Always one wager from a major scandal

When you consider the way the baseball season began - with news L.A. Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, the most compelling player on the planet, was enmeshed in an ugly betting scandal - it's been a relatively quiet all-star break for Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball.

- DAVE FESCHUK

Shohei Ohtani's interpreter and close friend Ippei Mizuhara pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud for stealing nearly $17 million (U.S.) from his bank account. The potential menace posed by sports betting isn't taking a day off, Dave Feschuk writes.

Some four months after the story broke that Ohtani's interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had been accused of stealing millions from Ohtani to pay debts run up as a self-admittedly "terrible" sports bettor, there's been nothing to connect Ohtani to anything untoward. Last month, after Mizuhara pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud for stealing nearly $17 million (U.S.) from Ohtani's bank account to fund his betting habit, Ohtani acknowledged the preceding months had been, for him, a "uniquely challenging time." Still, Manfred and the Dodgers could breathe a sigh of relief that it hadn't been an incriminating one.

As much as Ohtani clearly spent countless hours in the company of an enthusiast of illegal sports betting and as much as Pete Rose, whose lifetime betting ban from baseball will turn 35 next month, opined that if only he'd employed an interpreter he'd have emerged from his own gambling-related travails "scot-free" - there's no evidence Ohtani ever placed a wager that contravened baseball's gambling policy.

"It's time to close this chapter, move on and continue to focus on playing and winning ball games," Ohtani said last month.