Now that sports betting has gone mainstream, are we ready for its impact on … sports?

All is quiet on the Ohtani front. After a week of thunderous headlines connecting the interpreter of Major League Baseball’s greatest star to gambling, there’s been precious little fuss made about it.

Pete Rose would like a word.

After the story changed a couple of times, the official line is this: Ippei Mizuhara, the interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers’ $700 million man, Shohei Ohtani — who hits like Mookie Betts and pitches like Orel Hershiser — was guilty of “massive theft” of millions of dollars from Ohtani, which he gambled away. Prior versions had Ohtani either loaning Mizuhara money or paying off his prodigious debts. Ohtano himself has denied gambling, and there is no direct evidence that he has.

Mizuhara is reported to be negotiating a guilty plea, which the Dodgers and Major League Baseball pray will put out the fire before it has a chance to catch.

But you don’t have to be Oliver Stone to wonder if that’s all there was to it. Did a lowly interpreter really have access to Ohtani’s bank account, and the ability to perform massive wire transfers without banks or regulators becoming suspicious? In a world where a bank will deny a $40 debit card payment on a toaster for no good reason at all?

And what would happen if it turns out that Ohtani’s involvement extended beyond loan/debt repayment/massive theft? It was easy to make an example of Rose after his playing days were over. Would baseball have the stomach to ban its biggest moneymaker — the best player since Ruth — in the prime of his career? For life?

It would seem a bit hypocritical for an organization to get all huffy over gambling when it is about to move its venerable Oakland A’s franchise … to Las Vegas.

Ippei Mizuhara may well turn out to be Ohtani’s Allen Weisselberg, silently enduring a prison cell for reasons  we can only guess at, while leaving a world of questions unanswered. But even if this bullet is dodged, a freight train is coming.

The real truth is that gambling is already out of MLB’s, or any sport’s, control. In the six years since the Supreme Court gave gambling free rein, sports betting revenue has increased by a factor of 12 — to more than $11 billion — and is still surging.

You could only have imagined this had the potential for trouble if you had, well, thought about it for three seconds. Gambling houses, the most grubbing of the money grubbers, were never going to use anything resembling restraint. Nor are honesty and integrity words that have ever been associated with this until now underground world.

Sure enough, sports networks overnight went from sermonizing that any allusion to the point spread was for “entertainment purposes only” to having hours of programming devoted exclusively to odds, numbers, parlays, point spreads and prop bets, to the point that you might not realize that, behind it all, an actual sporting event will be taking place.

In the 1800s, sports were the domain of amateurs, where sportsmanship and camaraderie were more important than the final score. These “gentlemen amateurs” tended to be students at elite colleges, or those wealthy enough to have free time on their hands to play games. Professionalism, with its cash payments, was regarded as a filthy pursuit, a stigma that disappeared through the breadth of the 20th century.

Today’s new era, the hyper-monetizing of sports through off-field activities, has happened much faster, and gambling is only part of the story. Name Image and Likeness, the transfer portal and legalized booster-sponsored slush funds now make it likely that all but the best athletes can make more money by staying in school than turning pro. It’s hard to even know if this development is good or bad.

It’s nice that players are staying in school longer, but the problem is they might not be staying at your university. It’s hardly worth learning the names of the athletes at your favorite school anymore, because they won’t stay, they won’t become family the way they did in the days of Phil Ford, Bobby Hurley or Adrian Branch. The great teams that would stay together for four years and provide a sense of continuity from year to year are gone.

Worse, who knows anymore whether a player on the team you’re watching is in deep trouble with the bookies and might be incentivized to miss a free throw or strike out with the bases loaded?

To normalize Extreme Gambling, we must brush aside not just the social costs, but the idea that professional athletes can withstand the tsunami of professional gamblers. If you want a sure bet, take organized gambling and lay the points. Because there won’t always be an interpreter handy to take the fall.

Somebody figured out women's basketball can make money. Is that the beginning of the end?

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Gambling is transforming sports, and it might not be a good thing