shohei ohtani alert

xps to Shasta his role was more of a personal assistant than an interpreter. There was an article about interpreters last year and I remembered this because the article commented on how unusual his role was:

https://theathletic.com/4581805/2023/06/06/mlb-interpreters-shohei-ohtani/?source=user_shared_article

Mizuhara also trains with Ohtani. He’s caught his bullpens at times, and served as Ohtani’s catcher in the Home Run Derby. He said part of his job is helping Ohtani minimize distractions and balance his offseason schedule of marketing and endorsements.

“I’m with him all offseason too,” Mizuhara said. “I’m with him 365 days of the year, which I think is different than the other interpreters.” Mizuhara and Ohtani even worked out together on Christmas.

While the work schedule isn’t that demanding for other interpreters, it is still a significant enough commitment that lack of personal time is the clear number-one drawback.

did Ippei deserve to go to "arbitration" because LAA was only paying him $85k/year and he felt he was worth $4.5M...? LAA was paying Ippei 2.5x minimum wage for being the gopher/best friend/personal assistant/low-key financial manager (TIL this is what translators do!)

It's funny you mention that. People forget that minimum hourly wage in California is $16-$19+ depending on the locality (and going up to $20 for fast food workers in SF).

The minimum legal salary for an exempt full-time worker in California is generally double the state minimum wage for a forty-hour week with no vacation. If a person is truly never off the clock and has their work tightly controlled, then conceivably they are not even an exempt employee and entitled to overtime and doubletime.

The salary is pretty low. Don't know if translators are in a union but would be interesting to consider the potential wage claim, class action claims, etc.

fwiw the first time I did a wire transfer at Schwab (a small amount, a few hundred iirc) I got a phone call from a human after I hit submit on the website and they asked me a bunch of security questions.

the second time I did a wire transfer at Schwab it was the down payment for my house, which was low six figures, so not millions but not nothing, and 99% of the balance of the account, and I did not get a phone call.

The lawyer, business manager, agent, bank are the safeguards. If the account holder instructs a bank that a fiduciary can handle their money then the bank relies on that instruction.

Mechanics of wiring money can be as simple as the bank follows up on an online request to move money by calling the number associated with the account and speaking with the person who answers in a recorded call. They call the number associated with the account.

These are big sums of money in one sense but not compared to, say, an escrow agent who closes housing sales in Orange County all day. I am not up to speed and have no opinion on this case but in general it's not beyond the realm of belief.

― felicity, Tuesday, March 26, 2024 6:03 PM (yesterday)

this is a great point. there is a 300% chance that shohei has a special private banker assigned at all of his banks and a 500% chance that he is not the only one holding the keys.

i am also serious when i saw that private banking (available to HNW and UHNW individuals - a term of art) is not the same banking available to you and me:

https://www.jpmorgan.com/wealth-management/wealth-partners/family-wealth
https://www.privatebank.citibank.com/we-serve/worldly-wealthy-individuals
https://www.morganstanley.com/what-we-do/wealth-management/private-wealth-management

these bankers specialize in being obsequious, high-touch, fawning, acrobatic in their contortions to be of service - it's quite disgusting to see. quite easy for me to believe that they'd wave through a couple of $500k wires for somebody like ohtani, who most certainly isn't even on their top-tier list of clients. $500k is on the low end of the kinds of wires they clear in a day: https://archive.ph/FU6ie

Oh yeah sorry I forgot this happened in America

― Roman Anthony gets on his horse (gyac), Tuesday, March 26, 2024 5:58 PM (yesterday)

i get what you're saying - america, where everybody still uses checks! - but the modern system of private banking quite literally originated on the continent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_Switzerland

Are there any kind of safeguards in place that would alert you or require you to confirm movements of large amounts of money? Like have you ever been asked to authorise a large one-off payment to a new account? I’m honestly surprised if that’s not the case.

when any payment needs to be made an email goes out to both my manager (not biz manager, different role) and myself requesting authorization to pay. they could certainly go rogue at some point but it would be pretty short-sighted, because you don't carry more balance than you need in the biz account -- in our case, enough to pay for a tour to get started. the function of the biz account is to have a place where payments flow into and from which to pay anybody who needs to get paid. there's full accounting on all money that goes in and out. but it's not like a big reserve of money, keeping more-than-needed-for-specific-purposes money in a business account seems like a bad idea.

