The Secret World of Baseball Interpreters — and Shohei Ohtani

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

I feel like he's really trustworthy, so I felt really comfortable in being my interpreter.

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You motherfucker.

Welcome to Parakey Cortez.

Finds Out.

I am Parakey Cortez.

And today we're going to find out what this sound is.

You know that I'm in Miami and that you had to zoom in from our studio.

I did not give you permission to sit in my chair and and certainly not wear my

cardigan.

Let me just tell you, as much as I want to roast you for the cardigan, I get why you wear it every f ⁇ ing show.

Like, it's very comfortable.

It feels expensive.

I don't want to take it off.

It is expensive.

I may not take it off.

It fits me great.

Like, I'm filling it out in a way that you never have.

Like, your arms like would sink in this thing.

That, okay, let's not get out of control here.

I'm just saying.

How does it smell?

Not as bad as you would think.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I've been trying to say this to our audience

for almost a year.

But the entire reason I even had you back on the show today is because there, in fact, is somebody else, Cortez, who has been thriving in the absence of their own accomplice.

One on, two, out.

The one, one.

Otani unleashes high into the Friday night sky and gone.

Shohei Otani is the biggest star in baseball.

The Major League Baseball All-Star Game is on Tuesday, and he's an MVP candidate, and he's been doing amazing, amazing, without, you know, his interpreter, Ipe Mitsuhara.

Are you calling me your Japanese interpreter?

Is that what you're doing?

I'm not calling you that.

I'm not calling you my Ipe Mitsuhara, the banished Japanese interpreter, who is, by the way, at the forefront of the largest scandal in baseball.

Tonight, the stakes are rising in the scandal surrounding star LA Dodgers pitcher Shohei Otani, with Major League Baseball launching an investigation after illegal gambling allegations involving Otani's interpreter and close friend, Ipe Mizuhara.

The scandal broke when the LA Times reported that Otani's name came up in connection with a federal investigation into a sports betting ring in Orange County.

A source telling NBC News that Mizuhara initially said Otani bailed him out of $4.5 million in gambling debts, but Otani's lawyer saying the pitcher was the victim of a massive theft this story i got to be honest bro it did not play out how i expected because i expected it to play out in the obvious manner which is otani knows about this he's going to get in trouble obviously he knows about this look at how much money was taken out right

dollars yeah the reason it didn't play out that way the way it played out was oh tani's he doesn't know any of this because that helps mlb think about it so otani right now he's not pitching he's only hitting this year he's leading the national league at home runs he's by far the leading candidate for mvp in the n He's the face of baseball.

So, on that level, you do have something of a point.

And what I've started to do was go back and watch some videos of Shohei and Ipe together at all these press conferences they did.

And there is one specific question that Ipe and Shohei both had to answer in their first spring training ever.

This is back with the Angels.

And the video I want to play for you now is from 2018.

Shohei, can you describe your relationship with Ipe and how you settled on him as your interpreter?

I know you were involved in the process.

really trustworthy.

So I felt really comfortable in being my interpreter.

Really trustworthy, Cortez, is what Ipe Mitsuhara said in the third person while speaking in the first person about himself.

While dressed as the second person next to him, I guess you could say, I mean, what do we do?

They are dressed up in identical, like fully zipped up angels track jackets.

And the question was, just to restate it here, can you describe your relationship with Ipe and how you settled on him as your interpreter?

And that is the question that I mostly wanted to try and find the answer to here.

And so what I wanted to do was call up a third person,

Tim Rohan.

You know Tim, a guy.

I remember Tim.

A guy who has great hair as well.

Unlike you.

Yeah, he washes his hair.

Very hygienic.

He's an investigative reporter, former baseball beat writer for the New York Times.

And what I wanted him to help us find out was how much vetting a Japanese player like Shohei Otani actually does when it comes to selecting the person who does the interpreting for them.

And also, how you can possibly learn to trust somebody to do what turns out to be a uniquely and incredibly intimate job.

I'll be your interpreter if you need one.

That is not helpful to anybody.

I'm just offering.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Veeen Champain, a 14 alcoholic volume, reported by Remy Control, USA, Incorporated, New York, New York, 1738, Centaur Design.

Please drink responsibly.

Wait, turn off my phone.

Yes, dude.

Are you just checking your phone to make sure someone else has not said no to you?

That's what the intrepid reporter would do.

No, it's been, yeah, it's been weeks.

It's been the only sort of assignment so far that you get.

Yeah.

Is the assignment where I say, can you get to the bottom of what is a fascinating story?

