Cup of Coffee: March 25, 2024

Good morning!

Today we have a substantial update on the Shohei Ohtani story, we gawk at an ESPN personality being stupidly irresponsible when talking about gambling, we talk about the death of Peter Angelos, a young man getting sent down, an older, but still young man coming to a career crossroads, and an argument in favor of the return of serious on-field trash talk.

In Other Stuff we talk about Donald Trump’s takeover of the RNC, we do a karma check in regards to our Princess Kate coverage, and we meet a man who claimed he owned a hotel based on paying to stay in it for one night and somehow managed to stay there for free for over four years.

 The Daily Briefing

Before we get into the latest news about a massive gambling scandal that is rocking the very foundations of Major League Baseball, let us pause for a word from one of MLB’s broadcast partners, ESPN:

That’s right folks, after a betting commentator who works for an actual gambling company explained why she’d take the under on a college basketball game, one of ESPN’s most senior and most respected studio hosts, Rece Davis, called it “a risk-free investment.” To say that is wildly irresponsible, even if said with a chuckle and a wink, is a tremendous understatement. It just underscores how much gambling has debased sports media.

Davis — no doubt immediately called by the lawyers and the suits — tweeted out a sorta apology/corrective a little later in the day. Hilariously, even if it was unintentionally, he broke up his statement over two tweets, with the first one ending mid-statement as “Though I’m not a gambler, I strongly encourage those who do . . .” Always be promoting, Rece! Always be promoting!

Anyway, let’s get on with the day.

The latest on the Shohei Ohtani story

“The Shohei Ohtani Story?” The “Shoehi Ohtani Scandal?” “L’Affaire Ohtani?” I don’t know. I’m still playing around with these titles. Anything but “Ohtanigate.” Watergate is just as long ago in our past as the Teapot Dome Scandal was when Watergate hit. As such, I feel like the “-gate” scandal-naming convention should be retired forever. We can do better.

For now:

• A Dodgers public relations official confirmed yesterday that the plan is for Ohtani to address the media later today. This will be his first time speaking since the story broke last week. As noted below, what he has to say and in what level of detail is gonna matter a great deal to how all of this goes. Frankly, I’d advise him to say nothing, but no one listens to me;
• Major League Baseball finally made a statement announcing that it would be investigating the matter. I had mused on Thursday that MLB’s acknowledgment of the scandal would come in a late Friday afternoon media dump. I got the email press release from MLB at 5:56 PM on Friday. Tell me I don’t know this league and how it rolls;
• That release came an hour or two after ESPN dropped a more detailed story describing the timeline of last week’s events, its conversations with Ippei Mizuhara when they confronted him with what they had learned about the wire transfers, and their subsequent interaction with the Ohtani spokesperson;
• This is the spokesperson, by the way, who, along with Mizuhara, initially told ESPN that Mizuhara asked Ohtani to pay his gambling debts to the bookie and that Ohtanti did so, knowingly, because he wanted to help Mizuhara out. The story then explains how everyone tried to recant that, no doubt because the lawyers found out about it and realized that Mizuhara and the spokesperson were unwittingly implicating Ohtani in federal crimes and a violation of MLB rules;
• Before we talk any more about the details of that, can we give a shoutout to the Ohtani spokesperson in question? Per the ESPN story it was not someone already on staff. Rather, it was a “crisis communications” spokesperson, the sort of whom businesses and high-profile people hire to put out really bad fires. This crisis communication spokesperson seems to have tried to put out this fire with a flamethrower. This is the person who initially floated the damaging "Ohtani paid off the gambling debts” story, who then arranged to put Mizuhara in front of ESPN reporters for 90 minutes, and who then confirmed everything Mizuhara said — in addition to offering a completely gratuitous quote purportedly from Ohtani in which the spokesperson said Ohtani said that he sent “several large payments” to the bookie — before the lawyer-driven Great Recanting began. I really gotta know who this spokesperson was because, oh my god they cocked it up good.

