 I'm going to try to explain the Shoei Otani gambling story in 40 seconds yesterday. The Dodgers fired Otani's interpreter and longtime friend Ipe Mizahara. Mizahara allegedly incurred $4.5 million in gambling debt and those debts were paid from Otani's bank account to a Southern California bookie. Keep in mind sports gambling is still illegal in California. Now the latest version of the story is Otani's camp is accusing his interpreter of massive debt and Otani had no knowledge of the gambling. However, the day before there was a much different version of the story. Mizahara saying Otani was aware but not happy. But he did decide to pay off a $4.5 million for him. The interpreter adding he never bet on baseball and that Otani made the payments directly because he didn't trust Mizahara to not gamble it away. All right. Let's time to deep dive this subject. One other thing and now they're calling him a thief. Otani's camp. They're making Mizahara retract his stories. We welcome in Tom Giles, our Red Sox insider, John Tomasi. To buy this story, Tom Giles? Not really. I'd like to. Because obviously because if you buy the story, then Shohei Otani is a very nice guy who was maybe, you know, paying off the debt. Actually, I guess now the story is that he stole it from him. So that story is really not good for anybody. It doesn't feel like I guess it would be good for Shohei Otani. Maybe he keeps him out of trouble. But if you're looking at the story where he paid off the debt that makes him look like, you know, maybe it's just a really nice guy who was trying to cover up for. Apparently that, though, is a jailable offense. It's called wire fraud. I don't understand the details of that. But Tomasi, it's just there's too many moving parts. There's too many law firms and PR guys and spokespeople now interjecting themselves, making like forcing stories to change Mizahara saying, I can't comment on that. I've been told not to. Well, who's been told not to we don't know something stinks in suburbia. Oh my God. So you asked Giles, you know, do you believe his story? It's like, which story? I don't know. I don't have a track of which story to believe. And so when the story keeps changing, that tells me that none of them are the truth. We have not gotten anywhere near the truth of this story yet. And yes, where it's all conjecture on our part right now. But listen, you've got you've been around pro teams. Gambling is a thing like these guys are kind of hardwired for it. So the idea that Shoei Otani would maybe be gambling on baseball, not remotely outside the culture of baseball whatsoever. And frankly, we don't know anything about Shoei Otani. It took an act of Congress to get the name of his flipping dog after he won the MVP award. And so for people to say he would never do this, how do you know this guy's a cypher? We don't know anything about him. How big do you think the story is going to get? Oh my God, this is this is massive. This is potentially what everyone kind of thought maybe the Michael Jordan story was in the NBA, which has never been proven, but long assumed or long hypothesized that he was suspended for gambling. This would be the actual real version of that if. And this is the important question, Giles. Does MLB really want to get to the bottom of it? So that that's the scary part here is if MLB wants to somehow kind of like, OK, we believe him and want to make this go away because he is obviously the number one person in their sport by far and away. They're number one superstar. Do you trust Rob Manfred to get this right? Because that's the thing. Like, do you trust MLB to to get this right in the sense that if they want to make it go away? I was to say, if they wanted to get it right, I think they could get it right. I think you have all of that. I mean, Rob Manfred was the head legal counsel. He was general counsel to to. But to Bud Selig back in the day, like he was right there. This is a guy with a law background. Like they could, if they wanted to get to the bottom of this, they absolutely have the resources to do it. I don't think they want to. Oh, no. I don't think they want to get it right. I don't think they want to investigate him. But I just don't know how major right now, Major League Baseball saying, we're not investigating this. I don't know how you don't investigate it to Masi because that is like to me like, listen, I don't want to I don't want to tie this necessarily to the steroid thing. But like for how many years did they look the other way and soup that under the rug? If you sweep this under the rug as well, like where's the credibility of the league? Yeah. And I mean, so you mentioned it earlier, Rob Manfred's a Harvard law grad. Like he certainly could investigate this. The thing is, it may be taken out of his hands, depending on where this federal investigation goes of the bookmaker. They already have Otani's name on, you know, the wire transfers that we've spoken about. And Jim Murray brought it up on Felgar Mazde. Are there any records of the money going back the other way? Because that would be really concerning if you're MLB. Like now he's cashing the other guy. I mean, it gets very sorted and twisted right there. So this may end up out of MLB's hands. Maybe Otani gets swept up in it. If you think back, you mentioned the steroid era, think back to NFL, a lot of Rodney Harrison guys who got caught for stuff. It wasn't because the league caught them. It was because they got swept