And you realize that nobody wants to talk to you.

But if you're a journalist, you want to ask questions and investigate stuff that maybe people might not want to talk about or might not want to answer for, right?

So this is what we do.

You know, I'm used to it at this point.

Okay, so the job of Japanese interpreter, which is a job that is unlike any other job in sports.

How hard was it to get people to say even anything of interest to you?

What was it like to try to report this?

So first we made a list of, okay, who are some interpreters we want to reach out to?

My thought process was, why don't we try to talk to people who maybe aren't actively still working as interpreters?

So we made a list, started reaching out to people.

And I reached out to seven interpreters, you know, people who've worked with Ichiro, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Hiroki Kuroda, Hideki Matsui.

And of the seven people I reached out to, they either didn't respond or politely declined.

The politeness of this, though, right?

So when we had you investigate Rick Petino, different sort of genre of reply, it sounds like, when it came to a no.

Yeah, these were the most polite no's I've ever received as a reporter.

This is from Masa Hoshino, who worked with Daisuke Matsuzaka.

He said, quote, I'm honored by the opportunity, but I've made it a policy to avoid baseball-related media engagement in which I'd speak for myself.

I respectfully and quite regretfully, as it sounds fun, decline your offer to chat.

Kindly, Masa.

And then another good one from Kenji Nomura, who worked with Hiroki Kuroda.

He said, quote, I appreciate your reaching out to me.

I'd rather keep my distance from this mess.

My hope is that the dust settles soon so that we all can enjoy the game we love.

Respectfully, Kenji.

So these are these very nice little notes.

Yeah.

I mean, this job is under siege right now, right?

I mean, because of the Ipe Mizuhara scandal, this is suddenly in the news.

Okay, so I should probably admit that the assignment we gave Tim was kind of like cold calling a bunch of financial advisors and asking them how they are connected to Bernie Madoff.

Because nobody wanted to be even vaguely associated with Ipe Mitsuhara, whose entire existence now required a vigorous level of fact-checking.

At one point, for instance, it was reported that Ipe, pre-Shohei, had worked as an interpreter for former Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Hideki Okijima.

But before the media could descend upon Boston, the Red Sox quickly released a statement declaring that Ipe was, quote, never employed by the Boston Red Sox in any capacity and was not an an interpreter for Hideki Okojima during the pitcher's time with the team.

End quote.

But all this did was raise a new question for us, actually.

If Ipe did not handle Okojima with the Red Sox,

then who was the person who did?

Jeff, thank you.

Thank you for taking the time.

It's nice to see you again.

Of course, of course, likewise.

This is our guide into the remarkably cloistered world of Japanese interpreting.

A guy named Jeff Cuddler, who is also known as the guy who actually did handle Hideki Okojima for the Red Sox.

It turns out that Jeff was in Japan when he first got hired to work with Okojima and the Red Sox, but he was born here in America.

I grew up in Boston, the Boston suburbs, but spent a few years of my elementary years in Japan, which is the basis of my Japanese.

I got really lucky.

And Jeff, thankfully,

was down to answer our questions on the record.

And this was in part because he also had to figure out how to enter this world as kind of an outsider himself.

So Jeff was working as an interpreter for a Japanese rugby team.

And after a while, he decided, hey, you know, maybe I want to go back to the U.S.

And a friend heard that Hideki Okojima was looking for an interpreter.

Hideki Okojima was this pitcher who was about to move from Japan to the Major League Baseball.

And so this friend connected Jeff with Okojima and Okojima's management team arranged for an interview.

And they met at a cafe in Tokyo.

Jeff sits down with Okojima.

And I was just curious, like,

what does that look like?

What kind of questions is Okojima asking him?

Yeah, what's the vibe?

He told me that

he was impressed that

I went in a suit, I believe.

So

I think that impressed him, showed respect.

So he liked that at the end of the day, you spend so much time with an interpreter that that becomes an important factor, whether you feel that you can get along, spend a lot of time together.

As Jeff came to understand, he was going to be spending a lot of time with Okojima.

And so the thing that Jeff said that really stunned me was he said, That meeting was probably

less than an hour.

I recall it being quick

and I heard back a few days later

that

I passed

and that I would be connected to the Red Sox for their interview.

From there, the management team had Jeff meet with the Boston Red Sox.

And Jeff said that was also a quick meeting too.

And one of the most important, I guess, facets of that was the Red Sox just needed to make sure, hey, you speak English, right?

And so I just got to jump in here to note some of the the basic math involved.