Now for some analysis:

• For what it’s worth, Mizuhara’s initial explanation of this to ESPN — he got into deep gambling debts, Ohtani knew nothing about it until he finally told him and asked Ohtani to help him, which Ohtani then did over a series of payments — sounds eminently plausible. Like, if I had to guess, that’s how it probably went down. I would be surprised, in fact, if we learn that Ohtani was not the one who effected the wire transfers. The real question is what Ohtani knew and what he thought he was doing when he made the payments;
• The lawyers’ statement — that this was a “massive theft” — clearly seeks to create the impression of Mizuhara just up and stealing money from a completely oblivious Ohtani, possibly by illegally accessing his computer and/or his accounts. I would guess, however, that that won’t hold as the actual story. I think the lawyers chose their words very carefully so as to create that impression, but their statement leaves things open for this to be more a matter of Ohtani willingly making the wire transfers but Mizuhara misleading Ohtani as to what they were for. That would still, broadly speaking, be “theft” in the non-legal sense of the term, but it’d more likely be some species of fraud or embezzlement or what have you. Ohtani doing Mizuhara’s bidding, but doing so under false pretenses created by Mizuhara;
• This suspicion on my part is bolstered by the fact that the IRS is currently investigating Mizuhara and that Ohtani’s attorneys have not said to whom they reported the “massive thefts.” If it was a digitized smash-and-grab, the FBI would be on this and Mizuhara would be perp-walked in handcuffs pretty soon because Ohtani would tell the feds through his lawyers, like yesterday, that Mizuhara accessed his accounts without authorization. If it’s a false pretenses thing it requires a longer investigation as to who knew what and when. For what it’s worth, the IRS’ most common role in cases like these is to go after gamblers for not reporting their winnings, not prosecuting common hackers and thieves. All of this could change, but the longer Mizuhara remains a free man, the less likely it seems to me that he just brazenly ripped Ohtani off.
• The most likely story if Ohtnai effected the wire transfers but did not know they were gambling debts would be Mizuhara telling Ohtani that he was in deep to a loan shark. This is bolstered by the fact that the wire transfers had the word “loan” entered into the notes fields, per multiple reports. It’s also bolstered to some degree by reports that Mizuhara was not truthfully translating certain things to Ohtani just before he got fired. I still think the “Ohtani knew it was gambling debts and was trying to help Mizuhara out” story sounds pretty plausible, but “Mizuhara told Ohtani it was a different kind of debt and Ohtani was trying to help out” story is plausible too;
• Whether Ohtani actually thought these payments were about loans or whether it was something Ohtani/Mizuhara came up with to cover up the fact that this money was going to a bookie cannot be known right now, but the Feds and/or Major League Baseball will no doubt ask Ohtani about that and he’ll have to say so. If that does hold, though, it would transform Ohtani’s act from paying a bookie, which would be bad, to Ohtani paying a not-bookie, which would get him out of most of the potential hot water we’ve discussed since last week, I figure. No matter what it is, it makes him a witness to whom the feds will be talking so, he’s not out of the woods yet and won’t be for a while;
• All of that would mean that last week’s actions and statements from Ohtani’s attorneys was some world class PR and legal needle-threading, in response to which I give an anticipatory tip of my old, dusty, and sweat-ringed lawyer’s cap. Nice work! Especially give the mess they had to clean up from comically loquacious crisis communications arsonist.

