There were 6 NFL players who were suspended indefinitely for betting on the NFL last year (maybe more but I found a July 2023 article that listed the suspensions) Mostly scrubs, but it is more common than you think.

We don't know the motivations, and I would agree most cases are players just being dumb rather than having an addiction.

Does Ohtani look like a man beaten by jacks?

Ohtani strikes me as someone who would snap call an all in with two red aces on a 5678K 4 spade board because honor demands it

this is going to be half right.

it will entertaining af to learn how Danny Ocean so easily walked out of Dodger Stadium with 4.5 mega belonging to his BFF without the "victim" not coming off as a complete moron.

Ohtani's wife has a FIBA mixtape.

We're going to pretend to believe it because we want to watch the guy play baseball. Obviously nobody actually believes it. Doesn't really matter, victimless crime.

Once again correct.

Candybar holding a press conference:

yeah, the dead giveaway was they all admitted that ohtani was in on it, before realizing that story was no good for them, i guess



only thing i'm wondering now is if mazuhara was placing bets for ohtani (probably, yeah) or was only in on making the payments to cover the losses. this guy is a good enough friend that you're gonna wire millions for him rather than telling him to go **** himself? makes a lot more sense if the bets and debts were actually ohtani's...

How did Andrew Friedman know that Ohtani had helped cover Ippei's losses before Ohtani knew that? It doesn't make sense unless you think this is a David Lynch film.

How is the story no good? The first story, which was never independently publicized, would have been perfectly fine for Ohtani. The Feds don't even go after people that gambled illegally, they are certainly not going to go after someone who paid a friend's illegal debt. That's not a thing. The first story being legally problematic is something conspiritards on the internet made up. Even without the story change, Ohtani probably looks worse in the current story.

The story change makes it overwhelmingly more likely that Ohtani is telling the truth - the current story is extremely problematic for Ohtani if not true, because it involves a crime of the sort that is likely to be investigated and puts Ippei in an extremely precarious legal situation. It really doesn't make any sense that Ohtani's legal team would go along with it:



Well unless it's true. Also, Ohtani's full account now includes a huge number of potential witnesses that can't possibly all in the conspiracy together. Are all those people in the Dodgers organization, including players, other interpreters, Friedman, people that work for Balelo, their lawyers, crisis spokesperson. Are they all conspiring to cover up for Ohtani and falsely accuse Ippei? And they managed to get on the same page while operating under a deadline that ESPN gave while threatening to go public with the first story?

Have you ever worked in an organization of any complexity and had information relayed incorrectly? Given that the entire Dodgers organization was used to Ippei speaking on behalf of Ohtani, it would take one person not distinguishing between "what Ippei said Ohtani said" and "what Ohtani said" for there to be significant confusion about whether any given information came from Ippei or directly came from Ohtani.

Responding to the tweet bc lol at reading the rest, ESPN can't confirm which authorities Shohei told.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...ontacted-theft

This would be a good attitude to have if you're the sort of person that finds 72off's posts ITT convincing, given that you're consistently going be on the wrong side of things.

I've never dealt with money at that level, but I'm under the impression that if you want to send your friend $500,000, you can't just log into your account and click some buttons. And you certainly can't just casually do that 8 or 9 times in a year.

Excellent.

The alleging of theft as pointed out is absolutely the dumbest thing you could do (and this would be all on everyone advising Shohei and not on him) if it is fabricated. Saying this means the feds are auto involved (money laundering, terrorism, RICO, etc.) and they absolutely do not give a **** whether Shohei wants to actually press charges or not.

Also transactions over a certain amount are reported to the government, so I doubt Shohei can even try to hide anything.

it's very funny now that the story is that the dodgers heard, from mizuhara, that he lost millions gambling with an illegal bookie, and ohtani agreed to cover his losses, and they were supposedly like ok cool sounds good, we have no follow-up questions, and no desire to speak to ohtani. we're happy continuing to run literally everything through the guy who is at the center of all this. shame that there's only 1 guy in the organization who speaks japanese...

also "ohtani's camp" (whoever that is aside from mizuhara) set up mizuhara's espn interview and watched him say that ohtani was in on the payments and no one batted an eye, no one had any issue about any of this until after that team meeting apparently. none of them speak english and/or have any contact with ohtani i guess, oh well, mistakes were made

No need to point that out, it's already clear you're having problems reading and processing information

I'm not sure what you're getting at, it doesn't seem unreasonable for Ohtani's lawyers to take their time doing this, given that they most likely just took this case and it's not some super-urgent matter and authorities have enough information to proceed if they want to (it's not like they need Ohtani's permission to investigate) anyway. Nor would it be unusual for the involved agencies to decline to acknowledge even if they received information from Ohtani's lawyers. Aside from wishful thinking, there isn't any actual information in the article, the gist of it is that ESPN asked a bunch of people questions and no one answered them.

Given ESPN's (or the reporter's) behavior early on:

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...ara-theft-line

It's not too surprising that no one wants to answer their questions.

like if the real story actually ends up being that this translator was almost able to steal $4.5m of ohtani's money because literally everyone else in this play has a forrest gump level iq then idk man, all you can do is laugh really

take their time telling espn that they informed lapd or the LA FBI desk? gtfo with your incessant wishcasting.

at best, this will turn out that Shohei gave unfettered access to a guy neither he nor his reps did due diligence on. Shohei is not blameless no matter how this turns out

I don't think that is the most likely explanation at all and instead will continue to believe that Andrew Friedman is a clairvoyant.

The first story is perfectly fine from Ohtani's perspective and sounds like Ippei's the one at fault and Ohtani's just a really nice guy. So given that ESPN likely threatened them, look if you guys don't have any explanations as to what's going on, we're just going to go public with the story where money sent from Ohtani's account directly to the bookie, they were too ecstatic to hear Ippei's explanation and willingness to be interviewed to question whether that is even true. Especially given the time difference and lack of clear communication between all parties (not sure who was in Korea and who was in the US, but obviously the team was split in a way that made communication even more challenging).

The pivot to the current story really doesn't make any sense if Ohtani has anything whatsoever to hide. The current story is less believable in the eyes of the public, doesn't paint Ohtani in a better light, has no legal advantages and invites substantially more scrutiny. There really is no good reason to switch unless it's true.

looking so, yeah

At this point, Ohtani's camp got their story out and it makes sense. If it doesn't make sense to you, even if Ohtani's camp were to share everything they shared with authorities with you, you're going to go, this doesn't make sense, this other thing in the report doesn't make sense, how is this possible, why doesn't Ohtani address this and so on. And it's likely that a detailed report would have some private information that needs to be redacted - and you would go, look at all this information they redacted, are they hiding something?

What are you babbling about here? Ohtani's relationship with Ippei predates any of Ohtani's reps - Ohtani met Ippei as a teenager while playing for the Fighters in Japan.

Obviously he's not looking great here in terms of financial acumen or common sense, but you probably shouldn't be going around calling other people dumb.