Because while nobody but Jeff wanted to go on the record here, there was an interpreter that I wound up interviewing who agreed to help us fact-check all of this on the condition of anonymity.

And what our anonymous interpreter kept on stressing was that a Japanese baseball player in America will spend more time with their interpreter than with their own wife.

We're talking about roughly 300 out of 365 days together in close quarters, in cultural isolation, often on the road.

And yet the fact that Hideki Okojima shacked up with Jeff after less than an hour of meeting him,

less than an hour,

it's shockingly typical, I am told.

In part because not that many qualified people want to be what amounts to the sort of sports au pair, a kind of bizarro live-in nanny who gets paid a starting salary, according to my source, of between $40,000 to $60,000 American, plus benefits, and possibly a visa or green card as needed.

And so this whole profession, quietly, is this industry of trans-specific shotgun marriages.

And in terms of paperwork and the qualifications required to do this job, something else is worth noting,

which is that the collective bargaining agreement of Major League Baseball requires every team to employ at least one Spanish language interpreter.

And those standards for the Spanish interpreters are very specifically enumerated.

The Spanish interpreter must be able to work long hours, including nights, holidays, and weekends, and be able to travel both domestically and internationally.

The Spanish interpreter also should have a working knowledge of baseball, media relations, and baseball-related statistics.

The Spanish interpreter should be certified as a translator by an accredited institution or have the equivalent work experience to fulfill the duties described herein.

Now, guess how many words MLB spends on Japanese interpreters?

None, zero.

So it's kind of left to every team to decide how to hire these people.

Yeah, I was asking around about this.

Like, okay, so who does the interpreter work for?

And it turns out every interpreter, even though they are the de facto new spouse of the player, they're employed by the baseball team that the player works for.

Well, they have to be team employees because, as it was explained to me by an official with Major League Baseball, they want all interpreters to be team team employees, so they're subject to the gambling policy, the drug policy, the domestic violence policy.

You know, if Hideki Okojima just has this guy hanging out and he's not an employee of Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball has no control over him, right?

Right.

This guy that you decided to get married to after an hour is now hanging around the clubhouse.

And oftentimes, what Jeff told me is the team just kind of accepts, okay, this is who the player wants to be their interpreter.

You're the interpreter.

And that's why I think one of the most important aspects of this job in the interview process and figuring out, are you a good hang or not, right?

Yes.

Because we're going to be going to dinners.

We're going to be hanging at the ballpark.

You're going to be my buddy.

You're together 24-7.

So, you know, when life happens, you know, the interpreter is there to help out.

So in terms of like the pie chart of responsibilities here, there are like a million slices.

And how big is the interpreting part?

Well, if you ask Jeff, it's really that big.

It's hard to define, but I would say maybe 1%

is actually interpreting.

The rest is more of a

manager type of role, assistant type of role.

Obviously, I would be there with them at the ballpark, but afterwards, we'd usually go to lunch together, have dinner together.

Yeah, really anything from making reservations, phone calls.

buying a car or conversations with agents,

you know,

any range range of things that can happen

in anyone's life on a day-to-day basis.

A quick pause to acknowledge what Jeff Cutler just said there,

which is that 1% of his job as a Japanese interpreter had to do with actual interpreting.

1%.

And even the tasks Jeff began to list at the end there, they barely begin to cover the full range of actual responsibility.

Because what my anonymous interpreter confirmed is that you are also expected to handle finding a place for the player to live,

sorting out government forms like travel visas and driver's licenses for both the player and his family members.

Some interpreters, apparently, have even had to organize baby showers.

Others have driven the player and his wife to the hospital during labor.

And in Jeff's case with the Red Sox, as if his portfolio was not immersive enough, he also wound up adding a second client, starting pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka.

And so Jeff was also in every conversation Daisuke was having with the press, obviously.

I'm still far from my goal, where I want to be, so I'm just taking it day by day and do what I can each day.

But I've been told by the trainers that my rehab is going well, so I'm happy about that.

But Jeff was also there for the conversations Daisuke was having with the trainers and the front office and coaches and teammates.

And one day, Daisuke Matsuzaka needed him for another position,

catcher.

You know, he was describing how all of a sudden here he is playing catch with Daisuke Matsuzaka.

And there were occasions when Daisuke, you know, would potentially want to work on a new pitch.

And Jeff would have to crouch down and try catching a major league curveball.

That feels like the metaphor here, right?

Like this whole thing is a curveball, and you're not quite sure

what you're supposed to be doing exactly.

It's very scary at first.

It's not the easiest thing to catch when you're not used to that.

So just trying to get your glove in front of it.