Two more stories of note came out over the weekend which add to the flavor of all of this:

• The first one is a Washington Post deep dive into the gambler who received the wire transfers, Matthew Bowyer. The guy sounds all kinds of crooked and shady, having been involved in all manner of sketchy gambling endeavors, including receiving payments from some gambling operation linked to organized crime, getting involved in a Caribbean real estate scam, and stuff like that. Mizuhara, it appears, met this guy a few years ago and got in super deep to him almost immediately. Bowyer says he never met Ohtani, never spoke to Ohtani, and that the bets were never Ohtani’s but that he extended Mizuhara the credit “Because [Othani] was [Mizuhara’s] best friend.” A key question is whether it was just Bowyer’s assumption that Ohtani would pay off Mizuhara’s debts or whether Mizuhara made representations to Bowyer that Ohtani would. And, of course, whether such representations were based on something of substance or, rather, the desperation of a compulsive gambler;
• The second story, which came out late Saturday night, was that Mizuhara’s publicly available biography appears to be exaggerated and, in some instances, simply phony. His bio in the Angels media guide said that he graduated from University of California, Riverside in 2007. University officials contacted by NBC Los Angeles, however, said that they have no record of his even having attended U.C. Riverside. It also appears that Mizuhara falsely claimed to have worked with Japanese players on the Yankees and Red Sox before he latched on with Ohtani. With one — Hideki Okajima — being a flat-out lie. I feel like that’s something that could’ve easily been confirmed or refuted years ago, but I suppose no one cared because it’s not like people run drafts of the media guide past the legal department. It’s just a damn media guide. But it does show you how easy it can be to lie on your resumé. You’ll likely never get busted just for the lie. It’ll only come to light if you become prominent for different reasons later. Oh yeah, and it also shows you that Mizuhara is not an honest person;
• Per The Athletic “Spokespeople representing Ohtani declined to comment when asked if they had believed Mizuhara’s biography during his tenure with Ohtani.” NOW they shut up! Where was that silence last week, people?!

So that’s the state of things right now. Based on everything I’ve seen it seems very clear to me at least that Mizuhara is a gambling addict who got in deep. We’ve seen nothing to support a claim that Ohtani was himself gambling.

It also seems clear that Mizuhara is a liar. The key points of inquiry will be about how much he lied to Ohtani, whether Ohtani actually effected the wire transfers (seems likely to me), and whether Ohtani actually knew what the wire transfers were for (unclear at the moment). If Ohtani did effect them and he did know that they were for gambling debts, he’s going to be in some hot water. If he effected them and Mizuhara lied to him as to what they were for, Ohtani is likely in the clear, as long as he doesn’t lie to any investigators.

Once all of that is resolved, we can move on to the topic of how a how key employee of a major league baseball team — an employee who had close, personal access to the most famous and important player in the game — was allowed to associate themselves with sketchy-as-fuck gamblers for years without the league either knowing or caring the first thing about it.

[Editor: You think the league is going to even attempt to look into that stuff at all?]

Well, no. But if I make a note about the significance of that now, I can write far, far more self-righteously about it later when MLB starts pretending that none of this ever happened, which they totally will.

Peter Angelos: 1929-2024 

Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos died over the weekend. He had been suffering from dementia and other health ailments. He was 94. Which at some point becomes an ailment in and of itself because no one lives forever and hardly anyone lives to 94.

Angelos grew up in a working class family. His father, a Greek immigrant, was a tavern owner. Angelos put himself through college and law school while working at the tavern. He made his name as a products liability lawyer, most famously going after asbestos makers on behalf of thousands of steelworkers, shipyard workers, and manufacturers' employees who were killed or sickened by the substance. He later pursued class actions on behalf of the state of Maryland against the tobacco companies and scammy diet pill manufacturers in an effort to recover healthcare expenditures the state had to make as a result of people’s use of those products.

All of that litigation made Angelos extraordinarily wealthy, and he used a good chunk of his money to purchase the Orioles for $173 million in 1993 after former owner Eli Jacobs went bankrupt. At the time of Angelos' purchase it was the highest amount ever paid for a sports franchise. Which seems almost quaint now, but at the time it was a massive deal. Orioles fans rejoiced when Angelos took over. They would eventually, however, become disenchanted with his stewardship of the club.

