Major League Baseball is dealing with the fallout from a betting scandal. The NBA has already been there.
The Department of Justice’s indictments will play out. What’s left is for the leagues and the sportsbooks to figure out their role in how we got here and what happens next. But are there any good answers?
The scandals have been on an individual level so far. It makes sense. Getting an entire team to throw a game in this day and age feels impossible. Getting to one player, however, in order to manipulate a single stat? That’s doable. According to prosecutors, it’s already been done, in fact. This is what Guardians relievers Emmanuel Clase and Luis L. Ortiz were allegedly doing: altering the outcome of a single pitch, be it the velocity or whether it was a strike.
So why don’t the sportsbooks just ban prop bets? Fans can still gamble without wagering on individual players’ stat lines. Wouldn’t eliminating prop bets be the best way to protect the integrity of sports while also still allowing fans to gain entertainment from gambling? It’s not that simple.
Rogue individuals can create a problem
We are unlikely to ever find ourselves again in real danger of a Black Sox scandal-level problem, where eight players were involved in fixing a World Series. Something like that would be exposed before it came to fruition. The problems nowadays arise from bad individual actors.
This is where the discussion of player prop bets has come to the forefront.
“We’ve asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets, especially when they’re on two-way players, guys who don’t have the same stake in the competition, where it’s too easy to manipulate something, which seems otherwise small and inconsequential to the overall score,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said recently. “We’re trying to put in place — learning as we go and working with the betting companies — some additional control to prevent some of that manipulation.”
The NFL too has gotten out in front of the player prop market, forbidding betting on some specific plays, like “the first pass will be an incompletion.”
Major League Baseball, in light of the Clase scandal, has limited the pitch-specific market.
But in terms of all-out eliminating props from the gambling world, sportsbooks view that not only as a non-starter, but also totally unnecessary.
“We’re not gonna do that,” John Murray, the vice president of race and sports for Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook, told CBS Sports of eliminating player props. “Even before this happened, you were taking all these bets on something like that from all kinds of customers you don’t know and they’re betting as much as they could. That would be a red flag right there. We had an incident here with guys betting a preliminary UFC fight. They were new customers we’d never seen before, they were trying to bet as much as they could on the same guy. They were trying to do it without using players’ cards. All the red flags. My guys tracked them, got all their information and turned it over to our compliance department. Those are the deterrents in place to prevent things from happening. If these things do happen, we’re the ones that are paying. Literally paying. So we’re on guard, looking out for stuff like that.”
Matthew Bakowicz, a professor at American University’s Kogod School of Business, previously worked for both the Boston Red Sox in MLB’s office of gameday compliance and managed sportsbook operations for DraftKings at Connecticut’s Foxwoods Resort Casino. Baseball and basketball specifically, he said, are “definitely more susceptible to individual issues” because one person has more control over an event.
“Do I think that all prop bets should go away? No. I say this because people that like to wager on sports bets like to be engaged in the entire game… It’s beyond just placing a bet on the game and hoping you win,” Bakowicz told CBS Sports.
“Today’s modern society wants to be engaged 24/7/365 and likes instant gratification. These bets provide instant gratification and keep you engaged in the game throughout the entire period and it lets you be involved in a game that might’ve gotten out of hand. Or if it’s a team you’re not really a fan of, but you can still be involved.”
Limiting prop bets, Bakowicz said, isn’t about stopping people from gambling.
“The vast majority of the betting public doesn’t wager high amounts of money on these bets anyway,” he said. “Limiting it, all it’s going to do is deter nefarious acts. It’s not going to eliminate the casual fan.”
Shouldn’t we have seen this coming?
Throughout history, any time there’s a gambling element in sports, there have been people trying to cheat the system in order to line their pockets. So was it any surprise when we started to see gambling scandals in sports with legalized gambling?
Call us naive, but it was a bit surprising to see a player like Clase tied up in a scandal like this. The Guardians closer was set to make $6.4 million in 2026 with team options for $10 million in each of the ensuing two seasons. According to the Department of Justice indictment, he made about $5,000 each time he rigged a pitch or facilitated the same from his teammate.
Bakowicz said it’s impossible to say if such a scandal was inevitable due to the infancy of legalized sports betting, but pointed instead to a market attracting a bad egg, rather than a rotten system.
“When you look at it from a sport standpoint, people look at it from an exploitation standpoint. From a more holistic society structure, when there is a gambling element, there’s always people out there, since the 1900s, someone is always trying to get an advantage,” he said.
“What has happened is this is a commonality that you see in sports. I say this in the sense of, you’d love to look at sports and say that everybody’s really pure, everybody does the right thing, everybody is the best of the best. The reality is baseball deals with a product that is human nature. At times, humans make mistakes. In this case, we have a mistake. Do we have a worldwide-spread mistake? More than likely not.
