For the first time in a while, I didn’t join a March Madness pool, in which you toss in your five bucks and then obsessively follow the endless string of NCAA basketball games as if real money, and possibly your children’s lives, were at stake.
In fact, as I write this on Friday, I haven’t watched any of the games so far — although I’ll certainly make an exception whenever women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark is playing — which tells you a lot about the relationship between betting and sports. Normally, I’d have at least one eye constantly on the TV screen.
And it tells you why sports leagues, thanks to a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that effectively opened the door to massive legal sports betting, have become so inescapably entangled with legal wagering — which is, of course, much different from the illegal kind, in which a bettor is far more likely to have his kneecaps broken.
I like to gamble, which is why I rarely do so, NCAA pools excepted. Because, if you haven’t noticed, gamblers nearly always, eventually anyway, lose. And I don’t much like losing, especially when it comes to money.
It was once easy enough to avoid, if you didn’t find yourself in Vegas or Atlantic City. Then states across the country began allowing casinos.
And now, sports leagues — which used to, officially anyway, discourage betting on games and still do when it comes to their athletes — are partnered up and down with legal betting outfits, which have seen betting grow to more than $100 billion annually. Illegal betting adds many billions more.
Apparently, there is money to be made, fans to be won over, TV-advertising sales executives to enrich, prop bets (how many points will Nikola Jokić score before two inches of snow accumulate at Ball Arena?) to be invented.
And, not incidentally, risks to the, uh, integrity of the games to be discounted.
Want early access to
Mike’s columns?
Subscribe to get an
exclusive first look at
his columns twice a week.
Which brings us, of course, to what is being called the Shohei Ohtani betting scandal — I’ll pass on any Shoeless Sho jokes — even though it’s not all all clear just how deeply, if at all, involved Ohtani might be in the scandal.
We know that someone — several versions of the story have implicated Ohtani’s longtime interpreter and close friend, Ippei Mizuhara — wired $4.5 million from an Ohtani account to a bookie running an illegal betting operation, presumably to cover gambling debts.
The story broke wide open when Mizuhara told an ESPN reporter that he owed money to a bookie — who, it turns out, was being investigated by the feds — and that, out of friendship and possibly concern for the interpreter’s knees, Ohtani had bailed him out. Mizuhara insisted he had never gambled on baseball, which would have broken the first rule, dating back to the 1919 Black Sox scandal, of professional baseball.
But a day later, the Los Angeles Dodgers, who employ Ohtani and Mizuhara, announced they had fired the interpreter, and Ohtani’s camp announced that Mizuhara had stolen the money to pay off his gambling debts, which, we were told, Ohtani knew nothing about.
Why did the story change so dramatically? After all, an Ohtani spokesman had seconded the original story.
It is being suggested that lawyers pointed out that if Ohtani had, in fact, wired all that money to the bookie, he would have broken not only a serious baseball rule, but also, very possibly, a California law or two. (Betting is illegal in California, where Ohtani plies his trade.)
And there has been unsupported, but unsurprising, speculation that once the story about the bookie broke, Ohtani might have been the gambler and that Mizuhara, the friend, was ready to take the fall.
We don’t know. We do know at least three things:
One, that Ohtani — who signed the unprecedented 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers (of which Ohtani, who has always been considered more than squeaky clean, deferred an unprecedented $680 million) — is the biggest name in baseball, a Japanese-born international sensation and worth untold dollars to the Dodgers and to Major League Baseball.
Two, that MLB executives, who have said they are “looking into” the situation, are praying that Ohtani had nothing to do with the betting — that, at worst, he was an innocent dupe and that, at best, he will remain the untarnished superstar he has always been. Mostly, baseball execs are hoping no one will ever mention Ohtani, at least not again, in the same breath as Pete Rose, who was infamously banned for life from the sport for gambling on baseball.
Ohtani, who is just back from Korea for a season-opening series against the San Diego Padres, has yet to comment.
Three, that baseball, and seemingly every other sport, has willingly sold its soul to gambling interests. I’m old enough to remember when fantasy baseball, which I had always opposed on baseball-purity grounds, was something played among friends and not on Fantasy Kings or FanDuel. And it’s hard to deny today that what’s clean and what isn’t clean is not exactly clear cut.
There has been an argument that professional athletes have gotten so rich that the risk of, say, throwing a game for mere money has all but disappeared. Of course, it hasn’t.
Just this year, we’ve seen an NBA player fined $100,000 for suggesting that a referee was on the take. We’ve seen a watchdog report on unusual betting made on games by a college basketball team. We’ve seen a pro football executive convicted of siphoning funds from the team to pay off gambling debts.
Of course, gambling on sports is as old as sports. I’m sure the citizens of ancient Greece were betting on whether Pheidippides would make it from the Battle of Marathon to the Athens finish line.
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
I don’t think that gambling, in and of itself, is immoral or anything like it. But we know the seamy side of gambling, and we know the danger that money — and $100 billion is real money — represents.
If you want to assess the danger, ask J.B. Bickerstaff, who coaches the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. He told reporters he had received threatening phone calls and assaults on social media from angry gamblers.
But maybe the relationship between baseball and legal betting is best shown by a tweet — that’s still what I’m calling it — someone alerted me to written by a guy named JEFF: “Welcome back to SportsCenter Presented by ESPN Bet, for more on the Ohtani situation we go to our FanDuel MLB Insider Jeff Passan at our DraftKings Studio in Los Angeles brought to you by Caesar’s Sportsbook. Jeff, how could something like this happen?”
Yeah, I know we’re not talking about legal gambling in the case of Ohtani, who may well be entirely innocent. But when sports leagues and teams encourage gambling on the scale that they do — when they basically beg you to gamble with their sponsors — the story turns.
And the fear is that this latest story could turn as ugly as Coors Field — where you should always take the over, by the way — during a Wednesday afternoon blowout.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.