My PJ Media colleague Rick Moran reported about Major League Baseball’s suspension of San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano for betting on baseball games — and not being terribly good at it. MLB gave four other players year-long suspensions, as Rick noted.
Rick also did a terrific job skimming the history of gambling scandals in pro baseball. Betting on ball games is nothing new, even as sportsbook sites find new ways to wager on events. What is new is how MLB, other professional leagues, and college athletics are having to deal with the proliferation of gambling in sports.
“In a majority of states, it’s never been easier to place a bet,” reports The Athletic. “But in a world of legal online sportsbooks and smartphones, it’s also never been easier for leagues to track the betting and, as they see it, protect the competitive integrity of the sport.”
It’s an interesting time in sports as leagues and media outlets partner with sportsbooks. The effects of gambling on sports and sports media are inescapable. Betting affects coverage of sports; you can’t watch ESPN, Fox Sports, or other networks without seeing stats about betting lines for games.
“These days, people can bet on more than winners, losers, and point spreads,” I wrote last year. “Modern gambling provides opportunities for bettors to wager on individual athletes’ performance or place parlays on things that have nothing to do with the games themselves. Needless to say, these factors have turned sports betting into a multi-billion-dollar industry.”
It stands to reason that more fans and even players would be tempted to bet on sporting events. And the strange bedfellows between athletics and gambling make all of it more complicated.
“It’s really uncomfortable for the leagues,” John Wolohan, a sports law professor at Syracuse, told The Athletic. “That said, the leagues are in bed with the DraftKings and the FanDuels of the world anyway, and casinos, so in some ways they’re taking the money and hoping things don’t blow up in their face.”
Flashback for Our VIPs: Alabama's Baseball Gambling Scandal May Be Just the Tip of the Iceberg
The leagues are relying on integrity firms to help police gambling in pro sports. One firm, U.S. Integrity, has launched a venture that relies on “encryption technology that will prevent athletes, coaches and league officials from placing bets in the first place,” reports The Athletic. U.S. Integrity launched a tip line last year that allows people to report suspicious gambling activity.
The Athletic explains how technology can help teams monitor and investigate gambling:
When a bettor — any bettor, for that matter — logs into a betting app, their location is immediately pinned by integrity analysts within a matter of feet. Global positioning is one way of ensuring no athlete can place bets from within a team facility without being caught. There are other methods, too. Social media is monitored closely, and companies use real-time data and proprietary algorithms to monitor betting trends and flag any unusually large line movement. If a troubling trend is spotted, it is generally sent to a person on an investigative team who will look deeper into the matter.
It's not just professional leagues dealing with this issue. You may recall that suspicious gambling activity led the University of Alabama to fire its baseball coach last year. The NCAA also changed its penalties for student-athletes who gamble, but gambling on college athletics is as old as time, too.
“Concern about gambling’s impact on college sports is not new,” The Athletic’s Chris Vannini wrote last year. “There were famous basketball betting scandals at Boston College in the 1970s, Tulane in the 1980s, and Arizona State in the 1990s, the latter of which was part of a 2021 Netflix documentary. Washington head football coach Rick Neuheisel was fired in 2003 in part for participating in NCAA Tournament pools.”
It's hard not to imagine that the Tucupita Marcano scandal is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Sports betting will continue to rear its head and create more wrinkles for athletes and fans for years to come. It's definitely not going away.
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