"ohtani's camp": we referred this matter to the cops last week
media: oh yeah, who?
"ohtani's camp": no comment
candybar: seems legit

I'm also guessing that you have literally no idea how these inquiries work and how PR works in general. Like is there a single area where you have any kind of expertise in?

sure i'm plenty good enough to improve "ohtani's camp", anyway


and whats your expertise in, other than pathetic simping fanfic for no money?

I'm sure you're employable in some fashion, but you certainly would do better in a role that doesn't require much critical thinking or judgment.

Anyway, I could elaborate on how PR teams work with the media (there's a lot of subtle give & take) and how the news cycle works, but it doesn't sound like there's much of an audience for any of this.

I'll give some help though: why did ESPN publish that article even though it's content-free? In other words, what is the purpose of that article?

Another couple of helpful questions: given that it will take at least a few months to find out what happened (it's extremely unlikely that either side will be fully vindicated any time soon), what is Tisha Thompson trying to accomplish in the mean time? What are the short-term goals for Ohtani's PR folks? What is everyone trying to do?

If you can answer these questions, you can sort of begin to figure out why people are acting the way they are, without resorting to conspiratorial nonsense, though it might still require inferential skills well beyond what you've demonstrated so far in this thread.

At this point I feel like we need a 72off vs candybar wager, where the loser has to have an avatar that calls themselves a dumbass or something.

72, If Ohtani and his camp are truly covering up his own gambling, this would truly eclipse any sort of stupidity that you feel Ohtani is under candybar's argument of reality here.

I don't think it makes everyone super stupid to have taken Ippea's word initially. It's probably precisely how Ohtani communicates with most people, and it's well beyond translator/client relationsihp. If you pretend Ippea is Ohtani's brother, does it change your opinion on any of this 72off? Because it basically seems like that's almost the case here.


--

As an aside, is "Ohtani made the transactions/was aware of the transactions, but was told they were for something else" still in play? Or is Ohtani claiming he had no idea that that sum of money was transferred at any time? If the former is still in play, that seems very much possible to me.

Also, someone mentioned Ohtani hasn't been paid much yet. He's made over 100m in endorsements in the last few years I believe. Very plausible he has eight figures in a bank.

It's also possible that Ippea communicated with some of the professionals that might be overseeing that money, lying to them as he was translating on behalf of Ohtani. Or that the money was in an account not overseen by professionals. A savings or discretionary or expenses account of some sort. There are a lot of possibilities that seem plausible. Athletes get cheated out of money all of the time and not paying attention is the primary reason it isn't caught sooner.

I don't know that it'll take at least a few months candybar. If we're taking Ohtani at his word, I think we start to get some bigger pieces of info sooner than later. Not getting those immediately as the camp scrambles to figure out what happened, big gun lawyers get brought in, authorities speak to some of these people and the media is on fire with the story---that's all understandable. I think a good bit more details get filled in before the end of April.

I frequently contact the FBI asking for detailed information about ongoing investigations and they've yet to decline any of my requests, so it's suspicious that Ohtani's team has gone radio silent on this issue.

another irrelevant 10k word-bomb from candybar in response to a very simple point, nobody saw it coming


because they were following up on the claim that ohtani referred this matter to the authorities last week? maybe they checked on it with their sources but couldn't find anything? you know, reporting on this story involving a high-profile athlete. are you alleging some espn anti-ohtani conspiracy here? lol


if ohtani is innocent of all wrong-doing this should be pretty straight-forward actually. however if he bet on games and/or ok'd payments i can totally understand why it's playing out like this, with them unable to answer simple questions like which agency they sent this to, and dragging this out as long as they need for ppl to lose interest

did i actually insult him or did he just get mad because i said ohtani is stupid? i already forgot


not really

for certain people, when the money comes suddenly and is far more than they ever need, they tend to be hands off and pay someone to deal with that for them, handle taxes, set aside some for retirement and invest the rest

this is how they get swindled so commonly, because after a while the person doing this for them, realizes that their client has utterly no clue how much money they should have so if a few hundred thousand or million were not there anymore they would be unlikely to notice and would just assume they spent it

dane cook's brother stole millions from him over a 4 year period and cook had no idea - his brother wasn't even trying to hide it and would transfer the money directly from Dane's account into his own, at one point he did it by writing himself a 3 million dollar check - cook only discovered the theft because when he moved to California he needed to change to a new money manager based in california

eminem famously had no idea of his finances to the point where he called his money manager before buying a rolex to make sure he could afford it because he had absolutely no idea what kind of income he was generating

so yes, it's very plausible that someone in his entourage could both have access to the funds and doesn't require an ohtani signature and that ohtani would be not have noticed

rolex is a **** watch.
cant keep time for crap.

He hasn't bet on baseball so who cares.

None of us know if he was really the one betting or not and I don't care. I want to see Ohtani do Ohtani things.

He probably made 100 million last year bw salary, endorsements in the US and endorsements in Japan. If he punted 5 mill on sports betting bfd. If he blew 5 million on cars I wouldn't care either.

