How Will ESPN’s Dodgers Broadcast Address Shohei Ohtani Fallout With Former Interpreter?
When ESPN selected the Los Angeles Dodgers’ series finale against the St. Louis Cardinals for its first Sunday Night Baseball broadcast of 2024, it couldn’t see this coming.
To be fair, no one could.
The fervor surrounding a new season of Dodger baseball has morphed in a matter of days into a state of equal parts curiosity and stupor. What happened between star Shohei Ohtani, his former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, and an alleged illegal sports bookmaker? What punishment might come down from Major League Baseball or law enforcement toward Mizuhara, Ohtani, or both? Those are unusually weighty questions to be asking on the eve of a new season.
Monday, Ohtani will address the media for the first time since MLB launched its investigation Friday by reading a prepared statement. It’s an important development in a whirlwind story that goes beyond the usual X’s and O’s of a baseball season.
By the time the Dodgers and Cardinals take the field Sunday, the story will inevitably have taken another twist or turn. For play-by-play man Karl Ravech, it’s an admitted challenge — yet one he embraces as part of the broadcast.
“You absolutely at this time rely on the reporters like Tisha Thompson and TJ Quinn to provide all the facts,” Ravech said on a conference call with the media, including Dodgers Nation, on Monday. “We report the facts in this case, but there’s also informed opinion that comes from being the boots on the ground with the Dodgers in Seoul and talking to players, and not necessarily giving our opinion but giving the opinion that we’re getting from those who are closest to the situation in the clubhouse.”
Ravech cited the expertise of analysts Eduardo Perez and David Cone, both former players, in addressing their expertise on what could be an uncomfortable situation in the Dodgers’ clubhouse.
“There is a distinction between my opinion, Eduardo’s, Coney’s versus somebody who’s wearing the uniform, and I think it allows us to give a great deal of context to the viewer and the audience to hear what’s being said in the clubhouse,” Ravech said. “It’s a way to express those opinions when they’re not ours but they’re very, very valid, and that’s I think the role of the broadcaster with regards to a story like this. It’s not one where you can say who do you think is a better player or is he struggling with this particular pitch.”
The novelty of the situation — an interpreter using money from a non-English speaking player to pay off his gambling debts, possibly without informed consent — is a saga none of the men in the booth has personally dealt with. That’s far outside the context of typical baseball storylines, enough to beg the question: does it need to be addressed during the broadcast at all?
It does, said ESPN Sunday Night Baseball producer Andy Jacobson.
“When news like that breaks or there’s something of that nature being reported, we have a lot of conversations behind the scenes with each other, with various people at ESPN to kind of figure out a plan of attack,” Jacobson said.
ESPN has plenty of opinion–based shows in its programming lineup. Sunday Night Baseball isn’t one of them — at least when it comes to the Ohtani-Mizuhara fallout, Jacobson said.
“I think what we’ve set out to do is just hit on the facts. We can’t roll in our opinions on something this delicate, this sensitive. But I do think there’s an expectation from our viewers, from our fans to cover it in some capacity, to talk about it. That’s sort of what we did in Seoul when this was all — we woke up to that news on Thursday morning in Seoul, South Korea, that had broke.”
In other words, if you want the weeklong social-media-fueled opinion cycle around the latest Shohei Ohtani news, don’t tune in this Sunday to watch the Dodgers play the St. Louis Cardinals. But if you want some context for the last week of Shohei Ohtani’s life, it’ll be part of the broadcast if and when Ohtani is on camera.
Photo Credit: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters via USA TODAY Sports
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