This was pretty wild for Ohtani to say at his statement reading pic.twitter.com/2ET2kHLhgq

— Bob Knows Ball (@bobknowsball69) March 26, 2024

this is a great point. there is a 300% chance that shohei has a special private banker assigned at all of his banks and a 500% chance that he is not the only one holding the keys.

i am also serious when i saw that private banking (available to HNW and UHNW individuals - a term of art) is not the same banking available to you and me:

https://www.jpmorgan.com/wealth-management/wealth-partners/family-wealth🕸
https://www.privatebank.citibank.com/we-serve/worldly-wealthy-individuals🕸
https://www.morganstanley.com/what-we-do/wealth-management/private-wealth-management🕸

these bankers specialize in being obsequious, high-touch, fawning, acrobatic in their contortions to be of service - it's quite disgusting to see. quite easy for me to believe that they'd wave through a couple of $500k wires for somebody like ohtani, who most certainly isn't even on their top-tier list of clients. $500k is on the low end of the kinds of wires they clear in a day: https://archive.ph/FU6ie🕸

Btw HNW - henwees - is used repeatedly in the Crazy Rich Asians series and you’re right about the term lol

it's not really the job of the private banker to monitor their client's activity if the instructions are coming from a known source. my point about ohtani having a private banker was building on felicity's point - ohtani's bankers most certainly know who is capable of acting as ohtani's fiduciary. a private banker's #1 job is to not be annoying to her client (which might (i) make that client less likely to part with their money for the bespoke investment products she wants to sell them and (ii) may even cause the client to jump to another bank who is willing to kiss even more ass). $500k is a month or two of post-tax paychecks for ohtani based on his last year's salary - not to mention endorsement money - it's really not that much.

the question for me moves to - did ippei then have the keys to the kingdom? reporting suggests that they had the relationship where that could be the case, i just don't know. but it's easy for me to imagine that ippei is present at all of ohtani's meetings with his bankers and, if they really were bff, that ippei was known to his bankers to have fiduciary authorization.

the part of the bank that actually monitors unusual activity is the compliance/AML department, which is universally hated by all the other parts of the banks that deal with clients for being red tape and deal-stoppers. since the money here was just going to another US account and not to say a bank account in iran i'm not sure it raised any red flags for them.

Fair enough. I guess we’ll know more about Ippei’s responsibilities and what he had access to soon enough.

Is the #IppeiCurse a real thing?

Ohtani is currently in an 0-9 skid* since he was last seen joking around with Ippei in the dugout.

*mix of reg season/ST games

Opposite of caek's experience with my large wires, 3% down was hardly a blink, 27% took over 20 minutes...

Steve you’ll love the conspiratorial slant of this article

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/39817568/dodgers-shohei-ohtani-authorities-contacted-theft

Can the relevant agencies even confirm that?

#FreeIppei

did you make it out to his dad’s resto?

Opposite of caek's experience with my large wires, 3% down was hardly a blink, 27% took over 20 minutes...

no idea how long mine actually took to arrive. my point is that the first one came with security controls, and after that the controls went away, even for an anomalously large transfer.

I 100% want to but I have no SoCal trips planned until end of May at the earliest:

https://www.hachius.com/costa-mesa

This could all have been avoided (c/o gyac):

Q. Have to brush up on your Japanese a little?

DAVE ROBERTS: I definitely need to brush up on my Japanese. I'm a momma's boy, self-admitted momma's boy. She's fluent in Japanese. Have to get home cooking and go back to mom and go back to Japanese 101.

i just closed on our new apartment and for the down payment i was asked to bring a certified check. that completely skeeved me out, carrying a piece of paper for that amount of money. would much have preferred jumping through a bunch of controls and red tape. but then i guess you run the risk of being scammed by a man in the middle attack. which is not uncommon!

