Danny Funt

Bench player, as we've seen, or even a more established player than that, can influence one play through these prop bets and make a fortune for them or their friends.

Emmanuel Closset, one of the top relief pitchers in baseball, was arrested at the end of last year.

Allegedly for just intentionally throwing a couple of pitches as balls, he texted someone from the bullpen and said, heads up, I'm going to spike a slider to start this inning.

And that was very profitable, allegedly, for him and his partner in that.

Again, it also relates to parlays because when you can stack those sorts of bets together, you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the most obscure bets.

John T. Porter, the most obscure player we could think of in the NBA, a two-way bench player on the Toronto Raptors, was arrested and ultimately convicted for removing himself from a couple of games, pretending he had an injury.

so that those prop bets on his points and rebounds and assists and things like that would go under.

That was something that people were betting hundreds of thousands of dollars to win on.

And I hear bookmakers so upset about that who've been at this for a long time because they would never have dreamed of letting you stand to win hundreds of thousands of bucks on –

A guy like John T. Porter, they knew that was ripe for fixing.

It was so corruptible.

And yet because the online business is, you know, their biggest moneymaker is these parlays, they've rushed into offering as many ways of building parlays as possible and accepted that a price you might pay for that is the corruption of sports.

Yeah, I'd love to get into that.

But the first name that popped in my head was Bob Costas, who spoke with me.

And his father had a gambling problem, he told me.

And so when he was calling baseball games and they wanted him to tout parlays or read sportsbook ads, he said, I just don't feel comfortable doing that.

And they gave him a pass.

The takeaway, I think, is you need to be a 30-time Emmy winner, a legend of broadcasting, to be able to opt out of that.

It's just become a fact of life.

for so many journalists.