What would be classic is if

1)it definitely was the interpreter
2) the interpreter kept betting against the Angels when Ohtani wasn't pitching.

Ohtani also isn't the typical player. The angels were paying Ohtani a ham sandwich the first 5 years on the team and the last 3 he was the best player in baseball and a cash cow. Maybe they paid the interpreter 500k or maybe Ohtani kicked in. Either way I don't see the relevance.

Interpreters salary got brought up to make the argument that no one making 100K would have the connect/juice to make multi million bets. Response was he likely makes a good chunk more than that.

Enough to make baller bets on his own? Probably not. If it was all the interpreter he had to be leveraging his relationship with Shohei somehow.

so you're arguing that it was OK that none of Ohtani's reps questioned an arrangement where the billionaire ballplayer willingly gave one guy, who's turned out to have lied about his education and work history, unfettered access to his finances because he's known him for 10 years.

mkay

this is the part I'm hung up on bc part of me refuses to believe anyone could be this biblically irresponsible. PTI did a segment on Ohtani last night and they said the same as you have though. it's completely credible that a virtual nobody could have what is essentially power of attorney over it all.

insanity

I don’t get why people think it’s ridiculous that the interpreter just straight up stole it. There’s plenty of weird stuff about the story that makes me question the Shohei side, but that part isn’t unbelievable.

If there was a story tomorrow that Uncle Dennis had ripped Kawhi off for 10 mill, or that Ja Morants dad had stolen from him, or that Rich Kleinman has just been Ponzi-ing Durants money for a decade, I’d believe any of those in a second.

Like Rickroll said - people with insane amounts of money aren’t normal people. I wouldn’t even Venmo someone 5 bucks unless I was standing next to them and could confirm it’s the right person most of the time. These celebs have oceans of money pouring in from multiple places, and spend all their time making it and zero thought managing it.

I have a friend who won that national spelling bee thing and is close with the Scripps family that sponsors it. One time he invites me to go to this brewery that one of the family members had built. It was an enormous castle like complex. The guy walks us around, talks up the Germans he hired to run the place, all these big plans. I was rude enough to ask him how much it cost and he literally said - Oh, I dunno. This is just for fun. I guarantee you someone’s stolen a mill from that guy at some point and he didn’t even notice.

Edit - I’d also believe that Shohei has multiple million dollar accounts and that the transfers come from one he personally never even looks at. Like maybe it’s for his ad money only whatever.

I do not mind a fellow gambler. But seems way more likely he got robbed. He could hire trusted family to help him with his 100s of millions, they would rob him too. He needs to handle his own buisness and not give people access to millions of dollars. They will swipe what they can.

I haven't ever bet with a bookie. Is it standard for them to let you run up $4.5M in credit? Or do they only do that when you tell them you know a rich guy you can steal money from? That seems really not smart from the bookie's point of view as it has a major possibility of aiming the authorities right at them.

That's a lot of boxes of ziti

Did he owe 4.5m at once or did he pay that much over time?

It seems he likely started with smaller amounts.

Say he paid 20k then 50k then 100k etc. so the bookie kept raising his limits bc he kept getting paid.

The bookie obviously knew who he was and why would he turn down a cash cow.

It must have been all at once right? If Ohtani wired the money himself? Otherwise neither the "it was stolen" and "I didn't know" defenses make sense.

I'm not 100% sure about this but I thought I had read it was across something like 9 months.

all bookies are credit based, while 4.5m is an absurd amount

having said that, most new accounts are given $100 max bets and $1k total credit to start and generally bump you up as high as $1500 max bet and 10k credit


it's definitely plausible if he had a long history of playing with the guy to the point where he really opened up limits and really began letting him rip

however, the most plausible explanation for those crazy high limits was that it was either ohtani betting directly or Ippei conned the bookie into believing Ohtani was involved

celebrities are often used as beards because bookies tend to think:

a) they are not sharp
b) they have the funds to pay out big losses
c) they'd sooner pay a million dollar loss than risk the negative publicity that would come from it getting exposed

zero chance Ippei earned that level of credit unless he spent a long time establishing a rapport with the guy or the bookie believed Ohtani was involved

ie with Sean Perry now making huge sports bets, the general consensus is that he's leveraged his rich degen idiot status into bearding

The wires are where you lose me and there is like a 1% chance Ohtani didn’t know what was happening

If these were approved without Ohtani authorizing them the bank is on the hook for 4.5MM and a lot of people are fired. Is it possible Ippei lied and told Ohtani they were asking for confirmation of something else and Ohtani was consenting not knowing what was being said to him by the rep? Sure. But that is literally the only way this could have played out where Ohtani had no idea what was happening

Occam’s razor is Ohtani knowingly went through with this. Realized after the fact it might blow up in his face and is trying to walk back the story

How did the press find out about it?

There was always the sense that Pete Rose might have thrown games. He was clearly dishonest and a hustler in every sense. He wasn't going to bet on himself losing but he wasn't going to pass up an edge either.