The Josh Innes Show - Can Athletes Fix Games in 2025?

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

An MLB Umpire has been fired because he has a shared betting account with a friend. Does an MLB umpire have the easiest route to fixing a sporting event? Is there any way a player can get away with trying to fix a game in 2025? I go down a lengthy wormhole where I try to find the perfect way for an athlete to rig the outcome of a bet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tia Rosa, Tia Rosa. All right, everybody, what's going on? Let's see what's cooking, what's doing here in the world today. Headline, MLB fires umpire Pat Holberg for shared betting accounts. After a lengthy appeals process, Major League Baseball on Monday has fired umpire Pat Holberg for sharing legal sports betting accounts with a friend who bet on baseball and for intentionally deleting message key to the investigation into his conduct. MLB said Holberg adamantly denied betting on baseball directly or indirectly, so did Pete Rose, with Commissioner Rob Manfred saying there was no

evidence that Holberg directly bet on games or manipulated the outcomes of any games in any way. In its statement, MLB said it fired Holberg for failing to, quote, uphold the integrity of the game and that he, quote, should have known that his friend, a professional poker player, had bet on baseball from the shared account. Hoberg, 38, was widely regarded as the best ball strike umpire at MLB. He can apply for reinstatement no earlier than the start of spring training in 2026. Well, friends, that's something that's just going to continue to happen as these sports leagues get in bed with more gambling sites. I mean, they've married themselves to these gambling

sites because that's where the money is. Look here in Missouri, man. The Cardinals, the Royals, the Blues, the soccer teams have all been fighting to get gambling legalized here, and that's because there's money in it for them. There's tons of money. So they've sold their souls to the money, which, fine, you've got to make cash. It's baseball. You've got to find some way to make some revenue. But what you've done now is you've plastered gambling, gambling, sports betting in front of people nonstop, and there's easy money to be made doing that. Now, it's a risk, especially if you're an umpire,

but who better to control the outcome of a baseball game or an over-under or a prop bet than an umpire behind home plate? You've got it made there, man. You control it. And there's really no way, like if you wanted to rig it, if you're a home plate umpire, well, the umpire controls the strike zone. That's part of what makes baseball baseball is they don't have the robo umpire. What do they have? An umpire who on a daily basis is going to determine the strike zone and people just accept that like, oh, this umpire calls on a daily basis is going to determine the strike zone and people just accept that like oh this umpire calls more outside pitches strikes this this umpire's got a tighter strike zone there is no true strike zone in baseball we know this the strike zone is determined by the umpire on

that given day so if you're getting a little bit more to the outside you're getting those calls sometimes the inside corner sometimes he's calling them high letter high is going to be a strike but sometimes letter high is a ball who could control the outcome of a game better than the home plate umpire arguably there is not an official in sports that has more control over the outcome of a game than an umpire behind home play there's like four refs five refs in a football game. So you could throw a flag in a football game and you could control it, but you don't have the same impact as a home plate umpire. You could be the ref in a basketball game. You could be a Donaghy and you can call some ticky tack fouls. You can get a guy to the

free throw line that could work on the over. That's all very possible. And that happens. That's happened. We know that's happened. However, there is not a person that controls the outcome of a sporting event more than a home plate umpire. All right, let's do this. Let's take a commercial break here and continue this discussion about gambling because there was a basketball player to another basketball player. I think Terry Rozier has been implicated in some mysterious line movements and prop bet stuff. We'll talk about that, and we'll continue talking about this. All right, if you're ready to win some real cash during the basketball playoffs,

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that expire in 14 days. Limited time offer. See terms at picksix.draftkings.com slash promos so back to the idea of the home plate umpire being in control of things maybe you can't control the win or the loss but what you can control is like a prop bet for instance right so let's say you take a starting pitcher to have more than three walks. Now, there's a risk because you also don't control whether or not the starting pitcher

comes out of the game or not. So there's a lot of risk that would go into how you would handle this. But let's say there's a starting pitcher and he's a legendary guy who's not at risk of being pulled for a couple walks, like a Justin Verland or something. Not some slappy young dude

who the second he shows any signs of fatigue or any signs of being in dismay, they're going to say, all right, shit, let's get him out of there, right? So let's say you've got a Justin Verlander going and his walk total for the game is two and a half walks or something. You can really make things difficult by pinching him right you can uh you can make that strike zone like dime width if you wanted to you can control it you could be like frank drebin behind home play like you can do whatever the fuck you want to do so it makes it kind of easy but what does baseball expect what does basketball expect there's the lure of easy fucking money, and guys can convince themselves that it's not that big of a deal.

Like, who was the player? Let me look up Terry Rozier really quick, but there was another player that was implicated in this, some guy I think that went to Missouri, who I think is suspended currently. But there was a guy that was implicated in some mysterious unders being bet in his player props. And then he was implicated in this.

