In what could have easily been the next season of “American Crime Story,” Lionsgate Television is diving into the gambling scandal that’s rocked Major League Baseball since March.
Lionsgate is developing a scripted series about how Shohei Ohtani, the Japanese superstar of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Angels, became the subject of massive fraud and theft at the hands of his longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. Just days ago, Mizuhara agreed to plead guilty to accusations he stole almost $17 million from Ohtani to pay off gambling debts.
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Scott Delman (“Station Eleven”) will produce along with Albert Chen, a former senior editor with Sports Illustrated, MLB Network contributor, and the writer of “Billion Dollar Fantasy” about the battle between gambling apps DraftKings and FanDuel. No platform or creative talent is being announced at this stage. Executive Max Elins is overseeing the project for Lionsgate Television.
“With a strong track record of creating daring, boundary-pushing series, Lionsgate Television is the perfect partner to bring this unbelievable story to the screen,” Delman said in a statement. “In addition, Albert’s extensive sports journalism background will enable us to connect the dots to make sense of the startling turn of events we’ve seen play out on the world stage.”
“This is major league baseball’s biggest sports gambling scandal since Pete Rose – and at its center is its biggest star, one that MLB has hitched its wagon on,” Chen said. “We’ll get to the heart of the story – a story of trust, betrayal and the trappings of wealth and fame.”
Ohtani this offseason signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers, who play just up the highway from his old team, the Angels. The Japanese two-way phenom, already flush with cash because of countless international licensing deals even before he hit free agency, is notoriously private and only reveals so much of his personal life. We only just learned this year that he secretly got married.
But when the Dodgers faced the San Diego Padres in an early season series in South Korea this March, ESPN broke a bombshell story in which Ohtani’s name had been found on gambling receipts from a bookie in Anaheim. Mizuhara told reporters Ohtani helped him pay off $4 million worth of gambling debt and did so across numerous $500,000 transactions in a span of months.
Not a day later, Mizuhara changed his story and was fired. The (remaining) Ohtani camp claimed the superstar was the victim of massive theft; Ohtani says he has never gambled on baseball or any other major league sports. A federal investigation backs up Ohtani’s story.
To pay his massive debts, Mizuhara meticulously withdrew money from Ohtani’s accounts and deposited winnings into his own, even impersonating Ohtani to his bank in order to withdraw funds without Ohtani’s knowledge. Text messages between Mizuhara and the bookie did him in.
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