DODGERS PAY $1 BILLION-PLUS AND HAVE TROUBLES WITH OHTANI, YAMAMOTO
The season is long, thankfully for manager Dave Roberts, who has nothing to do with Ohtani’s gambling debt payments for his interpreter and Yamamoto’s problems with confidence in a 15-11 shelling
From the way he looked at his watch and wheeled despondently in the dugout, Dave Roberts might have wondered why his bosses trashed him. First Shohei Ohtani loses his interpreter in a swarm of gambling losses and, I’m certain, Major League Baseball scrutiny. Now Yoshinobu Yamamoto was rocked for five runs, four hits, a walk and a hit batter after one inning of a South Korea headknocking.
As 29 other teams celebrate, the Dodgers spent $700 million on Ohtani and $325 million on Yamamoto. What’s next? Will Ohtani be suspended by a commissioner who wonders why he was so close to a wagering nuthouse in paying off Ippei Mizuhara’s debt, which amounted to at least $4.5 million? And will Yamamoto recover from a troubling case of nerves, in a 15-11 loss to San Diego, that seemed off-putting for a pitcher of his regard?
You wonder if Team Guggenheim, with its logo shown on the famed blue batting helmets, checked into Ohtani’s relationship with Mizuhara before granting him the largest contract in American team sports? Did the Dodgers, who control what they choose in southern California, wonder why the translator was on the scumsheet with bookmaker Mathew Bowyer? Where were chairman Mark Walter, president Stan Kasten and executive Andrew Friedman? And did they ask whether Yamamoto will adapt to a different ball, while controlling his emotions, before guaranteeing him the largest amount given to a pitcher?
The season is long, as Roberts knows. But this is a frightful start for a team that was supposed to go 162-0 and win the postseason in a sweep. Even a front office as wealthy as Guggenheim doesn’t pour more than $1 billion into two Japanese players without understanding, to some degree, exactly what is coming. Ohtani must wait for clearance from MLB chief Rob Manfred, who will look into Mizuhara and want very badly to make things right for the two-way marauder. But he cannot pitch until next season, meaning Yamamoto’s issue is front and center for a manager who looked ready to pound the back wall at Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome.
It was Mookie Betts, who had six RBIs and a home run, who expressed the team’s stunned trauma. “It kind of is what it is. I hope Sho is good, but you know, at the end of the day we have to make sure we take care of our jobs,” he said. “No matter what cards we’re dealt, you have to go play them.”
Roberts will face the sound of losing his job without a World Series title this year. He has nothing to say about Mizuhara’s Tuesday night meeting with players, which was similar to what he told ESPN about paying off the gambling debt, when he said, “Obviously, he (Ohtani) wasn’t happy about it and said he would help me out to make sure I never do this again.” If the interpreter has told the same story twice — to a major media network and a clubhouse of big-league players — it will be difficult for the Dodgers and Manfred to cut him loose without a strong reprimand. I wrote earlier today that Ohtani should be suspended half a season amid gambling’s dark period in sports.
“Anything with that, the meeting, I can’t comment,” Roberts said. “Shohei’s ready. I know that he’s preparing.”
While the front office deals with Ohtani’s life and activities without his longtime friend, the coaching staff needs to decipher the pitching ace’s early qualms. “Just didn’t have the command and so it’s not about the stuff,” Roberts said. “When you’re a command guy, which he’s been his entire career, his life, and you just misfire, get behind in counts, hit batters, that’s just not who he is. He’s an easy guy. You know he’ll bounce back from this.”
Will he? With a 45.00 ERA after throwing only 23 of 43 pitches for strikes? Back in spring training, Yamamoto was haunted by an 8.38 ERA and hitters who clubbed him with a .357 batting average. “I feel regret that I just couldn’t keep the team in the game from the get-go, so I do feel responsibility for it,” he said through a translator, who wasn’t Mizuhara but Will Ireton. “I just got to get ready for the next outing.”
Unlike Ohtani, who is 6 feet 4 and carries enough weight to have a belly of sorts, Yamamoto is 5-10 and weighs 175 pounds. Everyone loves his native Japan story about using a javelin to prepare his body. Right now, Dodgers fans would like to stab the javelin into his soul. The best command ever from a pitcher? Did they really have to outbid other teams and pay him one million more than Gerrit Cole? Roberts loved what he heard about Yamamoto from Ohtani.
“When you’re talking about the Japanese players, there’s always speculation, do they want to play with each other? Which nobody ever knows. But I certainly believe when you have a person of Shohei’s caliber saying, ‘We want you here. I want to be a teammate of yours,’ that was a good selling point for Yamamoto,’’ he said. “I think that obviously Shohei coming over here six years ago, and not having anyone kind of help support him as a fellow countryman was different, and difficult at times. But for Yoshinobu to come here and have a former teammate, a fellow countryman come over here and kind of show him the ropes and support him ... I think is great.’’
Yet forgive people for pondering one dollar figure today: $1 billion-plus. Together. “I think you’ve brought in, to be quite honest, an entire country, essentially another continent,” Roberts said. “You’ve brought in two superstars from Japan.”
Right now, they are 1-1. They have the same record as the Padres, who lost the first game when a grounder shot through the webbing of Jake Cronenworth, who had four RBIs and four hits in the winner. The Dodgers return to Los Angeles and resume the season next Thursday. A trip to their team clubhouse in Santa Monica showed Ohtani jerseys are available, with fans wondering about $4.5 million and why it was in his wire transfers to a bookie.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.