Chapter 1: What recent sports betting scandal is highlighted in this episode?
So I love sports. But I would only call myself a low-level sports bettor. I've wagered small amounts, $20 here, $30 there, maybe $50 if I'm feeling crazy. Increasingly, though, more and more sports fans are wagering a lot more than $50 and betting on every play within a game. And that's led us to the age of the betting scandal.
Rozier's accused of purposely leaving a game with a phantom injury so that he and his co-conspirators, including his childhood friend, could make tens of thousands of dollars.
The NCAA has banned six men's basketball players at three different Division I schools for allegedly rigging games. These two baseball players are in trouble for rigging pitches for bettors.
Has sports betting gone too far? I'm Astead Herndon, and that's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.
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Chapter 2: How are athletes being implicated in sports betting scandals?
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Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.
Chapter 3: What role does technology play in modern sports betting?
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Danny Font is the author of Everybody Loses, The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. So Danny, we've seen an uptick in sports betting scandals recently, but what's happened this week?
So this past season, two relief pitchers on the Cleveland Guardians were flagged for what the industry calls suspicious betting activity. Emmanuel Classe, one of the top relief pitchers in baseball, and his teammate Luis Ortiz. Federal prosecutors in New York indicted both of them for a host of charges. Charged with fraud, conspiracy, and rigging pitches. Feds are coming in hot.
They're facing up to 65 years in federal prison if convicted on all charges. Peter said in the indictment that Class A and Ortiz threw specific pitches for balls so bettors could place prop bets. To arrange prop bets. So that certain prop bets on those pitches would pay off.
Chapter 4: How has the legalization of sports betting changed the landscape?
Class A, this all-star closing pitcher, is accused of texting, saying heads up. You know, in his case, it was betting on whether a certain pitch he threw would be a ball or a strike. Indictment, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York.
After receiving advance information from the defendant Emmanuel Classé de la Cruz about a specific pitch that Classé intended to throw, better one and several of the betters won approximately $58,000 on betting platform two by placing multiple bets that a pitch thrown by Classé would both be a ball and be slower than 94.95 miles per hour.
won approximately $27,000 on betting platform two, won approximately $38,000, $10,000, $15,000. Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the bettors won at least $400,000 from the betting platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant, Emmanuel Classe de la Cruz.
And an important part of at least this Major League Baseball betting scandal seems to be that they were betting on individual pitches, individual balls and strikes, and they were communicating about it in real time.
Yeah, which is interesting because it's one of the defining traits of this legal online sports betting era. One player can very easily influence the outcome of one of these prop bets. It's literally about the play of a specific person, sometimes on a specific play. Will the speed of the next pitch? Will the runner on first try to steal second? Will this inning generate a run?
The idea is just every second you're watching and inevitably watching while on your phone, let's give you something to bet on.
How unique is this to this moment?
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Chapter 5: What are the concerns surrounding prop bets in sports betting?
We've had sports betting scandals before, but it seems as if you're saying this is unique to this time and this legalized sports betting industry.
Yeah, particularly legal online sports betting. So in the past, even if betting has always existed in Nevada or through your neighborhood bookie or whatever, typically that was done in person, often before games started. Now, more than 90% of bets are placed online legally. A lot of these are smartphone apps, which enables betting during games on these kind of real-time bets.
It creates so much opportunity for manipulation and This volume of betting where there are literally thousands of prop bets available for many major sports every game absolutely did not exist just several years ago. You could not bet tens of thousands of dollars on a fringe bench player to get a certain number of rebounds. That's something new.
How much of betting is happening on these prop bets during an individual game? So Americans wager about $150 billion legally every year, and about 30% of the money wagered, 30% of that $150 billion is on props or combinations of props that form parlays that generates 60% of the revenue. More than half of the money generated is coming from this type of betting.
So when we think about, okay, this is... opens the door for all sorts of corruption, will the sportsbooks be inclined to rein it in? To put it succinctly, I doubt it, because it's their biggest moneymaker these days.
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Chapter 6: How does the public perceive the integrity of sports amidst betting?
