There’s a tendency in the streaming age of television for a platform to initially drop just the right number of episodes of a new series to get people hooked. If the pilot is fantastic and the second episode a bit of a slog, they’ll give you just that first episode, then make you wait a week. If the first two episodes are slower stage-setting and then the third episode is where the show takes off, they’ll hit you with all three at once for a mini-binge.
Clearly, the higher-ups programming 30 for 30 Podcasts for ESPN are familiar with this strategy. It was likely no accident that they began with not one but two episodes of The Betrayal of Shohei Ohtani on Tuesday.
Episode 1, titled “The Letter O”? Yawn. There’s lots of background for people unfamiliar with the story of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara. There’s additional background for people unfamiliar with how legal and illegal gambling work. There’s a whole lot of navel-gazing via the host of the podcast, ESPN investigative reporter Tisha Thompson. And there’s occasional cringeworthy, overdramatized narration, such as when Thompson’s piecing together of the notion that Matt Bowyer might just be a bookie (gasp!) is presented as if it’s a cell tower ping that incriminates Adnan Syed.
If ESPN had released the first episode and stopped there, I’d be giving it a lousy review and wouldn’t be going back for the second episode.
But ESPN wisely dropped the first two of the six episodes together. And Episode 2, titled “The Interview,” built around the actual audio from Thompson’s March 2024 interview with Mizuhara that led to the scandal getting blown wide open, is a banger. If you want insight into the mind of a problem gambler, a masterclass in conducting an investigative interview, and a dash of mystery as to who and what to believe, it’s all there in a tight 46 minutes of AirPod-ready docu-drama.
O, no
The first episode, clocking in at just 29 minutes, does succeed at times in establishing intrigue, with Thompson’s intonation at the outset hinting that she isn’t so sure Ohtani is as innocent as Mizuhara’s eventual guilty pleas suggest. “Two years later, I still have so many questions,” she says, a smart hook for a story much of the public has closed the book on.
But calling this “one of the biggest scandals in baseball history”? That’s a reach, at least as long as the generally accepted theory is that Ohtani knew nothing and this is the story of an interpreter and an illegal bookmaker who are only tangentially connected to baseball. Also, I can’t do justice via written text to the fabricated drama embedded in Thompson’s delivery of “And that’s when I say to myself: I think Matt Bowyer is a bookie.” Plus, at least a mini-cringe is warranted when Thompson says of Pete Rose: “He holds records that have never been broken.” Yeah, um, that’s what it means to hold a record.
“The Letter O” also features an awful lot of Thompson telling the story of how she initially reported the story, which is all relevant and perhaps even necessary, but nevertheless shifts the focus away from Ohtani, Mizuhara, and Bowyer.
And the new interviews for the first episode of the podcast don’t cast a particularly wide net, keeping it on home turf as Thompson talks to ESPN’s David Payne Purdum for gambling explainers and to ESPN’s Tim Keown for his observations from covering Ohtani and Mizuhara. They’re strong interviews. But when the bulk of the episode is an ESPN reporter talking to other ESPN reporters and talking about her own reporting, you’re not off to the most promising start.
But then there’s the cliffhanger, the tease for Episode 2: “I’m Ippei Mizuhara, and you do have permission to record me.” And as long as the second episode is right there in the podcast feed and it’ll play automatically when Episode 1 ends, well … why not?
On the record
Without spoiling all the reveals of the episode here in this review, suffice to say that hearing Mizuhara’s voice as his world is coming apart, trying to parse what’s him being honest and what’s him covering his tracks and what’s him covering other people’s tracks, and listening to Thompson keep pressing him and drawing answers out of him while coming across as empathetic enough to not scare him away, makes for utterly gripping content.
She gets him to talk about his salary as an interpreter, revealing so much through what he is and is not forthright about. She gets him to nearly break down over his wife learning about the trouble he’s gotten into. When Mizuhara begins to clam up, she tells him what her sources have told her, prompting him to confirm or deny.
She is masterful at getting him to insist Ohtani has never placed a bet and hates gambling, leaving it to the listener to decide if that’s extreme honesty or a case of an interpreter who doth protest too much.
Thompson is suspicious at nearly every turn but avoids becoming abrasive about it.
“Do you have the kind of relationship where he does things without questioning it?” Thompson asks Mizuhara. It’s just the right probing question for the situation, as Mizuhara is claiming Shohei is sending millions of dollars to someone he supposedly doesn’t know, supposedly without needing to know what the money is for.
All of this leads to a plot pivot late in the episode, when Thompson is on the verge of filing her article, only for the story to change, with Ohtani’s spokesperson and lawyers insisting Mizuhara stole the money from Shohei and lied to Thompson hours earlier. It lays the groundwork perfectly for one of those first-season-of-Serial-style “you’re never sure what to believe” listening experiences.
Episode 3, titled “Baseball Boy,” drops Thursday, followed by “The Bookie” on Aug. 4 (which apparently includes new interviews with Bowyer), “The Feds” on Aug. 6, and “Footnote” on Aug. 11.
Here’s hoping by the end of the series those installments leave Episode 1, rather than Episode 2, looking like the anomaly.