Fighting for my life out in the ballpark.

Yeah, and

he was saying he was scared out of his mind.

Because statistically, again, like there just aren't that many other Japanese speakers on a baseball team in the sport.

And so you wind up, I guess, if you're Jeff, you know, being entrusted with everything.

Yeah,

you are the player's lifeline.

You are there at their beck and call.

Jeff did tell me one story about a time when Diceke asked him, hey, can you go get my car washed?

But it wasn't just any car.

It was a Porsche Cayenne.

And as Jeff described it, it had a nice body kit on it.

And so,

you know, Dice K tosses Jeff the keys, say, hey, go take it for a spin.

And if you've been to Fenway Park, you know, the streets around Fenway are pretty tight and narrow.

That's like an advanced mode in a driving video game.

Exactly.

Apparently, I went over a curb that I wasn't supposed to.

And of course, it damages the body kit.

And I was like, oh, shit what am I going to do?

And panicked and just started driving the car.

And

just driving around Boston, right down Storeo Drive for 10, 15 minutes before I was like, I got to get back.

I got to get back.

So you can imagine what's going through Jeff's head.

You know, about to be fired.

Daisuke is going to kill me.

You know, I just damaged his Porsche cayenne.

And lo and behold, I get back and Daisuke was like, where were you?

And I was like,

I have

something to tell you, or it's probably easier if I just showed you so you would go out to the garage in the uh fm way and he was like oh i i i knew it was something like this i knew this was coming all my interpreters have done something similar with my car so he was ready for it and um that was part of my initiation i suppose

there's a strange form of intimacy here even as much as jeff is learning that like I've had lots of you do this work.

It is unusually and uniquely intimate.

Yeah, I mean,

think about the level of trust there, Pablo, right?

The level of trust to drive you and your wife to the hospital when she's in labor, the level of trust to find a place to live, the level of trust to go get your Porsche cayenne washed.

You know, is that a Hillary Clinton political slogan?

Who do you want answering the phone at 3 a.m.?

Someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.

It's 3 a.m.

and your children are safe and asleep.

Who do you want answering the phone?

You want Jeff.

Yep.

That's the job.

Be on call 24-7.

Yep, exactly.

And they're also just like living this life together that like is not visible from the outside.

Like no one else knows what Dice K or Shohei Otani or you Darvish are going through except for this guy who is around them all of the time.

Yeah, I mean, if you've ever been in a baseball clubhouse, it's very, you know, clicky, right?

Players hang out with their friends or, you know.

They're countrymen.

They're countrymen a lot of times.

So naturally, you're going to bond.

You're going to get close to one another, right?

Which brings us back around to the reason why we were interested in the story in the first place, which is the most obvious and conspicuous

apparent abuse of this occupation, which is what Ipe Mitsuhara did to Shohei Otani.

So if that's how Jeff and Hideki Okojima and Daisuke were operating, what was it like for Shohei Otani when he got to Major League Baseball?

Jeff made the point that when both Daisuke and Hideki came over, they were both married and their wives spoke English.

So Jeff wasn't doing absolutely everything for them because they had wives at home.

When Shohei Otani came over, he was 23 years old.

And he was famous.

He was already famous.

He was already a huge deal in Japan.

A lot of these guys are.

But for Shohei, he was bigger than life, coming over to a new country.

So you can just imagine what it was like for him in finding an interpreter to help him navigate this new world.

Most Japanese players

can somewhat be naive, especially when they're younger, because they've only played baseball their entire lives.

And

they were superstars from high school.

And if they went straight to the pros, superstars there.

So they probably lacked some of the knowledge of daily life that most people kind of are forced to walk through.

So that probably...

And so I was curious.

I wanted to know more about 23-year-old Shoheiotani.

Yes.

I wanted to know what was he like at that point?

Why did he come over to the U.S.?

Where was he at that point in his life?

And what kind of help did he need transitioning from Japan to the U.S.?

It's like a child star, effectively.

Exactly.

And this, whoever he chose to be his interpreter was going to be there every step of the way.

And so, you know, I reached out to someone who knew Otani back then, a Japanese speaker, who could answer some of these questions.

So I've mixed a lot of metaphors here, right?

Like how these interpreters are spouses and managers and assistants, but with Otani, given that he has almost this child stardom from the jump, there's also like a parental dynamic that I'm suspecting here with Ipe.

So what was the young Otani like, Tim?

What did you learn about his arrival in America?

So to learn more about that, I reached out to Dylan Hernandez, columnist for the L.A.

Times, baseball writer.