The thing that's so enticing to these companies about offering thousands and thousands of live micro bets during the game is you might bet $30 pregame, but you might bet $10 five or ten times on these micro bets. Suddenly, you've bet way more than you would have if you were just doing it beforehand. So that's why it's a phenomenal business for them.
It's also, people say, especially addictive because the more frenzied and relentless the bedding, the easier it is to feed that kind of compulsive instinct. Because if I'm bedding every 10 seconds versus every two hours, it's a very different experience.
You know, this might be an obvious question, but why exactly are these athletes, particularly active athletes, getting involved in these bets? We're talking about multimillionaires. It seems a little ridiculous.
It does. And that was literally one of the arguments that the leagues and their gambling operator partners assured the public when they were pushing for legalization was, don't worry, today's athletes are too wealthy to be corrupted. They wouldn't throw it all away to gamble. Too wealthy to be corrupted. What a phrase. I know.
Now, obviously, you could look in sports, you could look on Wall Street, whatever.
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Chapter 7: What actions are being taken to regulate sports betting practices?
Being rich doesn't immunize you from being greedy or being foolish. This idea that, like... oh, you make however many millions of dollars, you're not going to make a bad decision, is really falling apart as we see these scandals unfold.
You know, for me as a sports lover, as someone who enjoys the community of sports, it definitely feels as if betting, and particularly live betting, has changed the fan experience.
You can be places, and it will often seem as if folks' rooting interests are more closely aligned with, will there be a turnover, will the next pitch be more or less than 90 miles an hour, than whether a team is even winning or losing.
Is there any concern that the leagues have had about the ways that their close marriage to the sports betting industry has changed the viewing experience or changed the fan experience?
No doubt. So much of the fallout of legalization, you could act as though this is a surprise, like who could have seen this coming? The commissioners of major sports warned decade after decade that all this stuff would happen, and then the people in power currently saw the dollar signs and changed their stance. But one of the things they really banged the drum on was that
A fixation on betting cheapens or degrades your relationship with sports. You know, it's one thing if you're a diehard Chicago Bulls fan. Hey!
Yeah. Playing to the audience.
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Chapter 8: What could be the future implications of sports betting on athletes and fans?
It's another thing if you go to a game and you're just waiting for, you know, someone to get two steals. And sometimes nowadays, like you were saying, you can feel this in an arena or a stadium. You'll hear... like a groan or a cheer go out when someone grabs a rebound and it's like, what's the big deal? What was that all about? It's because they covered their prop betting line.
So that stuff is interesting in how it's changing the nature of fandom. It also has a really ugly side where, of course, sports fans can be overly intense and get crazed about the teams they're rooting for. But we're seeing a level of harassment and threats sent toward athletes that crosses a line. That's why you see so many players fucking getting death threats, right?
Like in their inboxes, because people are mad because they didn't hit their profits and shit like that, or they smoked a layer. And I get people telling me to kill myself every week. And, you know, because I'll hit a kick that loses them money. I'll miss a kick and it loses them money. It was the other day somebody told me to get cancer and die.
There have been stories of people being stalked at their team hotel or at their home. So this is something that I think is going to reach a boiling point.
Considering all this, what are people trying to do about prop betting? Are there any pushes to change the law or to roll back any of this?
So one of the leading forces on that is the NCAA. They really dragged their feet to come around on legalization. They were often the most adamant that this would be bad for sports. And for a while now, they've been saying that states should ban bets on individual player props.
When you hone in on specific players, not only does it open the door for all sorts of manipulation and the temptation for them to gamble, but it heightens that microscope that they're under and leads to a lot of really ugly harassment that we were just talking about. So some states have gone ahead and banned individual player props on college sports.
The NCAA is pushing for all states to do that. Major League Baseball, in response to these arrests, reached an agreement with a bunch of sportsbooks that they won't take bets exceeding $200 on individual pitches. Now we were talking about how addictive that sort of betting can be. So definitely if you're betting 200 bucks a pitch, that can get out of hand pretty quickly.
But at least from a fixing standpoint, it doesn't make it as easy to make a boatload of money if you're fixing certain pitches.
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