on tuesday, The news reported San Diego Padres utility player Tucupita Marcano was facing a lifetime ban for allegedly gambling on baseball, including betting on the outcome of Pittsburgh Pirates games, while playing for the team last year. The investigation is ongoing, and while Marcano, the MLB Players Association and MLB representatives have so far remained silent publicly, the general consensus seems to be that Marcano would be lucky to escape with any degree of eligibility to return to professional baseball.
But Marcano is just the latest in a disturbing series of athletes caught up in professional gambling scandals. The problem isn’t limited to baseball. In April, the NBA Announcement of permanent ban Toronto Raptors reserve player Jontay Porter not only bet on games, but also allegedly provided illegal inside information to gamblers in exchange for money and, on at least one occasion, faked an illness to limit his own attendance at a game to ensure certain bets would stand.
And of course, most embarrassingly, Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s most exciting player in recent memory, has been caught up in a gambling scandal. His interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, has been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for allegedly stealing millions of dollars to pay off debts owed to Ohtani by betting on sports with illegal bookmakers. This investigation is still ongoing, but it seems quite likely that someone in Mizuhara’s position provided inside information to gambling officials that he could have known only through his role as Ohtani’s interpreter.
The greatest threat to the future of professional sports isn’t woke politics or the specter of biological men dominating female athletes — it’s gambling and the insidious influence that industry clearly has on the integrity of athletic competition.
Sports are inherently spectator-worthy precisely because spectators believe that the players competing are playing a fair game, with both sides doing their best to win. If fans did not believe that the games were fair, sports would not survive.
Gambling is inherently enjoyable for gamblers because it combines the adrenaline rush of participating in sports as a fan with the allure of the possibility of winning large rewards without working.
It should be clear to everyone that the incentives created by gambling essentially undermine the very foundations of sport itself.
There’s a reason why the four major American sports petitioned the Supreme Court in 2018 to uphold the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which effectively bans betting on single sporting events outside Las Vegas: The leagues knew that sports betting was a police nightmare, and from their perspective, the more they could outsource that job to the federal government, the better.
However, when the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in 2018 on fairly narrow technical grounds, Congress showed no appetite to pass legislation to fix the flaws that had made PASPA invalid. There was no serious debate even to introduce a bill to that effect.
And with surprising speed, sports leagues and the sports-loving public accepted the reality that sports betting could happen anywhere, on anything. Las Vegas, long kept away from the league because of the risks of having a team so close to an organized betting hub, suddenly had an NHL team and then an NFL team. DraftKings and other companies became the most prominent sports advertisers. ESPN launched a vertical called ESPN BET that not only handled gambling but also allowed people to gamble online through its portal.
And somehow, we were all surprised when news broke that millions of dollars had been diverted from the bank account of at least the most famous baseball player since Barry Bonds to pay off gambling debts.
It’s reassuring to believe the league has the situation under control and that the cases of Marcano, Porter and Mizuhara are isolated cases — the league even points to its own cases as evidence that its control mechanisms are working.
But the Suwon case specifically refutes that claim: He was effectively the mouthpiece for baseball’s most famous player, and investigators say he placed a staggering number of bets — estimated at more than 19,000 — over a period that lasted more than a millennium. 3 years.
He reportedly began misappropriating funds in the form of huge public transfers beginning in September 2023. In total, at least nine such transactions were approved and executed in the intervening months. None of them were discovered until January 2024, and even then, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the league. Who knows how long it would have taken the baseball world to realize what was going on if the Feds hadn’t raided the home of Mizuhara’s alleged bookie.
This is not an easy question to answer. There is little appetite for a legislative solution, because the public I like to bet on sports The sports betting industry has been booming since 2018. In addition, the sports betting industry is pouring a lot of advertising money into the media that covers sports and the teams themselves. Sports fans and the media, with their own greed, may be unwittingly sowing the seeds of the downfall of sports.
But even if these things weren’t true, legislative solutions probably aren’t the answer. Trusting the federal government to address the problem by making it illegal is a lazy approach that won’t work while it lasts. When Tim Donaghy was betting on games, gambling was pretty much illegal. 2 years Pete Rose was an NBA referee before he was arrested and reportedly betting on baseball in 1987, when gambling was mostly illegal, but he wasn’t caught until 1989.
This is not a problem the federal government can or should solve, but it is one that the leagues themselves need to address, and with a lot of urgency. As stories of those caught emerge, it’s bound to make sports fans wonder how many more at-risk athletes there are who haven’t been caught, or at least not yet. And it’s only a matter of time before those questions turn into skepticism about the legitimacy of sports’ on-field accomplishments.
And if that happens, sports as we know it will be over.
