Jason Fitz: "The person you trust the most is the one who is out here doing all this behind your back. You feel stupid, you feel used. And now, everyone that watches your sport, covers your sport, thinks about your sport has decided that you're actually a bad guy doing the one thing you cannot do - you're betting on your sport. We spent weeks saying the name Pete Rose and Shohei Ohtani in the same sentence with absolutely no evidence. We presumed the absolute worst at every step. Why? Because we applied our own personal logic to a situation we knew nothing about. Yet we've learned nothing, cause we will do it again next time. When do we just default to being human beings in these situations? When do we default to letting things play out? When, as a culture, do we decide we actually believe in innocent until proven guilty? When do we decide that the information we have today doesn't have to create a hot take, doesn't have to create a news story? It can simply create analysis based solely on what we know right now. All we had to do when everything broke with Shohei was say 'this is worth keeping an eye on, and when we get more information, we will let you know what we find out.' It's what we should have done. It's what we didn't do. And now, because so many people made up their minds, and as a society we don't like to say 'whoops, my bad,' we already decided innocence or guilt, and there is not a fact that we will let get in the way of that. It's unfortunate."
Jason Fitz, in for Doug Gottlieb, believes that the reaction to the Department of Justice confirming that Shohei Ohtani was a victim of theft reveals an unfortunate truth about our society. Jason rips into fans and media members who continue to harp on to their theories that interpreter Ippei Mizuhara is a fall guy for Ohtani's illegal betting habits, demonstrating how these people are refusing to accept facts as they are presented due to an unnecessary insistence that their imagined storylines are somehow the truth of the case.