I can’t think of a more 2025 way to start a column than to tell you it deals with a sports gambling scandal, and the most 2025 question you could ask in response is, “which one?”
When I tell you it’s the one that led to criminal indictments of active pro athletes, that would still only narrow the list of contenders to two. And if you didn’t think the wholesale legalization of sports betting, paired with an array of commercial partnerships between leagues and sports books, would lead to the exact kinds of headlines we’ve seen in recent weeks, you probably don’t pay enough attention to sports or gambling.
But yes, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, both relief pitchers with the Cleveland Guardians, were rung up this past Monday on charges related to dodgy prop bets. Prosecutors allege that the pitchers colluded with gamblers who bet that specific pitches would a) miss the strike zone and b) come in below a certain velocity, and that everybody cashed in with Clase and Ortiz delivered errant pitches on purpose. According to the feds, the scheme brought in more than $400,000 US to the players and their betting friends.
All those specifics matter – to a point.
Because the bets in question focused on pitch location and velocity, MLB and its “authorized gaming operators” will now limit bets on individual pitches to $200, and exclude single pitches from parlays.
That decision hits this particular target but misses the bigger point.
Parlays are still easy to lose, because every individual bet composing it has to break right for the better to get paid. And prop bets – wagers on discrete elements of the game, rather than the overall result – are still comparatively easy to manipulate. Neither Clase nor Ortiz could, by themselves, control whether the Guardians lost, won, or covered the spread, but either could decide unilaterally to throw a 55-foot curve ball rather than the 99-mph strike betting odds would have favoured.
The even bigger picture is just as grim. As long as gambling is normalized, accessible, and presented as a worthwhile habit and hobby, these shenanigans will happen. MLB’s response was a half-measure that all but asked for more scandals.
Sports gambling is more accessible than ever thanks to online sports books and betting apps. Now, wagers are just a tap away. Watch Swipe. Bet. Repeat. on CBC Gem.
In a perfect sports business world, leagues would interpret back-to-back-to-back gambling controversies – one each in the NBA, UFC, and MLB – as a signal to revisit their relationship with the gambling industry. It should always be worth asking whether leagues want to partner with sports betting outfits, or simply serve themselves up as gambling inventory, even if it risks eroding the integrity of the on-field product.
But in the imperfect sports-business landscape we inhabit we can only watch leagues and teams follow the money, even when it leads to shady places.
Why?
Because it’s a lot of revenue.
According to Global Data, MLB’s sports gaming partnerships bring in $70 million a year, while the NFL collects an estimated total of $80 million annually from DraftKings and FanDuel.
It’s more than enough motive to deepen the relationships between sports leagues and gambling if that money is coming from someplace neutral. But when you consider that the house wins because bettors lose, and that a disproportionate number of gaming dollars come from people who can’t afford to part with that cash, recalibrating the relationship makes sense.
Gambling, after all, is highly addictive by default, and made frictionless by mobile phones and their myriad gaming apps. That easy access sets it apart from other activities that can slide into life-wrecking habits. You can’t get liquor from your phone, and your dealer can’t text you your drug of choice. Before, you had to go someplace to lose your mortgage money playing poker; now you carry entire casinos, plural, in your pocket.
WATCH | MLB to limit pitch-level bets:
According to a 2022 study published by Statistics Canada, nearly two-thirds of Canadians older than 15 reported gambling in the previous year, and more than 300,000 people were at risk of gambling-related problems.
Sports betting didn’t cause all those problems, but its widespread embrace of betting pushes that habit to new places, and to new people.
On one level you have active athletes promoting gambling apps. Conor McDavid. Andre De Grasse. LeBron James. All have endorsed gambling platforms. Just another category in a sports star’s portfolio. Shoes, sunglasses, supplements, a gambling habit that could wreck your credit and more.
And on another level there’s the pervasive, persistent message that gambling is a legitimate way to express your sports fanhood, which it might be for people with the money and emotional make up to bet responsibly, within a pre-set budget, all the time.
But if you want to watch the game without being sold a highly addictive product, sports fandom is complicated these days. A CBC Marketplace investigation found that the average NBA broadcast contains 2.8 gambling ad messages per minute.
Those numbers also signal a shift in priorities among leagues, teams and sponsors.
Creating value for commercial partners by keeping viewers engaged isn’t new. That’s why sponsorships exist, and why advertisers love live sports. And to the extent that broadcasts addressed children, it was with eye on their futures, both as fans and as athletes. It’s why we hear colour commentators often implore “young players watching at home” to note Player A’s footwork, or the follow-through on Player B’s jump shot.
But now it’s less about investing in long term team loyalty, and more about collecting revenue from gaming partners up front while bombarding adults and kids alike with betting content. Some percentage of the young people watching will still grow up to become athletes, but the setup also seems designed to create future gamblers – which means we’ll see more schemes that end in suspensions and criminal cases.
Because if the pro sports talent pool includes more people who view gambling as normal, it will likely include more gamblers, which probably leads to more gambling debt, which makes athletes easy targets for betting market manipulators. Those circumstances, we later learned, helped drive former Raptor Jontay Porter to the intentional underperformance that got him into trouble.
That’s one reality.
The other one?
If you work in sports or sports media, you benefit from gambling revenue.
Maybe a sportsbook sponsors your podcast, or powers your pregame TV segment, or partners with The Athletic, the sports site owned by the New York Times.
As for me?
When I’m not here, I cover boxing, which takes place at casinos, where people lose money and call it entertainment.
So we’re all at least ankle-deep in sports gambling, and questioning whether the next scandal will make the water recede.
It might.
But I wouldn’t bet on it.
*This column does not have any relationships with sports betting outfits.
*Yet.
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