SHOHEI OHTANI left Anaheim for Los Angeles for a seven-year, $100 million contract with the Dodgers. Any regrets? (Angels photo).
There’s a scene in the TV series “Justified” in which Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylin Givens – at gunpoint – asks a bad guy to tell him what he knows about a certain shady situation.
“I don’t know,” said the bad guy, with apparent sincerity. “How can I tell you what I don’t know?”
Precisely.
Let’s assume that Shohei is telling the truth about never gambling on baseball.
There are some who have doubts about that, but OK, let’s set that aside for a bit.
What we still don’t know is how his interpreter was able to get access to Shohei’s bank account.
We still don’t know how or why Shohei didn’t have a business manager or accountant to ride herd on his finances.
We don’t know why “Showtime” didn’t bother to check his bank balance for a mere missing $4.5 million.
(One theory is that he’s sho rich that he didn’t miss it. Like the story about Bill Gates about not bothering to pick up a dropped $100 bill because in the time it took to retrieve it his wealth had already grown by $1000).
And why, exactly, Ohtani still needed to pay an interpreter a reported $400,000 a year after six years in American baseball?
Especially as he comes from a nation in which English is taught from the early ages on up?
Four hundred thousand dollars? I took French when I was 13 to 15 years old and with some refreshing could probably be serviceable as a translator for $40 an hour and all the Dodger Dogs I could eat. It doesn’t take that long to learn key baseball phrases like “thattaboy,” “waytohustle” “whatwereyouthnking” and “blankety-blank-blank.”
Of course, maybe I’m approaching this wrong. Maybe the things we don’t yet know are things we may not want to know.