Congratulations and I believe hand-delivery or courier was also presented an option and I was like... yeah no.

Back to gyac's insuation that ESPN (and the LA Times based on their article today) is still harboring a neutral-angle in their reportage:

Both media accounts have access to Bowyer's wire data and can see if Ippei is curiously absent from the list of individuals that Bowyer and his associates were connected to financially.

WaPo also did a deep-dive into Bowyer and he is a real piece of work, a child of a Long Beach Fire Department employee, they called him a high-end Baccarat (! lol) player who is banned from seemingly half of Vegas casinos, divorced (once? twice?) dad of four with 2 bankrupcies on file. Lives in a sprawling orange county luxury mcmansion (that was raided by federal agents) tucked between the hills and the ocean. He runs a BJJ studio called (don't laugh) RYSK.

I wasn’t really insinuating, just saying based on the questions put out in the article that ESPN themselves may be. I have zero knowledge of the banking & various protocols to be able to know if the article is insinuating that Ohtani’s people may not have made a report to a relevant agency, or if it’s common practice for an agency to not confirm whether they’re investigating on the basis of a person’s request to journalists. Personally I would be surprised if they did.

Anyway Passan tweeted out a link to this piece:

Other players have interpreters, but only Ohtani had an interpreter who worked as a trainer and a coach and a valet and a best friend and a bellman in addition to translating his interactions with the media.

…which I pressed send on new zing before linking or quoting further from

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/39816463/shohei-ohtani-dodgers-interpreter-gambling-betting-scandal-ippei-mizuhara

That, and everything else, was left to Ohtani and his ever-present confidant. "Interpreter" was never an adequate word to describe Mizuhara, who toted Ohtani's training tools and to-the-second workout schedule in the backpack. Ohtani's rhythms were Mizuhara's rhythms. They occupied the same locker, ate at the same table in the players' lounge, sat on the same five feet of bench in every dugout. Until Ohtani got his driver's license last season, Mizuhara drove the two of them to the ballpark every day. Nobody knew if they lived together, but his Angels teammates assumed they did. From the outside, it appeared that Mizuhara cleared away every menial task and potential obstacle; the great one would worry only about his game. Mizuhara's constant presence was proof of Ohtani's singular genius, so much so that it is jarring to see him, now, walk alone.

“I’ve enjoying driving,” Ohtani said in February 2020 through his interpreter.

When asked if he was a good driver, the baseball star replied: "Pretty good."

Shohei's garage:
Rolls Royce Wraith: $330,000
Aston Martin DB11: $205,000
Bentley Continental GT: $200,000
Porsche 911 Targa 4S: $175,000
Mercedes Benz S63 AMG: $170,000
Porsche 911 Carrera T: $125,000
Tesla Model X PD90: $100,000

What 😭😭😭

Now those are some eye-popping WHIPs

disappointingly quotidian taste in cars, imo. sad!

basic bitch millionaire cars.

he should be driving a tricked out supra or nismo or something

A lot of money for what was basically a fancy chair collection for him

it would be like me buying a very expensive skateboard

Trying to find pix of the luxury++ stuff is impossible, only mentions in japanese sports pages (and machine translations of).

The Porsche stuff is easy to find because he's a brand ambassador

Targa: https://i.imgur.com/Q5Fgjwm.png
Carrera: https://i.imgur.com/OF5pbqa.jpeg
Taycan: https://i.imgur.com/wu3iPZX.jpeg

2 OTHER Porsche models that I don't know from earlier this year in AZ (Ippei driving):
https://i.imgur.com/zOrqGoZ.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/TNac8YM.png

The black matte Tesla pix are easy to find and is ugly and dumb so I won't link.

