Have you ever seen a house fire with no smoke?
But this smokeless fire would probably have been visible from miles away, even weeks away.
From the moment it was discovered that Mizuhara Ippei, a former friend of the $700 million international A-lister Shohei Ohtani, had racked up Godzilla-sized sports-betting debts of at least $17 million with Ohtani’s money, executives at banks, lending firms and brokerages have been calling to warn of a looming cover-up.
In April, MLB quietly announced Ohtani’s exoneration. We were supposed to believe that Ohtani had nothing to do with it, and that Mizuhara had unsolicited millions of dollars in loans from bookmakers. The bookmakers were not informed, and were not interested, that Mizuhara’s collateral had nothing to do with Ohtani’s close friendship.
MLB’s blessing for Ohtani to “Play ball!” prompted yet another barrage of “What the heck?” emails from people who know far more about financial law than I, a simple mortgage borrower.
One such contact is a tight-lipped senior executive and compliance officer/investigator for a large East Coast financial firm, who asked to remain anonymous.
From the start, long before Mizuhara pleaded guilty to theft in a California court, this person predicted MLB would give Ohtani a pass, one of those automatic intentional passes of the Rob Manfred era. After MLB cleared Ohtani, he continued:
“This is a completely transparent cover-up against MLB’s biggest star.
“Any transfer of more than $10,000 in the U.S. banking system will trigger a SAR (suspicious transaction report), which must be reviewed, reported and documented at multiple levels of the bank, from the branch system to compliance and even legal if there are multiple instances.”
“these are Must comply It is important.
“These need to be submitted to FinCEN. [the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network run by the U.S. Treasury] Whenever foul play is suspected.
“This pattern screams ‘scam!’ There are red flags all over the place.”
“Or should we believe that there were, say, 34 transfers of $500,000 each? [totaling $17 million] They each placed a bet with a well-known bookmaker and no one noticed? Impossible!”
Or are we to believe that the bookmakers waited until Mizuhara was millions in debt before trying to collect? How much was his settlement? $5 million paid in $20 bills?
But MLB has already made its decision: “After further review, our superstars are safe!”
TNT’s Smith deserves more love
The media’s approach has been predictably ridiculous, with NBA rights expected to move from TNT to NBC and people gnashing their teeth over what that means for TNT’s two big-name studio panelists, Charles Barkley (retirement? No way) and Shaquille O’Neal, who kill time exchanging corny platitudes while making mostly unfunny insults of each other before breaking into forced belly laughs.
But Kenny Smith, the guy who pays attention to the game of the day and adds applicable and appreciated insight and content, becomes an afterthought, a disposable throwaway piece.
That’s only natural.
On Thursday at Kansas City, the Yankees lost 4-3 on Michael Garcia’s two-run double down the left field line with two outs.
While there were two big fundamental reasons why DJ LeMahieu decided to line up third base (the winning run was on first base and Garcia is a right-handed hitter), LeMahieu played further away from the base toward shortstop.
Garcia put the ball where LeMahieu logically should have been. Did Aaron Boone and his staff overlook decades of smart baseball strategy and new analytics?
There is no ridiculously long expression that won’t be copied and maintained by game commentators. Simply put, plain English is becoming obsolete.
A team that has scored at least one run in an innings will no longer say “We got two runs” or “We got three runs.” They will have to say “We got two runs” or “We got three runs.”
Last Sunday, Michael Kay must have told us under oath that “the Mets scored four runs,” as if that’s what he or anyone else would say in everyday baseball conversation.
On Thursday, everyone involved was sprinting, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, when the Yankees-Royals game ended with a two-out, two-run double. Of course, it was quickly described as a walk-off double. An almighty ploy.
This week’s box score: In Tuesday’s 5-3 loss to Cleveland, the Reds used seven pitchers, with only one of them, Buck Farmer, lasting two innings.
The Diamondbacks used seven pitchers in their 9-3 win over the Padres. See how the rule that you have to face three batters works?
In the next game between the Reds and Diamondbacks, it was said that both teams’ relief pitchers were exhausted and that they needed to let their starting pitchers “go long,” meaning pitch five or six innings.
Pick up eavesdropping
A story written here on Friday about Edmonton’s Darnell Nurse leaning over the boards from his seat at the end of the bench to hear what ice-side commentator Ray Ferraro was saying about him to the ESPN Stanley Cup Final crowd reminded me of a similarly situated clash I had 45 years ago while covering the Cosmos soccer team.
The Cosmos had a Belgian winger, Francois van der Elst, who I remember after the game, I think in Edmonton (when I want It’s hard to believe, but the Cosmos’ grunting, snarling, humorless German coach, Hennes Weisweiler, had unpleasant things to say about van der Elst’s play.
In those days, The Post was an evening paper, so I could go back to the team’s hotel rooms and type up stories, and we’d leave the hotel door open so we didn’t have to answer knocks; we’d just walk in.
Who joined me when I was transcribing the negative comments that Weisweiler had written about van der Elst? Van der Elst. “I was just writing about you,” I told him. He asked me what I was writing, and I read Weisweiler’s words out loud to him.
Van der Elst went on to angrily retort, publicly quoting every word his coach had said about him, as if King George III had been present at the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, which is very bizarre.
CBS’ Jim Nantz never tires of Tiger Woods discrediting himself.
Last Sunday, Scottie Scheffler won The Memorial, further cementing his status as the best golfer in the world right now.
But when Scheffler approached Jack Nicklaus, the tournament’s annual host, to respectfully shake his hand, Nantz thought it appropriate to tell us that Woods, who had nothing to do with this moment, had shook hands with Nicklaus “five times” after winning the Memorial. And it was too late to shout, “Enough!”
Two weeks after Bill Walton’s death, emails arrived that were testament to his kindness. Two stand out for the same reason: One was from a man who worked as a parking attendant at the arena when he was a kid, and the other was from a man who worked as a security guard at the team and media entrance.
Both wrote that Walton would stop and introduce himself when they came in, as if they didn’t know who he was, and always say thank you and farewell when he left.