There were almost always worse teams than the Orioles during the Angelos years, but the relative lack of success for a franchise which had seen so much of it in the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s was galling to the fan base. The club made the postseason in only six of the 30 seasons of the Angelos family ownership. They made the ALCS three times but never won a pennant. They suffered through fourteen consecutive losing seasons between 1998 and 2011. They cycled through eleven managers and multiple front office executives in large part because Angelos was a meddlesome owner and didn’t trust his baseball operations people. On the whole, it’s been rather depressing to be an O’s fan over the past 30 years or so, though things are certainly looking brighter now than they did a few years ago.

Not that Angelos was a hated figure more broadly speaking. He was a staunch Baltimore booster and people who know the city well believed Angelos cared about it deeply. He was also unusual for an owner of a professional sports team in that he genuinely respected the Players Union and labor in general, even famously refusing to go along with the other owners’ plans to field teams of would-be union-busting scab players during the 1994-95 strike. There were a lot of reasons that plan was doomed to failure, but Angelos’ refusal to go along with it was a key part of its demise and the subsequent end of the work-stoppage. I’m not sure it’s possible for a member of the billionaire sports-team owning class to truly be admired by anyone but their peers, but Angelos probably came closer to that than most of the others.

Angelos' death comes just days before his family's sale of the team to David Rubenstein is expected to be finalized. The last hurdle to the $1.725 billion sale is receiving approval from 75% of Major League Baseball's owners and that is expected to happen without any drama. It seems appropriate almost that Angelos passes just as his family is to pass his ballclub to a fellow Baltimore booster who seems far more committed to the team and the city than Angelos’ sons do. If you gotta go, going at age 94 with your life’s legacy in as good as shape as Angelos’ is at the moment is not a bad way to do it.

Rest in peace Peter Angelos.

Jackson Holliday to start the season in the minors 

One of the legacies of the Angelos years — especially in the past six or seven years since Peter Angelos’ son took over — is manipulating service time. Which makes it fitting that the last major team decision that happened while Angelos was still among the living was to send down a super exciting top prospect who is almost certainly better than the people who will play his position on the big club and was almost certainly done in an effort to game his service time.

Here I’m talking about Jackson Holliday, the infielder who was the number one overall pick in the 2022 draft and who is ranked at or near the top of all the experts’ prospect rankings lists. He also happens to be Matt Holliday’s son, if you wanna feel old. Though the fact that he’s just 20 — only 11 days older than my daughter, in fact — is enough for me no matter who his dad is. Either way, Holliday hit a combined .323/.442/.499 in 125 games across all four minor league levels as a 19 year old last year. He also hit well this spring, going 14-for-45 with two homers, six RBI, slugged .600, and stole two bases in Grapefruit League action.

There’s ALWAYS a reason one can give to keep a player, especially a player as young as Holliday is, down on the farm for a few extra weeks to start a season, and the O’s gave some reasons for that over the weekend. It’s about “putting a player in the best position for his own long-term success” said GM Mike Elias. He could use some more work against lefties, they said. He could stand to be exposed to more Triple-A pitchers. All of that is hard to dispute, and there are always young players who get badly exposed in their first big league action. But I’d bet Shohei Ohtani’s money that this was more about service time.

But eh, what can you do? The system is the system. At least now, unlike a few years ago, that system allows for players who are held down for service time purposes to recoup that service time if they excel and become one of the top-two vote-getters in the Rookie of the Year voting. Which Holliday totally could. So off to Norfolk he goes. Until, I suspect, no later than May.

The Guardians waive Miles Straw despite still owing him $19 million

Cleveland Guardians outfielder Myles Straw signed a five-year, $25 million extension with the club in 2022 that locked him up through at least 2026 and which had options that could’ve kept him in a Guardians uniform through 2028. At present he’s still owed $19 million on that deal. The club, however, has cut bait on him, placing him on waivers on Friday.

Given the money he is owed, Straw is extremely unlikely to be claimed by another organization. And given that he is two months short of five years of service time he does not have the power to refuse an outright assignment to the minor leagues once he clears waivers. He’ll almost certainly be down here with me in Columbus cooling his heels as organizational depth, though one without a place on the 40-man roster.

