The Current - How prop betting is undermining sports

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

A conversation with Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, about how the Clase/Ortiz pitch-fixing scandal exposes the explosive rise of prop betting — and why it threatens the integrity of sports from baseball to hockey, basketball, and football.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. One of the game's greatest players has engaged a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. By choosing not to come to a hearing before me, and by choosing not to proffer any testimony or evidence contrary, to the evidence and information contained in the report of the special counsel of the commissioner. Mr. Rose has accepted baseball's ultimate sanction, which is lifetime in eligibility. Pete Rose was one of the best to ever do it.

But when it was discovered that he was betting on baseball, his career wasn't just over. He was banished from the game he loved. But that was then. Before watching any sport meant getting fed ad after ad after ad for gambling apps. And it seems fans aren't the only one. who are getting in on the action. In recent weeks, we have seen two pitchers with the Cleveland Guardians indicted on charges that they deliberately threw certain pitches

to make specific bets pay out. And in pro basketball, there are ongoing federal investigations after a player and a coach were arrested in connection to betting rings with links to organized crime. Dave Zyron is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the host of the Edge of Sports podcast. Dave, good morning. Oh, it's great to be here.

Thanks for having me. It's good to have you here. let's start with baseball. The heart of this story is something called prop betting. What is a prop bet? Well, a prop bet that's short for proposition bet. And that is a bet that has nothing to do with the actual outcome of a game, but instead an individual instance that could take place in a game. For example, you would not be betting on whether the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of the World Series. You would be betting on whether a pitcher throws perhaps a strike or a ball to an individual batter at an individual moment.

And that specifically, I mean, not with the Jays, but this is with the Cleveland Guardians, is what is being explored in these charges with two players. I said that they were deliberately throwing certain pitches to make specific bets pay out. Tell me more about this. Well, the part about this story that, to me, really deserves examination, is not so much that they were doing these prop bets or fixing pitches for the, allegedly, for prop bets because both have pleaded not guilty. It's important to say that. But what's interesting to me are the amounts that are being alleged. We are talking about $5,000 bets that players who make

millions of dollars a year are risking their careers to do. And that's where we get to one of the central problems with prop betting and with sports betting as a whole. When we talk about professional athletes. We are talking about people who are literally in the top one-tenth of one percent of competitive personalities that we have on the planet Earth. We are also talking about people who have expendable income, and we're also talking about people who have tremendous amounts of downtime. I mean, the stories of gambling on team planes, team buses throughout the history of sports are legendary. And when you actually, though, place the the real corporatization of betting through the apps, through the phones, and make it that

much more available for players to access instances and scandals like this are inevitable. Can I go back to the prop bet part of this? I mean, what is to you most alarming about that? And how does that kind of betting in particular change or impact the integrity of sport? If you can bet not on the overall outcome, but on the specific thing that may or may not happen, whether it's a pitch, whether it's a player that leaves a game early or what have you. Well, I think the part about it that's the most alarming is how difficult it really is to track, unless you have a whistleblower of some kind.

Like, how do we possibly know on, let's take, stay on baseball for a moment, if an individual pitch is or is not delivered on the up and up, how can that necessarily even be proven? And the mere fact that I'm asking this question, the mere fact that fans are asking this question also gets to the root of the problem, because if you're not confident in the game in, game out, play in, play out integrity of what you are watching, what we are doing is actually risking the integrity of sports itself. It no longer becomes sports. The one thing that distinguishes sports from other forms of entertainment is that the outcomes are not predetermined. As soon as people start to believe that outcomes are predetermined,

even on a pitch-by-pitch basis, it erodes the very nature, the very reason for being of competitive sports in the first place. How much of this problem is the fault of these leagues themselves? I mean, you want me to put 110% on the leagues? I mean, if there's no number high enough for me to say, the embrace of professional sports of what we can call app gambling or through our phones or what basically has now colonized all sports television coverage, I mean, a process that has turned some of our most respected sports journalists into bookies, you know, more interested in betting lines than they are in what's happening outside the lines in sports is really what's corrupted this entire process. And it's all about the money. I mean, it doesn't take a PhD in sociology to figure that out. I mean, we're talking about billions of dollars in revenue streams that are trickling down to every aspect of the sport. And it's reached a point where no one

wants to stand up and say, well, wait a minute, what if this is fundamentally corrupting what's so beautiful about sports in the first place? And also, even if people want to be more self-interested, about it? What if we are engaged in a process where we're basically telling the golden goose to lay so many eggs that eventually it's going to keel over? How did this happen? I mean, it's interesting. Reading about this is reading through a piece in the athletic sports publication that's owned by the New York Times. There's a story about betting in sport. Every ad break in that piece was an ad for a betting platform, which... Incredible. It speaks to the integration. Keep going. No, well, first of all, let me just say that I really appreciate even being able to do this interview with you because just on a very personal level, as someone who's been a consistent critic of app gambling and the legalization of this process, I've also found that my appearances on certain networks in the United States have dried up as well, because these networks, I mean, they are just completely now intertwined in the economics of app gambling.

