

00:53Yeah, look, the story is wild.

00:55Like you said, to consider that Shohei never inquired once over those years about just

01:02how his money is looking.

01:03But outside of that, I can tell you that sports books, the sports betting industry as a whole,

01:10and the MLB are thrilled that it is looking like Shohei Otani had nothing to do with this.

01:17Look, legal sports betting didn't need another ugly knock when talking about sports betting

01:23in general.

01:24We still have the ugly story, obviously, about what's going on with eBay, but legalized

01:31betting necessarily wouldn't have stopped that, right?

01:34There's always going to be an illegal bookmaker floating out there somewhere ready to take

01:38money that the legal books just aren't going to take.

01:41eBay really would have had a hard time moving any kind of significant money without having

01:47to prove where those funds were coming from had he been betting with a legal book.

01:52So it's not like he would have been betting with anybody legally operating in California

01:58anyway.

01:59So when I hear people using this as an argument for legal betting, it's a bit of a red herring.

02:06But I can tell you that definitely everybody involved with sports betting this morning

02:14is feeling better that it doesn't look like Shohei was directly involved in this.

02:21Maybe this will lead to a bigger push from more of the industry to really try to crack

02:28down on some of the bigger offshore guys.

02:31But at the end of the day, I mean, that's so hard for any jurisdiction in the U.S. to

02:36actually pull off that I don't know that we can expect that.

02:39So yeah, look, as was said earlier on the show, there's still going to be a lot of twists

02:45and turns with this story, but as long as it stays the way that it is now where it looks

02:51like Shohei was the victim and not complicit in some kind of gambling scheme, then everybody

02:57on the gambling side should be pretty happy.