Shohei Ohtani is, when healthy, the best baseball player alive as well as the most remarkable. No one since Babe Ruth (and no one before Babe either) managed to be a star slugger and an ace pitcher simultaneously, and Ruth never filled both roles in equal measure in the same seasons like Ohyani has. It may well be that the imported Japanese star isn’t as great a hitter as Babe or as overpowering a pitcher either, but never mind: he’s star quality on the mound and at the plate, and that is unprecedented.

The undisputed most valuable player in baseball signed a massive free agent contract with the best team in baseball (and, after the despicable Yankees, the best known), so Major League Baseball was confident that it had hit the metaphorical jackpot. And then…disaster struck.

During a Seoul, South Korea, series between the Dodgers and San Diego Padres, it was revealed that Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s interpreter since 2013 who followed the star to the United States in 2018, had been illegally gambling on sports; a law enforcement investigation of a bookie uncovered his activities. Ohtani’s name was bank transfers to the bookie to cover Mizuhara’s gambling losses, but Mizuhara insisted that his boss and friend knew nothing about the gambling. The Dodgers fired Mizuhara and the official story coming from Ohtani’s lawyers was that Mizuhara had been stealing money from Ohtani.

Ohtani’s spokesman then told ESPN that the new Dodger had transferred his own funds to cover Mizuhara’s gambling debts. (It was millions, but Ohtani has already banked at least $69,000,000 and signed a contract paying him 254 million more, so the few millions or so was literally pocket change.) Then Mizuhara submitted to an ESPN interview and recanted everything he had said the very next day. Ohtani’s lawyers weighed in, announcing that “In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities,” which didn’t clarify much.

It seems that the wire-transfer payments were sent from Ohtani’s account to an associate of the bookie, according to multiple sources and bank data reviewed by ESPN. More sources, including Mizuhara, told ESPN that Ohtani does not gamble and that the funds only covered Mizuhara’s losses; still, Ohtani’s was the name on name on two $500,000 payments sent in September and October.

Here’s a wrinkle: although sports betting is legal in all but ten states, one of those ten states is California, where Ohtani has lived and played baseball for the past six years. “Sources” informed ESPN that the bookie dealt directly with Mizuhara—he supposedly placed bets only on sports other than baseball—and that despite the player’s name appearing on the wire transfers, the bookie jumped to no conclusions. Other sources, however, say that the bookie allowed people to believe Ohtani was his client.

Then Mizuhara changed his story again, claiming that Shohei Ohtani never gave him any money and wasn’t aware aware of his interpreter’s illegal activities. It now looks like at least $4.5 million was withdrawn via wire transfer from Ohtani’s bank accounts by…somebody.

What’s going on here?

What’s going on here is that the anointed “face of baseball” is up to his neck in a gambling scandal. Maybe he really was a complete innocent, but there is an awful lot of smoke for there not to be a fire somewhere. Ohtani has had Ippei Mizuhara as his closest associate in the U.S. for six years, and has employed him for more than a decade. Claims that he was clueless regarding his friend’s extensive gambling are about as credible as Joe Biden’s claim that he never talked to Hunter about his business dealings. Mizuhara, as a loyal carrier of Japanese culture, is expected to take all of the legal blame regardless of the truth. Still, MLB is obligated to investigate, and so will investigative reporters. The story is too juicy to ignore.

Yesterday, Shohei Ohtani finally gave his own statement. He took no questions, and stuck with the story that Mizuhara stole from him, and that the superstar was as shocked as anyone when the interpreter confessed in South Korea.

Do you believe that? Let’s just say I have my doubts. There have been four disastrous scandals in baseball, and two of them involved Hall of Fame caliber players being involved in gambling. (If you don’t know the other two scandals, you need to follow baseball more closely.) The first gambling scandal, the fixed World Series of 1919, nearly killed the sport, causing baseball to make an iron clad rule that gambling and baseball must forever be separated. Then, over the last few years, the money to be made by online gambling got to be too much for the fools running the game to resist. Now sports betting operations have ads in every baseball broadcast. Some local team broadcasts invite viewers to bet on aspects of the game in progress. The message the sport now embraces is that gambling is harmless, fun, and completely endorsed by Major League Baseball.

Morons. Morons. Do they know nothing about how culture works? It is impossible to simultaneously tell the players that gambling is verboten while all around the players the sport is aggressively promoting what it says that players must not do.

Maybe Ohtani really is innocent, but this scandal tarnished him nonetheless. And if he isn’t at the center of a gambling scandal that sends the American Pastime into a crisis, eventually some other superstar will be. Baseball’s hypocrisy and greed guarantees it.