Straw, 29, was traded from Houston to Cleveland in the middle of the 2021 season. He finished strong that year, hitting .285/.362/.377 (105 OPS+) in 60 games, leading to the contract extension just before the 2022 campaign began. Since then, however, he has posted a 67 OPS+ in 299 games. He won a Gold Glove in 2022 and he remains a strong defensive outfielder, but that batting line ain’t gonna cut it in the bigs.

I talk a lot about guys leaving money on the table when they sign team-friendly extensions before they’ve reached free agency. But this is one of those instances in which the player ended up doing the right thing. Because based on how it looks right now Straw will, at the most, get sporadic big league playing time for whatever remains of his career. But he’ll also have cleared $25 million based one good 60-game stretch that his team miscalculated to be a new norm as opposed to an outlier.

“Insane whooping,” “incessant howling” and “disgusting mouthings”

The pitch clock was a pretty successful innovation last year, but there are some people who think baseball needs to make even more radical changes in order to stoke fan interest in what was once the National Pastime. Like a man named Rafi Kohan, who has written a lot about sports psychology and who apparently has a book coming out about trash-talking in sports.

Kohan, writing in the New York Times, believes baseball needs to see the return of “bench-jockeying” which was the older, more genteel word for trash talking. He provides a nice, albeit cursory overview of the history of old school, 19th and early-20th century trash talk and then notes its decline:

In baseball, bench jockeying started to fade from the picture sometime in the mid-20th century. Among other factors, the advent of a players’ union and free agency cultivated a feeling of more fraternity among those in uniform. Athletes also imagined themselves as having more to lose as game checks ballooned in size: No one wanted a retaliatory fastball aimed at his head. (Throughout the bench-jockeying era, violence was not uncommon as a response to verbal abuse.) But without trash talk, baseball has lost more than the occasional dugout brawl and well-timed zinger; it’s lost some of its drama.

Kohan wants to see its return beyond just the occasional hoots ballplayers sometimes loose. He wants to see a return to the “insane whooping,” “incessant howling” and “disgusting mouthings” that baseball’s godfather of trash talk, 19th century star Arlie Latham, unleashed on his opponents to the delight of the overhearing crowds but to the disgust of his opponents and the men who ran the league. “How much more interesting would an encounter between former teammates like Max Scherzer and Bryce Harper be if the slugger came to the plate barking that Scherzer is too old to still be on the bump? Or if the ace informed Harper he’ll still be making him look silly when he’s 59,” Kohan writes.

It’s fun to think about. And it’d be fun to hear. But I think the “play the game the right way”/”respect the game” ethos that has become deeply-rooted over the past several decades would completely prevent it. The discourse and hand-wringing over even a clever, non-offensive barb would be massive, exhausting, and ultimately so eye-rolling that we’re probably all better off not having to go through it. And that’s before you realize that a great many players today would probably be totally incapable of barking at opponents for more than a week before they started dropping slurs and other unfortunate words and phrases that would only make the trash talking itself pretty ugly and would render the discourse about it even more exhausting. I mean, the old guys used tons of slurs too, but that was just part of the deal when you lived in Olden Times.

So, nah, nothing north of calling the pitcher a “belly-itcher” would probably fly. And even then I’m sure someone — probably on Twitter or Bluesky — would make a convoluted argument about how calling someone “belly-itcher” is ableist or has roots in some episode of historical oppression that they just Googled moments before.

Other Stuff

Karma’s a bitch

The Associated Press reported late last week that Donald Trump’s new joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee — which he has basically taken over and staffed with family members — directs donations to his campaign and a political action committee that pays his legal bills first before the RNC and any downballot Republican campaigns get a cut. And based on how much that PAC — the “Save America PAC” — has spent on Trump’s legal bills, there will be scant left over for party operations that don’t directly benefit Trump.

