Gambling has never been more on the minds of baseball fans since the days of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox”. The news this year has been chock-full of baseball-gambling crossovers that no one wanted. It’s not as dark a time for America’s Pastime as others, perhaps, but it’s no shining example either. Multiple people have lost their jobs in the sport just this year due to issues with gambling, and more potentially are on the way. But the gambling train keeps rumbling on. According to ESPN, sports gambling generated $13.71 billion in revenues in 2024, up 24 percent from 2023. All signs point to that number increasing even more this year.
Pat Hoberg, Luis L. Ortiz, and Emmanuel Clase
So far as can be seen from the outside, baseball is doing everything it can to monitor the people surrounding the sport for potential problems. Pat Hoberg is an umpire who was fired on February 3rd. MLB discovered he was sharing a sports betting account with someone else who had bet on baseball. MLB couldn’t prove that Hoberg had placed any of the bets himself, but the appearance of impropriety in one of the people charged with ensuring fair play was too much to handle, and he had to be let go.
Luis L. Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase are both pitchers with the Guardians who have been placed on paid administrative leave through the end of August as MLB investigates them for potential gambling. MLB became aware of a potential problem when there were suspicious bets placed on two individual pitches thrown by Ortiz.
The theme between these incidents is how closely MLB is monitoring sports betting to identify these situations and how seriously they’re taking it. If you’re a fan concerned about cheating happening, as in the Black Sox scandal, you can rest assured that MLB will almost certainly find anything like that. Of course, that doesn’t prevent all problems. Assume for a moment that MLB finds that Ortiz did intentionally throw pitches in such a way as to affect betting markets. It’s really hard to say one way or another how those pitches might have affected the outcome of the games they were thrown in. Will MLB replay those games? No matter what they choose, it will be unfair.
Of course, anyone who tries to argue against legal sports betting on those cases has a major roadblock; illegal sports betting has been around for a very long time. After all, it’s not like the Black Sox or Pete Rose were betting legally before they were banned for their gambling activities. A case could be made, however, that legal sports betting is still exacerbating the problem.
Staying out of bad situations is harder than ever
Do you remember the last cigarette commercial you saw on TV? Unless you’re of a certain age, the answer is a guaranteed no. Cigarette ads have been banned on TV and radio since 1971, more than 50 years ago. They were banned because public health officials finally caught on to the fact that cigarettes were bad for you, addictive, and advertising for them encouraged people to take up smoking against their own best interests.
Public health officials are equally aware of the addictive and dangerous nature of gambling – that’s why gambling ads are always accompanied by the fine print of how to get help if you believe you have an addiction. And yet, the ads are still permitted to air. Not only are they permitted to air, but they’re more or less omnipresent. Not just on TV, either. There’s a very good chance you are being served sports betting ads on the same page you’re reading this article. I have personally written FanDuel-sponsored posts for this website. ESPN and The Athletic are inundated not just with sports betting advertisements but with writing aimed at helping you understand the betting markets. Smaller sports newsletters have their own sponsorships that require their writers to occasionally indicate what bets they are making.
None of this is said to excuse Hoberg, Ortiz, or Clase for their alleged actions. If they gambled on baseball due to addiction, they can’t be allowed to participate for similar reasons to why those with epilepsy can’t become airline pilots. Some conditions pose too much of a threat to allow those afflicted to have certain roles.
But this isn’t just about them. Look at that number from the top of the article again. All of the money made in the sports betting industry this year is money they explicitly took from other people without providing anything in return. Most businesses profit by selling a product or service. Individuals or businesses will then exchange currency for the good or service, and a trade has been completed. But when gambling companies make money from gambling, they provide no goods or services to their customers. If you bet and lose, you have less money than when you started and nothing to show for it. And, as we can see from those insane profit numbers, the house still always wins.
Sports betting likely isn’t ruining baseball. After all, given the fine-tooth comb that was used to identify Ortiz’s potential cheating, if there was a widespread epidemic of betting among players, umpires, and coaches, there would be a lot more people suspended. But it does worsen and even ruin people’s lives. And not just those playing the sport, either.
I’m not calling for the banning of sports betting. If nothing else, it’s really hard to shove a genie back in the bottle. Otherwise, cigarettes would be entirely banned instead of just not advertised on TV and radio. It does seem like there should be some kind of middle ground between “banned” and “unavoidably omnipresent,” though.
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