Dylan is one of the best baseball writers in the country.

And he is uniquely qualified to talk about this because A, he's covered Otani since he came into Major League Baseball.

But also, Dylan is the rare sports writer who can speak English, Spanish, and Japanese.

It's, you know, if some would say it's his superpower.

My father is from El Salvador.

My mother is from Japan.

Like, I don't remember not being able to speak Japanese or not being able to speak Spanish.

In 2017, around that time when word was starting to pick up that Otani was going to come over, Dylan went to Japan to report out a feature on Otani ahead of his arrival.

During that time in Japan, Dylan followed a band of scouts who were watching Otani, and he spoke to all these people around him, like Otani's high school coach.

And he learned a lot about just what it was like.

at that time in this this kind of time in Otani's life when everything was about to change.

Dylan talked to the cab driver who would take Otani to and from the ballpark.

And Dylan asked him, well, what does Otani talk about?

What's he like?

He's like, he just talks about baseball.

You know, if he's sitting with another player, you know, he might ask him, hey, do you remember your first home run?

You know, after games, the other players might go out drinking and Otati wouldn't.

And Dylan said that one of the other

players asked Otani once, hey, you know, don't you like to have fun?

And Otani's response apparently was, my idea of fun is getting a good night's sleep and playing well the next day.

So he's a total nerd.

He is a nerd.

He's a baseball nerd is what I'm getting.

Yeah.

I mean, he's just focused.

What about his actual like family, his parents?

What did they say about their son?

So one story Dylan told me was apparently, you know, when Shohei's playing professional baseball in Japan and he's starting to make some money, you know, he decided, he's like, I'm going to have my parents handle that.

So when he would get his checks for playing baseball, he set it up so the checks would go to his parents' banking account.

He was like, you guys handle this.

I don't want to deal with this.

I'm focused on baseball.

You guys handle all the money stuff.

They were so concerned.

Hiltani's mother was so concerned that he would grow up to be financially illiterate.

Oh my God, like my son's going to not know anything about money.

So she set up a personal bank account for him and just dropped in $1,000 a month just for some spending money.

And she...

Here's your first bank account.

You know, and we've all been there, right?

Yeah, a training wheels version of adulthood.

Exactly.

And about a year later, she goes back to check the account and the money's still there.

There's more money in there than she had put in because it had accrued interest.

Shohei hadn't touched the account.

Which is all to say that the psychological scouting report of young Shohei Otani suggested an ignorance, a kind of arrested development that only athletic precociousness can enable.

Remember that Otani at age 23 winds up moving to America not long after his mom sets up that bank account.

Otani, when he joined the Angels, had never lived on his own before.

And so, if you want a sense of how insanely non-strategic he was about his wealth, you should also know something else about the reason why Japanese superstars typically do not cross the Pacific to join Major League Baseball at that young an age, even if they're in Aspirational Hall of Famer, whose only discernible interest, by the way, is baseball.

It's because coming to America at age 23, by rule, costs a prospect like Shohei Otani millions upon millions upon millions of U.S.

dollars.

We're talking nine figures in wealth.

So when a Japanese player wants to come over to Major League Baseball,

if they are 25 years old, there's two criteria.

If they are 25 years old and have six years of experience in a professional league, then they can come over and sign a free agent contract with a Major League team, and there are no restrictions.

You know, you just saw it with Yamamoto this offseason.

The Dodgers new pitcher.

He was 25 years old and met the criteria, so he came over and signed.

The richest contract ever for a pitcher.

Exactly.

Now, if you are not 25 or you don't have six years of experience, you can't do that.

You're restricted and you are treated as an amateur international free agent.

If you decide to do that, then you have to sign a minor league contract.

You're under team control for six years.

That means you have to wait six years before you hit free agency.

And the team is limited by their international pool of how much signing bonus money they can give you.

So that's what Shohei Otani decided to do.

Yeah, I'm just kind of blown away by how utterly disinterested and therefore potentially

arguably irresponsible Otani is being when it comes to the money he has available to him.

You know, Dylan actually spoke to Otani's high school coach who actually sat down with Shohei and had a conversation about this.

You know, and I told him, you know, the coach was telling me, I told him, you know, if you wait two more years, you can sign for right there, you know, because he was hearing 200 million, 250 million, right?

And the coach said, he told Otani, hey, you're an adult now.

Like, I get the value of chasing your dreams, but you know, you're an adult now, and maybe you need to start like considering other things, not just baseball.

And Otani said, no, I still want to go, right?

And he wound up signing for a $2.3 million bonus.