This is doubly good for people like me. For one thing it’s some instant karma for all of those Republicans, many of whom should know better, who have cravenly elevated and protected Trump over the years. I’m sure most of them figured it’d work to their personal benefit despite the fact that nothing in the entire 50+ years that Trump has been in the public eye has ever suggested that he is interested in anything other than himself.

For another thing: it’s a great lesson to Republicans about how trickle-down economics actually works. I don’t think it will change their commitment to robbing from the poor to pay the rich, but at least we can enjoy the irony for a while.

Speaking of Karma . . .

. . . I do hope I have not accumulated any for contributing to the “The Missing Princess” stuff over the past several weeks. But now that we’ve learned that Princess Kate has cancer and was decidedly not doing a whole “Roman Holiday” deal I suppose I probably have. At least a little bit.

Not that I feel too bad about it. I say that because if her spokespeople had not literally come out a couple of weeks back and said, affirmatively, that Kate was not sick, neither I nor anyone else with a conscience would’ve been cracking wise. But they said that and told misleading, and yes, sometimes kinda funny stories about it so they sorta opened the door as far as I’m concerned. Now that we do know she is sick, however, anyone who spins conspiracy theories or makes distasteful jokes is obviously just being a jackass.

As are the people who are writing stories in which they speak to so-called “body language experts” to judge her veracity and mental state or who have completely new conspiracy theories as to why Prince William as not in the video too, holding her hand and being a dutiful husband. No I won’t link them because no one needs that in their life, but they’re out there. I seen ‘em.

In closing: the Internet was, remains, and always will be a great, great mistake. Almost as great a mistake as elevating a bunch of sixth and seventh century bullies and thugs who were strong enough to take control of largish pieces of land as the Roman Empire fell, allowing them to launder their bullying and thuggery by calling themselves monarchs, and somehow getting it to stick for the next 1500 years.

How to (almost) steal a hotel

There was once a “Seinfeld” episode in which Kramer and Newman stumbled across an obscure New York ordinance that gave them the right to squat in a hotel room on the cheap and, via a couple of seemingly innocuous paperwork screwups, put them into a position where they felt they could claim that they owned the whole damn hotel. Kramer put on a suit and walked around the place giving orders to bellboys, summoned architects to plan a big expansion, and renamed the whole place “Hotel Kramer.” Their scheme was going well until they got sued by the real hotel owners, they hired Jackie Chiles to defend them, and Chiles berated them, saying “who TOLD you that you owned the hotel? I didn’t tell you that you owned the hotel!” Then it just sort of collapsed.

OK, that’s not true. Sure, it’s a plausible late-period “Seinfeld” subplot — maybe it was even one that came in via a spec script from some wannabe TV writer! — but it never actually happened. Yet such a hypothetical episode is all I could think of when I read the story yesterday of a man named Mickey Barreto, who basically did that with the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Barreto — who does not sound like a particularly well man — got a room at the New Yorker for one night in 2018, found some provision in New York’s rent control regulations that suggested to him that he could actually get a longterm, low-money lease for the room, and after some temporary unpleasantness from the hotel managers, got a judge to say that he had “possession” and could stay there. Except the order was super vague and poorly-worded, Barreto took the order to the recorder’s office and claimed that, as a result of the order, he actually had “possession” of the entire hotel, and somehow got a deed issued saying he actually owned the whole building.

The whole thing would not have happened if it was not, I suspect, for the lack of attention to detail by some probably overworked civil servants, but before it could be undone Barreto managed to live in the damn place for the price of one night’s stay — $200 or so — for over four years. In that time he made very Kramer-like attempts to get tenants of the building to pay him rather than the hotel and sent off emails demanding that someone fix the revolving door on 8th Avenue. In an un-Kramer-like turn he was eventually kicked out, arrested, and charged with various counts of fraud. That’s not super fun but he was really on a roll there for a while.

If anyone knows Ippei Mizuhara, don’t show him this article. I don’t want him getting any ideas.

Have a great day everyone.

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