SAN DIEGO -- The Padres opened their 2024 season against the Dodgers in South Korea this week, just as news broke of a sports-gambling scandal involving Shohei Ohtani's interpreter.
It produced a longer, stranger trip than anything the Grateful Dead sang about.
The Seoul Series was an MLB money grab, plain and simple -- although not one devoid of charm thanks to enthusiastic fans who filled the 15,000-capacity Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul.
Money was a recurring theme, whether it was Ohtani's close friend and longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, incurring a reported $4.5 million in illegal gambling debts that he said Ohtani helped pay off; or MLB marching closer to the inevitable day when its players display corporate logos head to toe.
(What says MLB opening day 2024 better than a hedge fund's name adorning the iconic Dodgers helmets and a South Korean bank renting space on the Padres' helmets?)
The primary baseball angle was health. If all of the Padres' pitchers are healthy entering the first series in San Diego starting Thursday against the Giants, those gifts alone will stand as their biggest victories to go with Thursday's 15-11 triumph.
The Padres fired more than 360 pitches in splitting the two-game series with the Dodgers. Pitchers' health being fragile even under baseball's normal rhythms, fingers are crossed that Padres arms don't pay a steep price for revving up against Dodgers stars on the last day of winter and first day of spring.
New Padres manager Mike Shildt should've risked MLB's wrath and started knuckleballer Matt Waldron and anyone else instead of having Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove, his aging co-aces who were each coming off seasons ended by injury, stress themselves as they did Wednesday and Thursday.
What beset the Dodgers, however, went far beyond the mid-March stress tests dealt to the Padres' pitching staff.
Circumstances dealt a one-two punch to L.A.'s globally splashy offseason acquisitions.
In December, Ohtani joined the Dodgers on a $700 million contract that blew away MLB's previous record for guaranteed money to a player despite his being unavailable to pitch before 2025. His Japanese countryman, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, received a $325 million guarantee to become the sport's highest-paid pitcher.
By the time the Dodgers boarded their charter leaving Seoul, the possibility had arisen that Ohtani will have to answer questions from federal agents and Major League Baseball investigators. Mizuhara, Ohtani's interpreter, said he alone made the sports bets -- and none were on baseball games. Inviting scrutiny from the Los Angeles Times and ESPN, a federal investigation was targeting an illegal bookmaking operation allegedly run by Mathew Bowyer, who lives in Orange County.
Ohtani could be subject to MLB discipline, such as a suspension, if investigators validate Mizuhara's initial claims that Ohtani knowingly helped pay off his friend's sports-gambling debts.
Contradicting Mizuhara's account about 12 hours after his comments to reporters, the media outlets got a statement from Ohtani's attorney at the Berk Brettler law firm stating: "In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft and we are turning the matter over to the authorities."
Investigators will want to square the vast discrepancy between the accounts of Ohtani's lawyers and Ohtani's interpreter, who was fired before the second game of the series.
Mizuhara was explicit that Ohtani was both aware of the translator's sports gambling debts and that he effected a payoff reconciling them, said ESPN investigative reporter Tisha Thompson.
"He basically said that it was his gambling debt, and that when he got too far in a hole -- we have multiple sources telling us it's at least $4.5 million -- he went to Ohtani, who told him he wasn't happy about the gambling debts, but he had decided to pay it off," she told NPR.
"He then gets into details about how he watched Ohtani log on to a computer and start to make wire transfer payments based on instructions that Mizuhara was giving him."
In both games against the Padres, Ohtani performed as a designated hitter. He contributed two singles and a stolen base to L.A.'s 5-2 victory in the first game.
Yamamoto, by contrast, looked ill at ease for most of a laborious outing.
He lasted just one inning on Thursday, allowing five runs and four hits. The Padres looked comfortable against his fastballs and secondary pitches despite never having faced him.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts may have overly exposed Yamamoto to physical stress by allowing him to throw 43 pitches. It's a universal belief that lengthy, stressful innings imperil pitchers' arms more than envelope-pushing pitch counts across a full outing.
The telecast showed Roberts fidgeting and looking increasingly uncomfortable as Yamamoto struggled. The Padres banged out four hits. Soon, they stared at non-strikes without lunging.
Yamamoto, like all pitchers, wasn't fully built up in terms of workload going into the game. Nor had he been sharp in spring training. The Dodgers had said he was tipping his pitches in a Cactus League outing.
So why was he pitching against a good Padres lineup in a game that counted? Well, holding Yamamoto out so he could try to establish himself in more exhibitions wasn't a likely option, given the surrounding hoopla of his $325 million signing and MLB's business partnerships in South Korea and Japan.
Beginning with Xander Bogaerts' hard-hit single off Yamamoto's first pitch -- a fat 97-mph fastball -- and continuing with Jake Cronenworth's two-run triple to the right-field wall and onward, Padres hitters knocked around several Dodgers pitchers. The Padres' homegrown 20-year-old rookie, center fielder Jackson Merrill, hit several pitches hard in both games. Having adjusted his stance by holding his hands higher, Cronenworth smacked upper-zone pitches that troubled him last year. Fernando Tatis Jr. stayed in the second game after taking a Yamamoto cut fastball to the left elbow. he later drove a curveball for a single to right field, a sign of growth from last year.
But the bigger story in Seoul may have been the drama involving Ohtani and Yamamoto, in whom the Dodgers have invested $1.2 billion including competitive balance payroll taxes.
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