COLUMN: Say it ain’t so, Sho!

The Major League season has just begun.

And like all too many professional sports leagues (colleges are doing their best to catch up), controversy amid a potentially devastating scandal has reared its ugly noggin.

This time, the cast of characters are from Japan.

You know, that country where everyone bows to everything. Where the work ethic is insane and ancient ethics allegedly still rule the day.

Say it ain’t so, Sho.

The facts are as blurry as one’s eyes get after a heaping helping of Wasabi. Hard to choke down.

Yet here it comes, the guy who would make George Washington look like a thief and his claim of “I can’t tell a lie”, a whopper. The amazing player who recently signed a ba-jillion dollar deal. The guy who can pitch and hit and play the field.

The guy with $700 million greenbacks credited to his bank account over the next 10 years.

The guy who will make that kind of astronomical sum of money for...playing baseball.

Now, there is no clear evidence linking the Los Angeles Dodgers $700 million man to the brewing scandal. Shohei’s Ohtani’s camp is working to say his interpreter (Shohei’s English is still better than me trying to speak Japanese) stole more than $4 million of those contract bucks and squandered or otherwise “invested” them in gambling.

Ask Pete Rose how all that, including the mandatory pleas of “not me”, worked in the long run.

Maybe just as startling is the fact that the interpreter was making around $200,000 a year for following Shohei close and telling the rest of us what he said when asked questions or if a comment was needed following one of his brilliantly played games.

I would learn Japanese if someone would pay me that much.

Of course, these days in Los Angeles, $200,000 is more and more “commoner” money, just to afford the taxes and other City of Angels expenses.

I can only imagine how big a chunk of that 200 grand would be needed to purchase, say, a good Japanese steak at a glitzy Hollywood eatery.

And if it turns out the interpreter was indeed involved in such a situation – not so much the money as the betting and was it on baseball? - this will be a head-scratcher worthy of many bows.

How much money does any one person need? And have we not learned that as is the case with absolute power, which most agree corrupts absolutely, bundles of cash as high as Mount Fuji, come with corruption opportunities up the ying yang.

No question Ohtani is a great player, if not the greatest current player of all time.

A real GOAT.

Pete Rose was ostracized and booted from the game with a big scarlet S on his forehead when he was accused of being involved in betting on baseball.

To this day he denies the charges.

Ohtani may very well be completely innocent of any involvement. But someone in his entourage must have known bad karma at the very least was afoot.

But heck, the Dodgers will have a good year. Fans will brave the Los Angeles scene to make it out to Chavez Ravine, the site of the hallowed Dodger Stadium.

The elite will seem more elite, the bookies in Vegas a bit richer.

And for those of us who love baseball and look to sports to take away the pain of all the other illegal things going on these days, this scandal in the making could be bad boogies.

This could make Pete smell like a Rose and take the "Black" out of the BlackSox World Series scandal from decades gone by.

Say it ain’t so, Sho!