Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier drives to the basket against Memphis Grizzlies guard Javon Small during an October preseason game in Miami.Marta Lavandier/The Associated Press
Long before anyone thought about investigating Pete Rose for gambling, everyone knew he was a degenerate gambler.
Rose didn’t keep it a secret. He talked constantly about betting, even in the Cincinnati Reds clubhouse, where he was the manager. He spread his action around to so many bookies that a personal cheque he’d signed over to one of them was seized in a raid. Baseball didn’t want to investigate Rose. He gave them no choice.
Even after he’d been caught, Rose lied about the extent of it for years. The issue wasn’t settled until he admitted everything in an autobiography, more than a decade after the fact.
Those were the good old days of gambling inside pro sports, where only a complete idiot could get caught. Welcome to the bad new days – for sports leagues, at least – where it’s becoming impossible to get away with anything.
The conversation around legalized gambling in sports centres around the idea that since it is easier to do, more people will do it. That’s true for your average teenager who’s looking to goose his game-watching experience, but doesn’t know any underworld types.
MLB moves to cap bets on single pitches, ban them from parlays
This has never been a problem for the pros. They are surrounded by vultures who would love to help them with this urge, and maybe get a taste for themselves. Sometimes that’s money. Sometimes it’s prestige.
You cannot walk into a Major League clubhouse anywhere and not spot a card game going on. You think this bunch of 20-somethings with hundred-thousand-dollar pay cheques burning a hole in their jocks are doing it for funsies?
Tales of gambling misadventure are one of the great sub-genres of sportswriter war stories, none of which can be printed because lawyers don’t gamble.
Lots of small things about sports and gambling have changed since Rose’s day, but only one big thing – algorithms.
Cleveland Guardians baseball pitcher Luis Ortiz departs Federal Court following a hearing in Boston on Monday. Ortiz has been accused of tipping off bettors about which pitches he would throw during MLB appearances.Steven Senne/The Associated Press
You could bring your action to an illegal book, but then you can’t be sure that you’ll be paid if you hit a major score. Most gamblers won’t ever get lucky enough to find out. That’s why bookies exist.
So you go through the new, legal routes, where your bets are tracked. It doesn’t matter how smart you are covering your tracks. The algorithm is smarter.
The most recent incidence, and maybe the boldest yet, involves Cleveland Guardians relievers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz. The pair faced charges this week, accused of tipping off bettors about which pitches they would throw during their appearances. The bettors would create parlays involving multiple over/unders about speed (above or below, say, 95.5 mph) and location (a ball or a strike).
This wasn’t well organized. Authorities allege that Clase and Ortiz were both in regular phone and text contact with the betters, including calls made in the clubhouse during games. They didn’t have code words or secret bank accounts. They did all their business out in the digital open.
We’re also not talking about huge money - US$450,000 in total winnings. Clase was guaranteed nearly US$10-million in future salary, and in line for much more than that.
Reporting by The Athletic captures the level of recklessness involved. In one instance, it is alleged that a gambling associate laid 16 parlays wagering that eight particular pitches by Clase would be balls or strikes. The better was right on seven. The eighth was a ball out of the zone that was swung on and missed by Andy Pages. You will remember Pages from the World Series, where he was the worst hitter by far on the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Imagine you are a computer. This bet floats across your circuits. You recognize that it should have been successful all eight times. The odds of that happening are similar to correctly calling heads or tails eight times in a row – 1-in-256. And the gambler was so sure about it that he bet it more than a dozen ways?
This is how the modern gambling cheat is caught. It’s a little more dependable than waiting for someone’s name to appear in a mob phonebook.
The accepted line in sports is that athletes won’t fix results because it’s too big a risk for too little reward, relative to what they are already paid.
Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups earned more than nine figures playing basketball, but still got caught up in a major gambling scandal.Jenny Kane/The Associated Press
When the Chicago White Sox fixed the 1919 World Series, the promised payout was more than the total team payroll. Who’s going to give the contemporary Yankees $250-million to sink the World Series today, and how are they going to deliver it? Via airlift?
This logic assumes two things – that gamblers are rational actors, and that modern surveillance methods will deter them.
If proved, the Clase/Ortiz case suggests neither assumption is correct. Ditto the recent NBA unpleasantness involving Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier, both of whom have earned more than nine figures playing basketball.
How rational is it to throw away 10 years of the sports high life – and we’re not just talking money, but status – for the thrill of winning a percentage of a $50,000 parlay? It doesn’t make sense to you or me, but we’re not gamblers.
Sports organizations can stop their staff from gambling in the same way that your office can stop employees from stealing pens – most of the time. The only real guardrails are common sense, and not everyone has it.
Some people are worse off than that. They are driven to self-destruction. The more they have, the stronger that impulse grows. I would suggest that an outsize number of this extreme risk-taking type can be found working in sports.
If there’s anything positive to come out of this ongoing humiliation, it’s this – the average fan now knows the games are fixed.
They’re not fixed all the time, and maybe not in a way that would affect the outcome. But the proof is piling up that professional sports are not wholly on the up-and-up.
There is no middle ground where the games we watch are kind of straight. Sports are either fully above reproach, or they’re compromised.
So why would you, a smart person, who only does this for fun, and could stop any time, bet on something that you know is rigged?