Opening Day overshadowed by cloud hanging over Ohtani in gambling scandal ROBERT WHITING

Opening Day overshadowed by cloud hanging over Ohtani in gambling scandal
ROBERT WHITING MAR 30, 2024

URL https://robertwhiting.substack.com/p/opening-day-overshadowed-by-cloud

TOKYO — It’s opening day for MLB and there is a lot to look forward to. Shohei Ohtani looks bigger and stronger than ever before. He has put on more muscle during the offseason, he is in the peak prime of his career, and he has added a wife to his repertoire. It would not be surprising to see him hit 50 home runs hitting in a lineup with Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts — three MVP’s in a row. Pitchers will be reluctant to walk him with such fellow powerhouses in the lineup and, thus, Ohtani will see more good pitches to hit. Sixty homers even seems reasonable.

That’s if, of course, this gambling scandal doesn’t torpedo his season. MLB fans in Japan as well as in North America all got a good introduction to the new reality of sports gambling recently with the publicized adventures of Shohei and Ippei Mizuhara. Version one had Ohtani paying off his good friend’s debts to explain wire transfers to an illegal bookmaker with Ohtani’s name on them, and 24 hours later, Version two, where Ohtani claimed massive theft.

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TOKYO JUNKIE https://tokyojunkie.com/
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Robert (Bob) Whiting is a best-selling, critically-acclaimed author who has written extensively on Japan, Japanese-American relations, and sports. His book You Gotta Have Wa was a Pulitzer Prize candidate and has recently been included in the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR) top fifty baseball books of the last fifty years"

https://sabr.org/50at50/books

His latest book is Tokyo Junkie, https://amzn.to/3MdUyr9 a memoir focused on his life in Japan that combines Japanese post-war history and Japanese-American relations with his own experiences. You can read the foreword here, and excerpts here:

https://www.fccj.or.jp/sites/default/files/2021-04/04-April-2021-Number1Shimbun-v14.pdf

This site - https://tokyojunkie.com/archive/ - is a work-in-progress archive of Bob’s work.

You can also subscribe to his Substack and podcast, Robert Whiting’s Japan, - https://substack.com/@robertwhiting - which provide regular analysis of Japanese sports, politics, and business.

More on Bob’s books here:

https://tokyojunkie.com/english-language-books/

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Your Intro by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artist: http://audionautix.com/

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Song in background is by Mark Schumacher:

Heaven is not far but Heaven is not where you are going

c1986-1987