He’s driving the car in that one photo? We need an ESPN source check on him not being able to drive

Sorry, this is indeed on ESPN for some sloppy cut and pasting from an older article I guess: https://www.mlb.com/news/shohei-ohtani-got-his-driver-s-license

I know Porsches make RHD for the UK market but it's weird to see a LHD one in Japan (unless this was shot here):

https://www.instagram.com/porsche_japan/p/CmP_TpMP8Tr/

(^^^shot in Tokyo, pardon me!)

that one appears to be RHD based on the second and third pics?

he’s probably getting out of the passenger side after one of porsche’s pro drivers took him for a lap

kinda surprised he can fit in that porsche

I join this thread in clowning Ohtani's taste in cars. wack tbh

kinda surprised he can fit in that porsche

Yeah but is that the largest auto he could afford

Monster truck doesn’t fit the vibe

My sad urbanist take: It's very telling that here is a kid who grew up in rural Japan who moved to the extreme north of his country (akin to moving to somewhere like Juneau for Americans) who NEVER needed nor felt the need to have a driver's license even as a celebrity and the best player in NPB.

When he first joined the Angels, he lived next to Angels stadium and would "walk to work" until paparazzi and fans bugged him and honked at him and then Ippei started driving him.

Did America (Anaheim)'s car-centric post-war urban design warp this carbrained mentality for Shohei and create eventual additional codepedency layers between he and Ippei? Is Walt Disney at fault because he created a carfree Utopia (well, except for Autopia) positioned in the middle of several thousand acres of parking lots which used to be endless citrus groves? Do you know in Japan you can take the commuter train directly INTO both DisneySea & Tokyo Disneyland?

The only city in Japan I’ve been to is Tokyo and my single criticism is what the FUCK is the deal with the various metro and train lines all being run by different providers, and no integrated transport system for payment? Otherwise 10/10 experience outside rush hour.

I read that many Japanese MLB players prefer to live in the cities they play in - this is said to be part of Imanaga’s draw to Chicago. Maybe he should have taken a leaf out of Yoshida’s book

NHK filmed Masataka Yoshida riding his scooter around Boston.

He’ll be on Monday’s episode of Sports x Human. pic.twitter.com/HEVAFMfDHV

— Jason Coskrey (@JCoskrey) August 13, 2023

More seriously, LA Times alluded to this when he signed & interesting to see ESPN make the same point:

At the beginning of spring training, Roberts, perhaps jokingly, nominated outfielder Jason Heyward to be the one on whom reporters could rely to contextualize Ohtani's achievements when Ohtani chooses not to -- a designated speaker of sorts. It was a nod to Heyward's experience and statesmanship, but it also served to emphasize Ohtani's lack of availability. In Anaheim, the guys speaking for Ohtani were Zach Neto, Taylor Ward and Logan O'Hoppe. When it's a team filled with All-Stars and three other MVPs, maybe the most accomplished collection of talent in the past several decades, it's a tougher sell.

He seldom speaks for himself. "I know," catcher Will Smith said during spring training. Then, perhaps thinking that it sounded harsh, he quickly said, "And I'm fine with it."

...and no integrated transport system for payment?

There are integrated forms of payment FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY (except Okinawa) even as long ago as 25 years ago (via mobile phone!!!) which blew my fragile american mind... but they are not easy for tourists to navigate.

What I mean is if you’re buying a ticket and changing to a line owned by a different company than the one you started with it’s confusing. I’m sure permanent residents have passes that navigate all that but it was confusing to me

ime a pasmo or suica card is all you need to get around tokyo? even when transferring to different lines.

leaving tokyo was where things got squirrelly for me

yup, add Suica, Pasmo or ICOCA in wallet (or watch) and tap transponder- voila. We (SF) didn't have that tech (FeLiCa NFC) until 2021 I want to say...?