“We have two individuals who have made a mistake. We will let the judicial process play out to see where it’s going to go, but I don’t see this as we have every single person in Major League Baseball causing a problem. I see this, from an expertise standpoint, as a small mistake that two individuals out of 30 times 40 times all the minor-league teams — so we’re looking at 50,000 players. It’s a minute issue that needs to be resolved within the judicial system.”
In other words, for Bakowicz, Clase and Ortiz were the problem, not the sports betting system.
MLB, sportsbooks have made changes
In light of the scandal, MLB has worked with the sportsbooks offering pitch-level bets to limit the market, capping them at a $200 maximum wager.
Per the official MLB statement:
Most prop bets present limited integrity risk because they take into account multiple events that are influenced by more than one actor. However, “micro-bet” pitch-level markets (e.g., ball/strike; pitch velocity) present heightened integrity risks because they focus on one-off events that can be determined by a single player and can be inconsequential to the outcome of the game. The risk on these pitch-level markets will be significantly mitigated by this new action targeted at the incentive to engage in misconduct. The creation of a strict bet limit on this type of bet, and the ban on parlaying them, reduces the payout for these markets and the ability to circumvent the new limit.
“Since the Supreme Court decision opened the door to legalized sports betting, Major League Baseball has continuously worked with industry and regulatory stakeholders across the country to uphold our most important priority: protecting the integrity of our games for the fans,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement.
The sportsbooks are fine with this because fans wanting to wager on this particular prop can still do so and if they want to spend more money, they’ll likely just place the bets on other items. Plus, as Murray noted, the books are the ones who pay when there’s market manipulation. They’re looking to eliminate as many problems as possible too.
High-profile cases serve as deterrent
Players are getting caught and lives are being ruined. Again, take Clase. He was set to make more than $25 million just over the next three seasons. Instead, if found guilty, he faces up to 60 years in prison and a permanent ban from Major League Baseball.
How in the world is taking something like five grand for one pitch worth that kind of risk? Now that players have gotten caught, surely anyone even pondering such an action would now run in the other direction immediately. It’s just not worth it.
“I think so,” Murray said when I asked if this MLB case could serve as a deterrent. “The question becomes, if they were a little bit smarter about it, could they get away with it? If you’re pushing the envelope, eventually someone who knows what they’re doing, has some experience, is going to say, ‘hey, this isn’t right, this is fishy’ and they’re going to get caught.”
Bakowicz similarly cited the need for swift action.
“Major League Baseball and the sport betting companies that are out there are extremely good at identifying major betting irregularities. When I worked for DraftKings, this issue would come up. We could clearly see that a betting pattern was not correct. We could clearly see there was an issue and we reported it immediately. What’s going to happen is you’re going to see swift action on the stakes and immediate suspensions and, in this case, potentially, jail time,” he said.
“I think that alone is going to show individuals that Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NHL, the NFL, anybody who is involved in that immediately going to be punished.”
System in place is working
We’ve been through this one regarding PED testing. A player gets caught and suspended and there’s always initial outrage that there’s a rampant, behind-the-scenes problem that no one is addressing. But catching people doing wrong means the systems in place to catch nefarious actors are working.
“This is an advertisement that the experienced people [and] the regulation of sports betting are enabling us to catch these things,” Murray said.
Legalization and regulation the better route?
Many will answer that there’s another solution though: ban all gambling. Make it all illegal and we don’t have to deal with the problem. Right?
“I understand their perspective, but, No. 1: It’s always going to go on,” said Bakowicz. “Gambling will always be a part of sports. There’s no getting rid of that. You can say whatever you want in terms of laws and regulations, but it will always be a part of sports. I want regulated gambling that is legal and enforced by state and federal laws because that’s where you find the nefarious actions. That’s where you can put a stop to them and that’s where you can enforce rules and regulations — so that we only have two players causing a problem and not 40 or 50.
“If you want to be anti-gambling, fine, it’s going to take place overseas. We cannot control what happens outside the United States, can’t control what happens with the off-shore books. Let’s control what’s here in America, make sure we’re doing it properly and observe the integrity of the game.”
The “vast, vast majority” of people betting on sports “don’t have any inside information and they’re not doing anything illegal,” Murray said. “They’re just betting to make the game more enjoyable to watch.”
“If you have experienced people working, they’ll catch everything immediately,” he said. “I don’t know that that would happen in a non-regulated environment.”
The situation is far from ideal, but the argument that legalization and regulation is much better than forcing things underground is pretty firm. The mob was behind the Black Sox scandal. Illegal bookies and underground betting operations lead to much greater problems than fans being allowed to bet $5 on a player to get two hits in a game. It’s better to regulate than delude ourselves into thinking we can eradicate the problem.
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