The Bet Is Already in the Building: What Baseball’s Gambling Era Asks of a Young Player

Baseball has spent the last two years learning what it costs to live inside a sportsbook.

In February 2025, Ippei Mizuhara, Shohei Ohtani’s longtime interpreter, was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison for moving nearly 17 million dollars out of Ohtani’s bank account to cover his own gambling debts. He was ordered to pay back 16.9 million to Ohtani and another 1.1 million to the IRS. Ohtani never placed a bet. He was the victim. The money walked out the door through the person standing next to him every day, for years.

In June 2024, infielder Tucupita Marcano became the first active player in a century banned from baseball for life, for placing 387 baseball bets totaling more than 150,000 dollars. Four other players drew one-year suspensions.

Then in November 2025, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn indicted Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, alleging they rigged individual pitches so bettors could cash microbets: the velocity of one pitch, a ball or a strike call. Both have pleaded not guilty and the case has not gone to trial, so nothing there is proven. But the shape of the allegation is worth sitting with either way. Nobody is accused of throwing a game. The accusation is about one pitch.

The bet moved closer to the player

That is the real story, and it is bigger than any one name. Gambling used to sit outside the game, on the final score. Now it sits on top of every single rep. Somebody has money on whether a 19 year old goes 0 for 4 tonight.

The players already feel it. An NCAA study released in November 2025 found that 36 percent of Division I men’s basketball players reported social media abuse tied to sports betting in the past year, and 29 percent said they had interacted with a student on campus who had bet on their own team. Not a stranger in another state. A classmate.

This is not just a pro problem

If you coach or parent a young player, this is already in your building. A Common Sense Media report this year found that 36 percent of boys ages 11 to 17 said they had gambled in some form in the prior year, and that number climbs to 49 percent at 17 and older. A survey of teachers found 83 percent had seen or heard of their students betting on sports, and the rate was no lower in states where it is illegal.

Your player watches games with the odds printed on the broadcast graphic. The line between fan and bettor got erased while we were arguing about pitch clocks.

What we actually owe him

Not a lecture about gambling. He tunes that out in nine seconds. Three things instead.

Guard your circle before you need to. Ohtani did not lose that money because he was reckless. He lost it because he trusted somebody who was drowning and never said so. Teach a kid to ask who has access to him, his phone, and his decisions, while the stakes are still small. Build that habit at 15, not at 25 with a signing bonus.

A rep is worth what it is worth. If a player learns to price an at bat by who is watching or what is riding on it, he has handed the value of his own work to somebody else. We train the opposite on purpose: same intent on a Tuesday tee session as on a Saturday with scouts on the fence. That is the point of building the plan around the player and retesting it with real numbers, so progress is something he can see instead of something he has to be told.

Play for an audience of One. “The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). A player who genuinely believes that is a hard player to buy, because there is nothing on the table worth more to him than the thing he already has.

Marcano was 24, on the injured list, bored, with an app in his hand. Nobody sat him down at 15 and told him the money would find him eventually, and that it would not look like a villain when it did. It would look like a friend, or an interpreter, or a guy who says he can get you a number.

It is my job to develop better baseball players. It is my duty to develop leading members of society. This is where those two jobs are the same job.

Walk by faith, not by sight. 2 Corinthians 5:7.

So here is the honest question, and it is not rhetorical: your son can name the odds on tonight’s game. Can he name the last conversation you had with him about what he would refuse to do for money?

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