Professional athletes are betting on their own games. Will bans help? | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on Thursday, June 27th) of The Excerpt podcast: Thirty-eight states and Washington, D.C. now allow any adult to place a bet on their favorite sport – even with the click of a button on the phone. But what happens when the athletes themselves are placing bets? Several athletes have been banned from their respective leagues in recent months for doing just that. USA TODAY Sports Reporter Steve Gardner joins The Excerpt to discuss this moment and what sports fans can expect next.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpts. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Thursday, June 27th, 2024.

Sports betting is here and it's not going away. 38 states and Washington DC now allow any adult to place a bet on their favorite sport, even with the click of a button on the phone. But what happens when the athletes themselves are placing bets? We're finding out, with several athletes banned from their respective leagues in recent months for doing just that. I'm now joined by USA TODAY sports reporter Steve Gardner, to discuss this moment and what's next. Steve, thanks for joining me today on The Excerpt.

Steve Gardner:

Thanks so much, Taylor. Glad to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So Steve, let's just start with this. What's the latest on athletes getting busted and banned for sports betting? What's happened these past few months and can you just walk us through the timeline here?

Steve Gardner:

Well, let's see, where do we start? First in basketball, Jontay Porter, who was a part-time player with the Toronto Raptors, was found to have thrown games, thrown his performance and opted out of certain games that he was playing in, as he was apparently in cahoots with a bunch of gamblers and was running up a pretty big tab. And this is how they decided to fix that situation. He was found out by the NBA and subsequently banned for life.

I think though, the more important and the more I guess topical things have happened in baseball. Most recently we had, of course, Shohei Ohtani's former interpreter who was betting with an illegal bookmaker allegedly in California, and ended up apparently stealing, according to the Feds $17 million of Shohei Ohtani's money. The two time American League most valuable player, one of the most visible players in all of Major League Baseball, and just recently pleaded guilty to a plea deal. And we just had a couple of players, actually five different players, one major leaguer and four minor leaguers caught betting on sports and baseball in particular. And one of them, Tucupita Marcano of the San Diego Padres was banned for life. So yeah, as gambling goes into and mixes with professional sports and college sports even, we're inevitably going to see more of these situations, I'm afraid.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. The incident over Ohtani's translator in particular, a big headline grabbing moment. Steve, I'm curious, who really is responsible for policing all this? Is this up to the leagues, the players' unions, or how about the sports books themselves? And is there any oversight over these books now preventing athletes from using them?

Steve Gardner:

Well, it is a partnership because both the sports leagues and the bookmakers, they have a shared responsibility to make sure that everything is on the up and up. The sports books don't want to see people betting illegally with inside information because it cuts into their profits. And obviously the leagues want to see the games pure and free from any gambling influences. So it's in everybody's best interests to make sure that there's nothing that is tainting the results of these games. And they do have a partnership. In fact, that's how Marcano and the other minor league baseball players were kind of found out, is that they used their real names and made what turned out to be very small wagers on these sports books online, and that's where they were found out.

Taylor Wilson:

It's astonishing. So did the leagues make a distinction between athletes betting on themselves and their own team, and betting on others in the same league that don't involve themselves? Or really where has the line been drawn here?

Steve Gardner:

Yeah, take Major League Baseball, for example. It is perfectly legal for players, staff members, club employees to bet using those legal sites and bookmakers to bet on other sports besides baseball. When you start betting on baseball and especially if you have an interest, you are playing in a game, which is, that's where Pete Rose got into so much trouble back in the day. Probably the most famous, or at least one of the most famous gambling cases in all of baseball. He was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds and he was betting on Reds games. So that obviously provides a huge red flag. But in this case, Marcono wasn't playing in his team's games, but he was betting on his team. And again, for Major League Baseball, that's the big red line, and that's why he got a lifetime suspension. While the other players involved were betting on baseball, but not on their teams, and they got a one year suspension.

Taylor Wilson:

Interesting distinction there. So Brazilian soccer player, Lucas Paqueta, has been charged by the Football Association in England for betting on himself to receive yellow cards. Steve, this makes me think of the prop betting market where folks can bet on all kinds of things beyond just the result of a game. How concerning are prop bets amid all this? They seem easier in theory, at least to me, for an athlete to hide. Although I guess in this case, Paqueta may not have gotten away with it.

Steve Gardner:

Yeah, absolutely. And that was the case in the Jontay Porter situation in the NBA, but he had the group that he was in cahoots with bet on all the unders on a prop bet for him, points, rebounds and assists, and he took himself out of the game after three minutes saying that he was feeling ill and so therefore their bets won. That's a huge thing, and especially because those prop bets are some of the more popular bets, shall we say. We think of the Super Bowl, a lot of the prop bets on who scores the first touchdown. Those are the ones that people maybe talk about the most, maybe more so than who's going to win the game or what the point spread is. So as we get into the different types of bets, those could be the most problematic because as you said, one person can control how those outcomes come out.