So basically, by like going two years early, he theoretically punted on $200, $250 million.

Yeah, I didn't know this, Tim.

The idea that Johe Otani punted on a quarter of a billion dollars because he couldn't wait to play baseball in America.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, what are you doing?

I mean, look, you made lots of money otherwise,

but

it just,

it's insane.

Yeah, I mean, it's quite the decision.

But if you are focused on making the baseball hall of fame, you know,

what is baseball other than counting numbers, Pablo?

500 home runs, right?

X number RBI, right?

If Shohei wanted to get to the baseball hall of fame, maybe it was worth $200 million to him to get an extra two seasons

of home runs in there.

I don't know.

So I betray my own bias here, right?

So I clearly am more capitalistically curious than Shohei Otani has ever been.

And into this specific portrait walks Ipe Mitsuhara, a man who knows, it sounds like,

more than Shohei about how to move around dollars and cents.

How do they even meet?

So they met in 2013 when Otani was a teenager, when he was just starting his professional career in Japan.

Now, Ipe was an interpreter for the Nippon Ham Fighters.

Just a great team name.

Flash forward to 2017.

So 2017 comes.

Otani's made it clear, word's starting to get out that, hey, Otani's moving to Major League Baseball.

And even though he's punting on $250 million, there's still a lot to come.

Okay, so this is where I pause to acknowledge that you probably didn't read the affidavit that federal prosecutors filed back in April in the case of the United States of America versus Ipe Mitsuhara.

And I say this because I myself did not read this, not before assigning Tim this story.

But the whole thing is worth it, as the U.S.

attorney who brought the case explained.

According to the complaint, Mr.

Mitsuhara stole this money largely to finance his voracious appetite for illegal sports betting.

Our investigation revealed that Mitsuhara, a Japanese language interpreter, began working as a translator for Mr.

Otani.

Over 37 pages.

There are text messages and vetting records and bank transfers, and all of it adds up to the case for an eight-figure felony bank fraud totaling more than $16 million

over less than three years.

What prosecutors allege is that Ipe had illegally wired funds from Otani's checking account to this illegal bookmaker.

And they said that Ipe, and maybe the least surprising news of it all, had also lost a bunch of money on crypto.

But the other thing that the complaint does is help fill in the gaps of how Shohei wound up officially hiring Ipe, his future best friend, in the first place, which is a little different from how Jeff Cutler got connected to Hideki Okijiba.

And it's actually a little different from how Ipe himself described his relationship with Otani in that video from 2018 that we played for you at the top of the show.

Yeah, he's been working with me with the fighters for the last five years and I feel like he's really trustworthy.

So I felt really comfortable in being my interpreter.

What you should know is that Ipe had not been individually working with Otani as his interpreter for the last five years, since 2013.

What Ipe had been doing was working as an interpreter for Otani's English-speaking teammates on the Nippon Ham fighters.

That it was only later that Ipe even sought out Otani himself to escalate their personal relationship.

And so, according to the federal complaint, at that time, once word gets out that Otani's moving to Major League Baseball, Ipe reaches out to Otani and asks him, hey,

do you need an interpreter?

Right.

I heard you love baseball.

Exactly.

Allow me to help with the things you may like less.

Yeah.

And so that's how it happened.

And so then Otani

comes over to Major League baseball and ipe turns into his de facto manager well good afternoon and uh welcome to sunny arizona and we thank you for attending today's media session with shohei otani and his friend and translator ipe muzahara so question off the field um

so

your food it's hard to find japanese food in the states and do you have any food that you're missing and how are you what kind of food are you eating daily and also today's valentine's day um how many many chocolates did you have

uh

tokeno tokoro and so

you know one of the first things they do is in 2018 they go together to set up a bank account and so ipe and shohei are there at the bank and this bank account they open it's basically to serve one purpose it's to be the place where shohei's checks his paychecks from the angels are deposited.

But even in this job, he's now, epee's already like accountant,

you know, business manager, financial advisor.

Like that is the power vacuum it sounds like he is stepping into.

Well, there's actually people who had those jobs.

You know, Shohei had an agent, right?

Right, right.

He's at CIA.

Yes, and he had an agent at CIA, and the agent had financial advisor, accountant.

He had all these people on staff who are going to be Shohei's team.

He's going to handle his money.

And what what we've learned now is that in all these meetings with the agent and with the financial people on Shohei's team, Ipe was in these meetings.

And Ipe is the one doing the interpreting.

He is the one essentially speaking on behalf of Shohei with all of these people handling his money.

