Too Close For Comfort

Well, thank Christ something went right for the Dodgers.

That’s not something I have ever written or thought in my entire life, excepting for right now. To be honest, I wrote that opening line because it’s ironic and hilarious. Both. The Dodgers own a payroll that exceeds a quarter of a billion Lasordas, so the idea that they needed something to go their way is funnier than Angel Hernandez’s idea of a strike zone.

The news that Shohei Ohtani has been exonerated in a federal investigation involving gambling just so happens to make that opening line true. Because if the feds had found Shohei’s fingerprints on a single one of the $16 million bucks that Ippei Mizuhara stole from him, the Dodgers season would be playing out much differently.

I’m old enough to remember when Pete Rose was given a lifetime ban for gambling on baseball. For those of you who believe professional sports began in the year 2000, well . . . the Rose ban was a big deal. He was MLB’s all-time hits leader; born and raised in Cincinnati, Charlie Hustle helped bring a World Series title back to the Queen City. He came back home in the mid ’80’s to skipper the club, and that’s when the baseball legend’s nickname became a little too real.

This was back in a time when baseball had an actual commissioner and not simply a corporate rain maker. Bart Giamatti was a Yale man whose eloquence and grace was only surpassed by his love for the game. He got five months in the Boss’s chair before succumbing to a heart attack at the age of 51. It was smoking that took him, but having kicked Rose out eight days prior sure didn’t help.

A Shohei Ohtani lifetime ban might have been worse. Because while Rose was a retired player when he got caught, the Dodgers superstar is in the prime of his career. And while he’s far from the only star in today’s game, he’s on a different level than all the rest. He’s a global phenomenon who somehow is deserving of all those big fat zeroes in his paycheck, because he’s going to make everyone and everything he touches rich. Excepting of course, for his degenerate gambler of an interpreter who didn’t know how to quit when he was behind.

The very idea that the sport’s biggest star could have found himself embroiled in a gambling scandal doesn’t seem to resonate with Manfred and his cronies, even now. Sure, the Dodgers would have found themselves on the kind of hook that Frankie Carbone made famous in Goodfellas. But it’s the sport that would have taken the biggest hit of all, after having jumped into bed with legalized gambling five years ago.

Baseball has a pretty forgettable history when it comes to gambling and  icons. It was the Black Sox scandal of 1919 that took down Shoeless Joe Jackson. It was the last great commissioner who took down Pete Rose sixty-nine years later. But that’s what Manfred and his owners will do now that their unicorn has been absolved of any wrongdoing. They’ll forget. They’ll forget just how lucky they got.

This time.