Taylor Wilson:

The people who have been banned recently, the folks involved with some of these scandals, you outlined it at the top, Steve, folks like Ohtani's interpreter, Jontay Porter, a few of the baseball players that you mentioned. These are names that I think beyond Ohtani himself that the average sports fan may not be familiar with before these scandals. I'm curious what happens if a true star, a real superstar, gets caught betting on their sport? We saw this, you mentioned Pete Rose, he got banned for betting on baseball long before sports betting was legal stateside. Would this be the tipping point if Giannis Antetokounmpo, I don't want to put a specific name out there, but one of the major superstars in today's game, were involved in a scandal like this.

Steve Gardner:

Oh, it certainly would, but I think one of the things is, and we saw this with these minor league players who were banned. The amount of money that they could make on gambling is dwarfed by what they could make as a major league player or as a professional athlete. So I think that's one of the major drawbacks. If you had a superstar, just think now, Shohei Ohtani's contract was $70 million a year, there's no way you could make that much money or would want to try and make anywhere close to that in illegal gambling, when you have that amount of money just available to you for doing your regular job. So I think where we will probably see issues popping up would be in players that aren't superstars, that are maybe minor players that have only a small role in these games. Those are the ones that are probably the most prone to probably look for that kind of quick fix or that cheap buck that they can make quickly. I think the superstars at least should be immune from the temptation.

Taylor Wilson:

It's an astute point, Steve. So how do concerns over referees play into this? Folks may remember disgraced NBA referee, Tim Donaghy got banned for betting on basketball a generation ago. Are people around the leagues right now actively worried a similar thing could happen again?

Steve Gardner:

I think that's a huge concern. Because as we all know, we'd love to criticize the referees, the umpires, and say that they're biased against our favorite teams. Well, what happens when you've got money on the line or there's a reason to suspect some bias on the part of an official or a referee? Any small amount of potentially factual material could cause a tremendous scandal. So yeah, I think all of this, while the players have to guard against the appearance of impropriety, I think the officials and the referees in sports now become under a much, much greater microscope, because we are watching their every move. And I think one of the things that could result is more of those judgment calls being taken out of sports and using replays more often and in more circumstances to try and take that possible judgment call out of the situation.

Taylor Wilson:

Recently, activist Reverend Al Sharpton issued a warning to the FTC about two gambling giants. He called them a gambling duopoly of DraftKings and Fanduel. How big of an issue is this duopoly? Is it actually a duopoly and could it or should it be broken up?

Steve Gardner:

Well, those two have been the major players. I mean, we've seen all of the advertisements on television, maybe not as much now, but certainly a couple of years ago when they were battling to get market share against each other pretty vigorously. It seemed like we would see ads for DraftKings or Fanduel every time we turned around watching a sporting event. I think right now the market may be saturated to the point where they're not spending as much on acquisition of subscribers and users, but there's still a degree where we need to be concerned. We don't want them to be giants where they can influence things like perhaps rights deals, things like that.

We did have in Major League Baseball, a group of more than a dozen regional sports networks that were sponsored by Bally's, a gaming company under the Diamond Sports Group, which went bankrupt. And now what happens with the rights to those particular teams? Well, it looks like it could be regrouped and reformed possibly with Fanduel or DraftKings becoming a title sponsor. So again, how close they get to the actual games themselves has to be a concern for Major League Baseball. It seems Major League Baseball, for instance, certainly doesn't mind taking the money and the sponsorships, but it does have to be careful how close those get to touching on the actual game itself.

Taylor Wilson:

And Steve, overall, gambling remains one of the biggest money makers in sports, but also one clearly fraught with potential challenges to the leagues. Do the leagues have more of an incentive to figure out the proper watchdog on this, as more and more players are getting caught betting on their sports?

Steve Gardner:

Yeah, I think what we're going to have is, as players who are younger now and are growing up with all of the gambling ads and the apps and everything around them all the time, as you're growing up with this, it's going to be more second nature to you. It's going to be something that you've always had. Maybe you've always bet on Fanduel or DraftKings from when you were young, before you get to the major leagues. So I think we do have to be concerned about the power that these companies wield and we have to be concerned to where it may not be enough just to post in every Major League clubhouse the rule that says you cannot bet on Major League Baseball and you can't bet on baseball and games in which you're a part of. Just having that posted on the clubhouse wall may not be enough. We may need more education and everything because it just seems so natural, perhaps, for the new generation of athletes coming along. And that will come along in the future.

Taylor Wilson:

USA TODAY sports reporter Steve Gardner. Thank you for the time and the insight on this, Steve. Appreciate it.

Steve Gardner:

Thanks so much.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks to our Senior Producer Shannon Rae Green for her production assistance. Our Executive Producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening, I'm Taylor Wilson. Back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Professional athletes are betting on their own games. | The Excerpt