And, you know, one of the things that stood out to me in the federal complaint later on was the agent didn't have a Japanese interpreter on staff, didn't hire one.

He was basically like, well, Shohei's got ePay, so we'll just use ePay.

I mean, it's not like, you know, this kid's mother thought that he might be financially illiterate or anything.

I'm sure they got it under control.

That's the gray area I don't know the answer to, right?

Like, how, how aware was the agent of these concerns?

Or how much do you defer?

Because the whole point of this job of Japanese interpreter has been so established throughout time, decades and decades, of like, this is the guy who does the stuff.

This is the guy we deal with.

This is the person who everybody who's come over from Japan has trusted to do exactly this sort of genre of thing.

Exactly.

This is how things are done.

And this is how things have been done for the last 20 plus years as more and more Japanese players have entered Major League Baseball.

So the key thing, Pablo, is that Ipe was there from the start.

He was there when they set up the bank account.

And he's there in all of these meetings with the agent, the financial advisor, the accountant.

He's there.

And that's like the behind closed doors stuff he's doing.

What I remember Ipe being,

as I was like watching this transcendent athlete show up in America,

pitching and hitting, I remember Ipe being the guy in like the dugout with the bangs, being Shohei's literal voice to America.

But he was also, I presume, just doing the baseball stuff that you would see and we've heard from all these interpreters anonymously and on the record.

Ipe is, he's doing all the stuff that Jeff Cutler was doing.

He's doing the interpreting.

He's with the teammates, with the coaches, with the media, but he's going beyond that.

Like, Ipe was looking at analytics.

He was monitoring recovery timetables.

I mean, there was one anecdote in a Sports Illustrated story where Joe Madden was texting Ipe

asking if it was okay with Shohei to push his start back.

So, you know, he's the intermediary for everything.

For an incredibly visible and famous, but it sounds like, singularly isolated celebrity who has been, yeah, attended to as a young person by others for a very long time.

Dylan made the point that, you know, Otani seemed isolated from his teammates.

And part of that was just given the unique nature of his role.

He's a pitcher and a hitter.

So you can imagine he's got to get ready to pitch every five days.

And there's Ipe next to him.

And he's also playing catch with Shohei.

He's also, you know, going through workouts.

There was one story that they actually worked out together on Christmas one year.

That's how close these are.

Christmas isn't baseball.

Of course, we do baseball.

Not only that,

Ipe, you know, in some of these stories, Ipe was said to help manage Otani's off-season schedule with the marketing, right?

Ipe then becomes famous just by proximity, just by being close to Shohei.

I mean, I looked it up today.

Ipe has almost 400,000 Instagram followers.

That's so depressing.

Can you imagine

Ipe's wife

at one point found a signed baseball from Ipe that was being sold on Japanese eBay?

I was watching the Angels several years ago now, like wear shirts emblazoned with Ipe's face.

I don't know if it was a joke that the shirt's amazing.

I mean, the photo is a glamour shot.

It's like sun falling, you know, dappled light.

He's in front of like a canyon, bangs glistening.

It's ridiculous.

I asked Dylan,

you know, what did the angels make of epe, right?

They're wearing these shirts.

He's around the team.

He's, he's basically a star in his own right.

Like, what did the players make of epei?

You know, there was one opening day, epe got like a standing ovation, you know?

And I asked Otani about that.

You know, because he was warming up in the bullpen.

He's the opening day starter that year.

I asked him, like, do you see that?

What do you think?

And he tells me, yeah, I kind of didn't like it.

You know, he was like joking around about it.

All of a sudden, this guy's like a household name, not just here, but also in Japan.

I am staggered by how

in plain sight he was,

while how private this part of the story remained, only uncovered because of, yeah, hugely scandalous lawsuits that have shaken up the entire occupation that he was, you know, a part of.

You know, we've been covering how close Ipe and Shohei were, right?

They're spending every day together, all day together.

And apparently, according to this federal complaint, while that's happening, as epei is getting closer and closer to Shohei, he started stealing millions of dollars from him.

So you remember that bank account they set up in 2018?

So apparently, according to the federal complaint, from 2018 until 2021, for about three years, No one accessed that account online.

You know how you can go on your phone and check your bank account?

Yeah, you have an app or something.

Three clicks away, you check your bank account.

No one did that for three years.

We talked about it.

Shohei would just let his money sit there.

That was his mom's nightmare.

And then in late 2021, epe starts gambling with this bookie and he starts losing.

And once epe starts losing, suddenly

the contact information on that bank account gets switched to epe's phone number and to an anonymous email that's connected to epe.