And so how did this happen is a great question. I love that you started the segment by hearing the words of, I do believe that was A. Bartlett Giamatti, the commissioner of Major League Baseball. Kicking Pete Rose out of baseball. Yeah, announcing the ban of Pete Rose. And just, I mean, I think Pete Rose is somewhere, wherever he may be in the afterlife, just wondering what the heck is happening. It's asking, I'm banned. Why? Why was I banned again?

And I remember when I was growing up, the mere idea, for example, of even having a team play exhibition. Games in Las Vegas was considered verboten because of its physical proximity to gambling. And now, whether you're talking about the Las Vegas Raiders or the moving of the Oakland days, the fact that the NBA is looking at Las Vegas's expansion, it's everything is awash and gambling. Gambling is the new national pastime. And, you know, it really does start with one single New York Times op-ed in 2014.

It's the equivalent of Martin, Luther and the and theses and hammering them to the door. It was Adam Silver saying it's the commissioner of the National Basketball Association saying it's time to embrace legalized gambling. And his grand argument for doing so was that it would be easier to figure out if cheating is taking place, if it's all above board. It'll be easier to track if betting is happening that undermines the integrity of the sport. And at the time, a lot of people saw that and said, you know what?

maybe that's true. Bringing out it out into the light might be a better way to get a handle on these things. But in retrospect, it just looks farcically naive, or at the very least, if you want to be less kind about it, a deeply cynical argument. Because of course, it's like saying I'm going to build a vegetarian society by putting a steak in everybody's refrigerator, because then we're going to be able to track whether people are eating the steak or not. In 2024, you wrote that sports betting could destroy sports. What do you mean by that? I mean, there are a lot of people who are maybe part of that ecosystem and that environment

and that industry who would say, come on. Like, this is part of it now. This is what it is. It's not going to destroy sports. It's going to make sports more interesting. It's going to, to your point, bring some of that gambling into the light. How could it destroy sport? Yeah, I mean, it could destroy sports by having people believe.

at some point that they're no longer even watching sports at this point. That, you know, with all due respect to one of the most popular entertainments in Canada and one in my life as well, you're watching pro wrestling. You know, you're no longer watching something where the outcome is not predetermined. And what you're also doing is undermining any sense of integrity of the people who are giving you the news of sports. you're turning it into something that people can become repulsed by instead of engaging with and also something that with gambling that people might have to turn away from for their own

economic and psychological survival i mean people need to really look at the statistics of the number of young people particularly young men who are flooding these gambling hotlines with calls because they're going bankrupt because they're psychologically losing their moorings And what you have the leagues doing is in a very parasitic manner going after the minds of young people who really lack impulse control on a very basic level and getting them to bet as easily as they like an Instagram post. And so what I think you can see is people, what you will see actually is a lot of people. I'm not saying it's going to be a determinative amount of people, but a lot of people actually saying, you know what, I need to quit sports cold turkey. because my alternative is financial or psychological ruin. And let me tell you, as the father of a high school athlete,

there are more bookies in my kids' high school than there are tutors. I mean, it is such a normalized thing for kids now to have the accounts and to be making a little money on the side by getting other people to place bets. I mean, this is the new reality. And anytime you have a new reality that's like the Wild West, you run the risk of it all imploding. I have to let you go, but just very briefly, it's the new reality.

Given the amount of money, is it possible to pull betting out of sports or sports out of betting? Or is that over and done with now? No, it would take a scandal the likes of which the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, people can Google that, but a scandal that's big enough,

I do think we'll have people looking in the mirror. Is that inevitable? If it's so intertwined, it's, I mean, the names that you're talking, talking about and that we've been talking about are recognizable names, but is it going to take one of those big, bold-faced names, the names that everybody knows to kind of bring this down? More than that, it's going to take something like a World Series, a Super Bowl, or a championship that people say is not on the up and up. It's going to take billions of dollars, then lost in

gambling, and it's going to take the league saying we are going to destroy in days what took over a century to build. Dave, good to talk to you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Dave Ziron is the sports editor at the nation and host of the Edge of Sports podcast. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.