Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) has announced that 14 players from seven teams were found to have used online casinos, an act that is illegal in Japan, even if the websites are based overseas.
The first publicly identified player was Orix Buffaloes pitcher Taisuke Yamaoka, who participated in an online poker tournament. Yamaoka, known as a poker fan, reportedly did not realize that gambling on an overseas site is against Japanese law.
In response to this revelation, NPB conducted a thorough investigation across all 12 teams, which confirmed that 14 players from seven different organizations had also been involved in online gambling. Secretary General Katsuhiko Nakamura emphasized that none of these incidents included wagering on baseball.
Gambling has taken center stage on both sides of the Pacific in the wake of the Ippei Mizuhara scandal that surfaced last year. Mizuhara, Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter and close friend, was recently handed a 57-month federal prison sentence on bank and fraud charges. Investigators found he stole $17 million from the two-way superstar by manipulating Ohtani’s bank account security settings to finance his estimated 19,000 bets.
Veteran MLB umpire Pat Hoberg was also recently terminated for violating the league’s gambling rules. Hoberg did not place bets on baseball himself, but reports indicated that he shared legal sports-betting accounts with a professional poker player who did wager on the sport, leading to his dismissal.
Though gambling is not as mainstream in Japan as it is in the United States, recent revelations suggest that an underground culture is quite prevalent. Some reports estimate that more than 3 million people in Japan use online casinos. Previously, laws and public attitudes were relatively lax, but police have recently begun cracking down amid suspicions that such platforms may channel profits to organized crime. Even prominent athletes like soccer star Maya Yoshida and former baseball player Tomoya Satozaki once served as ambassadors for gambling sites, although such endorsements would likely be viewed more negatively today.
All of the NPB gambling cases took place from February 2022 onward, which falls within the three-year statute of limitations for simple gambling under Japanese criminal law. NPB has left disciplinary actions at each team’s discretion, including whether or not to publicly disclose the players’ identities.
While Orix has indefinitely suspended Yamaoka, NPB has not issued any league-wide mandates, leaving open the possibility for him to return once his team deems it appropriate. Meanwhile, the league continues to investigate any additional reports and is encouraging anyone who may have unknowingly participated in such activities to come forward.
“We take these incidents very seriously,” Nakamura said. “It’s definitely something we have to deal with from now on.” He also emphasized that awareness campaigns will be conducted at team training camps, particularly for rookies, to prevent similar incidents in the future.