Not only that, but when the bookie starts reaching out to Ipe asking to cover his gambling losses,

Ipe starts accessing the account and he starts transferring money from this account where Shohei Otani is getting his paychecks from the angels.

And Ipe starts taking money from the account to cover his gambling losses.

The ex-interpreter of Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Otani is pleading guilty in his federal sports betting case.

What is more, Mr.

Mitsuhara lied to the bank to access the account.

For instance, we've obtained recordings of telephone calls in which Mitsuhara spoke with bank employees, lied to them about being Mr.

Otani, gave personal biographical information for Mr.

Otani in order to impersonate him,

and thereby convinced the bank to approve large wire transfers of large amounts of money to the bookmakers.

At one point, he lied and said that the transfer was for a car loan, but in fact, it went to pay off a gambling debt.

And then all of the IP addresses or the devices accessing the account were all linked to ePay.

And a lot of these transfers that are happening are coinciding with text messages that Ipe is having with the bookmaker who's saying, hey, where's my money?

And, you know, it's also helpful to understand just how deep of a hole Ipe was getting himself into.

So Ipe starts gambling at the end of 2021, and he goes until January 2024 when this all blows up.

In that time, Ipe placed 19,000 bets,

which is about 25 bets a day.

Now, he won $142 million.

That is a lot of money.

It's a lot of money.

But how much did he lose?

He lost $182 million.

So the net loss was about $40 million.

So he's $40 million in the hole.

And what's Ipe going to do on an interpreter's salary?

He starts according to this.

Oh, right.

He's an interpreter.

He's an interpreter.

He's not a player.

He's an interpreter.

And so according to the federal complaint, Ipe would take money from the account to cover his losses, but the wins, he would take the money from the wins and put it in his own account.

So much of the conversation around Otani, because of course Otani is the actual celebrity, has been, did he know?

Did he do any of this?

Was he part of of this gambling problem that Ipe had?

Did he have his own gambling problem?

How can you be so close to somebody and not know what your shadow is doing?

And what you're seeing in what this complaint is alleging is that it was actually disturbingly easy for Otani to be isolated even from the most important financial matters of his own life.

Where was the agent?

Where was the financial advisors that the agent employed?

And what ended up happening, according to the complaint, was Ipe told the agent that Shohei wants that account private and he doesn't want anyone monitoring it.

And the agent apparently didn't ask any questions and he didn't ask Shohei directly.

Because presumably

hearing from Ipe is the same to them as hearing from Shohei.

Exactly.

And so when other people

in his orbit, the financial planners raised questions are like, hey, what's going on with that account?

The agent told them, hey, Shohei wants that private.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

Is this thing that has the whiff of suspicion to it?

Is that actually just how their culture operates?

Yeah, it's, you know, this is why all these interpreters didn't want to talk to me, Pablo.

Yeah, I see.

You know what?

I see that now.

This is why, because this is

what could happen when

you place so much trust in someone, but that trust is misplaced, right?

And they take advantage.

And this is what happens if the federal complaint is to be believed.

Tim, thank you for taking another assignment in which you got a lot more no's than yeses, but got us where we wanted to go.

Maybe next time someone will talk to me.

What do you think?

I wouldn't, I wouldn't bet on it, as it were.

Alright, so as I sit here hovering over my keyboard wondering what it is that I found out today,

I realized I should probably bring you behind the curtain, behind the blue cardigan, if you will, of this episode.

Because what I am still stuck on, even after all of our reporting and even after Ipe Mitsuhara's guilty plea,

is this glaring and stupidly obvious possibility that Shohei Otani knew something.

That at the very least, he knew more about what Ipe was doing with his money than he wants federal prosecutors to know.

And of course, I have zero proof that Ipe Mitsuhara fell on his sword in some elaborate plan to shield his best friend.

But what I found out today is why either option, unthinkable personal betrayal or unthinkable personal loyalty seems plausible.

Because yes, in the world of Japanese interpreters, it is fully normal for a barely vetted stranger to be fully entrusted with an athlete's reputation and car and house and diet and curveball and family and bank account, let alone their voice.

No job in sports entails this kind of servitude and also this kind of power.

But there is one more thing that my anonymous Japanese interpreter also told me, which is that most people can't handle that kind of intimacy, that kind of responsibility, for more than like three or four years.

Our own guide into this world, Jeff Cutler, is actually out of the business himself now,

as is Ipe Mitsuhara, the man who publicly disgraced an unsustainably private profession,

all because the trust he had with Shohei Otani was broken

or

unbreakable.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.