Shohei Ohtani, Ippei Mizuhara gambling scandal is already becoming a TV show

Where do you stand on TV dramas based on real-life sports stories? As someone who loved HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty and is still salty about how abruptly it ended, I'm a big fan. That's why I'm very excited about the announcement that the Shohei Ohtani-Ippei Mizuhara scandal is being developed into a scripted series.

If you're reading this, you're probably like me in that you watch and talk about a ton of sports. Any sport, any time, regular season, playoffs, whatever, I'm in. Whether it's going to the theater to see a sports movie, settling on the couch to watch a sports documentary, or talking to a person you just met for an hour about the NFL Draft, sign me up.

Sports documentaries are great, and I eat those up. ESPN's 30 for 30 series has had so many interesting entries. The Last Dance was probably the best thing that came out during the lockdown. O.J.: Made in America was incredible. HBO has also made dozens of fascinating sports documentaries. Does Hard Knocks count? Maybe that's its own thing, but it's excellent, too.

Luckily for people like you and me, there's never a shortage of sports content in the world. No matter what time of year it is, you can always find a game on TV. You can watch all of these documentaries and movies through streaming. There's always an internet thread where you can just name random athletes to your heart's content.

One thing that's sorely lacking, though, is TV shows based on real-life sports. I get why. It has to be extremely difficult to get the rights to these stories, and to be able to use creative license when necessary to spice them up. Casting has to be a nightmare because finding actors who not only look like famous athletes but can believably play like them has to be impossible. It's nothing short of a miracle what Winning Time did in finding actors to play Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar so well both on and off the court. The fact that they did is a big part of what made the show so good.

The FX series Clipped, which is based on former L.A. Clippers' owner Donald Sterling's scandal that forced him out of the league, is premiering in less than a month on Hulu, and with people like Ed O'Neill and Laurence Fishburne involved, I'm also very excited for that one. With how timely it is, though, I think I'm even more jazzed for the Ohtani show.

The Shohei-Ippei saga is the perfect sports story to be given the scripted treatment

The sports world was rocked when the story came out that Shohei Ohtani's friend and interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had reportedly lost millions of dollars by betting on sports over the last several years. Initial speculation ran rampant. How could Ippei bet so much in the first place? Was Ohtani a victim in this, or was Ippei covering for him? If Ohtani was involved in some way, what would baseball do to him?

It was the perfect story for our time, as sites like DraftKings and FanDuel have partnered up with seemingly every major sports league to become an ever-present part of the sports landscape. More and more states are legalizing sports betting, which makes these kinds of stories inevitable, though no less shocking when they occur. NFL wide receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended in 2022 for a year for gambling on his own team's games, and more recently, NBA reserve Jontay Porter was suspended for life after it was found that he gambled on his own player props.

With all due respect to Ridley and Porter, Ohtani is in a league of his own, a global superstar who just signed the richest contract in baseball history this past offseason. This is only part of why this story is such an ideal fit for a TV show, as the entire angle of Ippei stealing from his friend makes it much more interesting than if Ohtani had just been gambling himself. Ohtani has been cleared of any wrongdoing by the federal investigation into the matter, but that makes it no less compelling.

The whole time I watched Winning Time, I just kept thinking, "Why don't they make more things like this?" The cast was a wonderful mix of established talent, like John C. Reilly playing Jerry Buss, and fresh, exciting faces, like Quincy Isaiah playing Magic. Add in some great writing, the show really nailing the feel of the NBA in the early '80s, and a little bit of poetic license (apologies to Jerry West), and it was all I could ask for.

With a relatively contained story, the Ohtani-Ippei show won't have to worry about suffering the same fate as Winning Time. One season should be enough to tell it in its entirety, and if it's successful, maybe we can get more scripted sports shows to air. You can bet that I'll be there watching. Then again, maybe don't.