In Shohei Ohtani’s press conference on Monday, his first interaction with the press since last week’s news, he debuted an interim interprete
Second straight day of big departures from what I usually post... Just wanna give everyone a little background on Japanese ballplayers and athletes in America, and the type of support systems they tend to bring with them to the US. A common refrain in the reactions to the Shohei Ohtani saga has been along the lines of, "Shohei really let his interpreter, of all people, access his bank accounts? That seems way too fishy." A lot of sports fans, with a good amount of justification, look at the hype that comes with the signing of Japanese players with MLB teams — and more so the money on the contracts that those players sign — and assume that they must have a team of assistants and handlers who look after their every need 24/7 as they navigate life in this new country and new league. People would be shocked at just how small that "team" can actually be. Oftentimes, it's just the interpreter (either team-assigned or hired by the players themselves) and however many family members they bring with them to the US. In some cases, especially for lesser-known athletes, it's just the family. And occasionally, it's just the athlete coming here entirely on his or her own and not knowing anybody upon arrival. On that last point: WWE used to have a partnership with F*ll S**l where they would get students to help with the production of live shows at their training facility just outside of Orlando. Not too long into the venture, WWE signed a wrestler from Japan on a development-type contract. Now, this wrestler was well-known in the Japanese scene, and had received enough of a push that he wore the championship belt several times during his career. He was also married with kids.
So he gets to Orlando. He doesn't speak much English (if any), doesn't bring his family with him, and doesn't have much in the way of contacts or a support system in the US outside of whatever the WWE arranged for him upon arrival. Bear in mind that this is all before we had things like instant translator apps on smartphones, and before Japanese-language services became more common worldwide. It eventually got to the point where WWE had to look for someone, anyone, who spoke Japanese, and got Strip Mall U to track down my mom — who I'm guessing was the only Japanese speaker in the entire company — and enlist her to help him with some of the basic paperwork for life in America: setting up a bank account (but not running it), trips to the DMV, and so on.
For WWE's part, they gave my mom free tickets to the shows in exchange for helping this wrestler out, which her (and my old) co-workers might have cherished more than she did. And for the wrestler's part, he managed to carve out a career in the US in the years afterwards; his Wiki indicates that he still does occasional shows in the US, albeit in the independent circuits. But the fact that they wound up entrusting someone who was a complete stranger to the wrestling world to serve as a de facto liaison to one of their overseas performers was, and still is, pretty wild to me. And regardless of whose plan it was for his support system to be that thin from the jump: if that's what it looked like for an entertainer of that caliber and fame, then it would stand to reason that the amount of help that is afforded to, or is possibly asked for by, the typical Japanese pro athlete in the US isn't all that much higher... and in that scenario, having just a single point of support for the athlete, or the athlete plain fending for himself or herself in an unfamiliar country using an unfamiliar language, could absolutely lead to some unintended consequences. I should make clear here that none of this will prove definitively that Shohei Ohtani is free of any and all wrongdoing. There's certainly a non-zero chance that he's actually a degenerate who stays up all night placing bets on random D2 college basketball and lower-league Japanese soccer games, and is using his now-former interpreter as the ultimate fall guy. But I do think this background might explain (what I personally think is) the more likely possibility that Shohei was okey-doked by his own interpreter, slash accountant, slash media liaison, slash workout partner, slash clubhouse attendant, slash Ubereats driver, etc etc.