up in something else. So, you know, that could be a possibility here. It's to rack up that kind of gambling debt though for, for the interpreter who I guess it did come out that he was making somewhere between 300 and $500,000, which is a ton of money, I would think, for that position. But even if that's what he's making, to rack up that kind of debt is... Like what kind of bets do you have to make and how many do you have? Four and a half million dollars of debt. Beyond that, why would you credit someone that kind of money? If you're the bookmaker, why would you credit them that kind of money unless you know that they've got a way to pay it? Right. Or that someone else is making the bets who can afford the bets. Right. I have a theory, but I don't know if I want to float a theory on live television. I'll tell you guys in the brain. The sports world's certainly benefiting from gambling, but there are certainly drawbacks. In addition to the Otani story, several NFL players have been suspended for gambling, including Calvin Ridley. Senator Center Shane Pinto was suspended 41 games for violating the NHL's gambling policy. And Cavaliers head coach, J.B. Bickerstaff, said he's received threats from gamblers last season. All right, let's welcome Bert Breer into this part of the conversation. Bert, just a few incidents. Is this just a couple of incidents involving sports gambling, or is this a real concern for the leagues? All of them, including the NFL, as gambling becomes more ubiquitous? I think they're still trying to find their way, to be honest with you. If you look at the way certain situations have been handled, the Jameson-Williams one, I think in the NFL, was a real flashpoint where they had put in rules and safeguards, and they hadn't communicated the rules completely to the players, and it became a problem for them. And Jameson-Williams wound up getting his suspension reduced for people who don't know what happened with him. It was because he was gambling on team grounds. And the reason they don't want that to happen is they don't want some large-scale gambling operation happening inside the team building. The truth was that Jameson-Williams placed a bet on his phone while he was pulling out of the parking lot. So technically he did violate the rule, but it wasn't the spirit of the rule. So I think it's a good example of all these leagues and the individual team still trying to find their way. This is still brand new for so many of them. And after years, decades, and decades of saying, this is not allowed, you are not to even reference, not even reference betting lines, having to go into an environment where all this stuff is now legal and so accepted, you know, I think it was always gonna take some time for everybody to find their way. And the reality is, guys, it's not going away. I mean, gambling is everywhere, and it also is bringing a ton of advertising dollars to all of the leagues and partnerships. And what do these leagues care about? What do networks care about? We care about money, and can you pay people? And so as long as that's around Giles, like there is going to be this conflict of interest. I mean, you now have what NHL team, a football team, you're about to have a baseball and probably a basketball team in Las Vegas of all places. Yeah, but I think beyond that too, I guess Las Vegas doesn't really have the same connotation as it used to because you can bet anywhere. Like you can basically bet anywhere in the country, so I don't think it really has as much, negative connotations. Yeah, I don't think it's as much as it used to be, yes. But this has been going on for decades though too, even when it wasn't completely, you know, Phil Mickelson, you look at the, Billy Walters, what he detailed in his book and whether, you know, some of it was not 100% true or not, $100 million in gambling losses for it. Like this has been going on forever. I mean, the thing is, like part of me says, who cares? Like, Otani, could you maybe have approached us from the standpoint of everyone gambles? We have sports books, like sponsoring our jockstraps right now. Like what, who cares? Like, so you bet four million bucks on soccer. So what? Everyone gambles now. It's a part of every broadcast. It's a part of every stadium. They sponsor everything. So the cover up is going to be worse than the crime, which is always the story. I'd say guys, the one thing I would add to this too is like, I think the fact that it's being run through actual casinos now and over apps and all of that different stuff does change the context of everything. Cause the concern had always been, well, if a baseball player goes and gets in gambling debt and like gambling on football and he's working through a bookie, well there might be some real motivation for him to get out of that debt. How does he get out of that debt? He could compromise the integrity of the games. And that's something I think the leagues are still working through. Maybe the biggest problem for all of them here is they look like such hypocrites, you know, when they're enforcing some of these gambling rules because on one hand, again, you're coming down on a guy for placing a bet on another sport, pulling out of the parking lot of a team facility. And then, oh yeah, by the way, over here, there's a stadium that has the name of a casino on it. The Caesar's Superdome, right? Like so, like how do you square those two? That's something I think everybody's still working through.