Let me see here. NBA player Terry Rozier being investigated in a legal gambling scheme. Let's see here. This is from blackenterprise.com. So this is legit. Really, when I go to my news, I go to blackenterprise.com. So this is legit. Really, when I go to my news, I go to blackenterprise.com. Wealth for life. Let's see here. After the arrest and conviction of former NBA player, Jonte Porter, that's who I was thinking of, due to his ties to illegal betting, federal prosecutors have started another investigation into NBA player

Terry Rozier. According to the Wall Street Journal, prosecutors are investigating whether the Miami Heat player manipulated his play while on the court, similar to Porter, who pled guilty to the charges against him. The government is also investigating whether Porter participated in an illegal sports betting scheme. An NBA official has confirmed that Rozier has been investigated, although the league did not find that he violated any rules. In March 2023, the NBA was alerted to an unusual betting activity related to Terry Rozier's performance in a game between Charlotte and New Orleans. The league conducted an investigation and did not find a violation of NBA rules.

We are now aware of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York related to this matter and have been cooperating with that investigation. Reportedly, authorities feel that some of the people involved in the Porter situation may have bet a large amount of money against Rozier a year earlier. They may have had inside intel that prompted them to place the bet. With the current investigation, there is speculation that more people may be involved than previously thought. Rogier has not been charged with a crime or accused of any wrongdoing, and his attorney, Jim Trustee, gave a statement. We are aware of the NBA's 2023 investigation, which determined there was absolutely no wrongdoing by Mr. Rozier,

and we are confident that the ongoing government investigation will arrive to that exact conclusion. So you might be asking yourself, what was the situation? How did this come about? Well, a lot of people bet a lot of money on prop bet unders for Terry Rozier, an unusual number of people, an amount of people. Eyes were drawn to Rozier after basketball contest March 23, 2023, when Rozier played for the Hornets. Suspicion was raised by U.S. Integrity, a firm that works with sports entities, gambling operators, and government agencies to monitor betting markets for suspicious activity. They warned the league that wagers were being made for Rozier not meeting particular statistical benchmarks.

Due to observation, some of the sportsbooks stopped taking bets on his stats for that game. U.S. Integrity sent out only three alerts about NBA during the previous two seasons. Two of the alerts involved Porter, and the third was Rozier. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often, really. I know that it'd be kind of obvious in some cases, but let's say you're a guy that can really control your statistics. You want to do something that's not going to be obvious, right? Obviously, the big thing is the amount of money being spent on it. So you'd have to find people taking unders and they can't spend a ton

of money on each one. So it'd have to be kind of a long play and it couldn't be every single game type of deal and it couldn't be the same people every type of deal. So it would have to be quite elaborate and time consuming and it really probably wouldn't be worth the risk for a major NBA star that's rich. I could be dumb, really. But it could be done. The problem is these people have like multiple people making fifty thousand hundred thousand dollar wagers on an under on a prop and that's going to obviously raise eyebrows right so you need to do if you're going to do it if you're a player it would have to be someone who plays enough where they have a prop bet that you can screw with but not someone who's a big enough star that has a lot to lose right like

jonte porter would be a good example of somebody like that jonte porter most people don't know who the fuck jonte porter is but jonte porter was a guy that would have made sense the problem is what you can't do is have people making gigantic bets you can't have people making fifty thousand dollar wagers on your goddamn under what you would have to do in a situation like that is again have like a whole ring of people somehow there'd have to be no link to them being involved with one another. And you'd have to put in like 1,500 here, 2,000 here, 1,000 here, like numbers that wouldn't raise eyebrows, right? Like, okay, a person might put $1,000 on a bet on a gambling app, right? It might be a fan duel, a DraftKings, whatever. But what you can't do is

put in 50 grand on one of those and have like 10 other people put in 50 grand on one of those. So it'd have to be a long ass play for you. And it really wouldn't be worth your time or your risk because you're risking your entire NBA livelihood and you're risking jail time. Like in the case of Jonte Porter, like it was stupid to do, But I'm surprised we don't see more of it. Like in college, like some states do offer college prop bets. We talk about this all the time. Like Illinois, you can take prop bets on college players. Whereas in other states, you can't. Like in Arkansas, when we went to Arkansas, you can bet on sports. They don't have DraftKings, they don't have FanDuel, but you can bet on college sports. You cannot bet on college prop

bets. You cannot bet on college player prop bets in Louisiana. If you would think of a group of people that would be easier to manipulate into prop bets being, you know, like just kind of fucking with prop bets, it would be college guys. Because while some dudes are making, you know, a million bucks, two million bucks, 500,000 bucks, a lot of those dudes are still not making a ton of cash, right? So it would be easy. Hell, a player could do it himself. You just got to find the right person that has zero link back to you, which is difficult. What you would need to do, basically, here's how it would have to go down. And this would be kind of an old school way of doing it. You would have to have a situation where a guy who's like some dude in the school, you know, some guy, some, I don't know, physics

major that likes to do a little gambling on FanDuel, right? Likes to place bets on FanDuel. That dude would have to come up and meet this dude in person. So like say he's a wide receiver at Florida. This wide receiver in Florida or a quarterback at Mississippi State would then have to be approached by this person. There can be no paper trail. There can be no DMs. There could be no Snapchats. There could be no phone calls. There could be no text. Everything would have to be done in person. And they would have to meet in person in like a meet cute situation. Like, oh, I bumped into you in line at the burrito store, the burrito store. I bumped into you at Taco Bell. I bumped into you at the Kedoba.

And oh, we just struck up a conversation and it led to this. It would be almost impossible for you to get away with it if there is any sort of paper trail involved. So what you would have to do in that scenario is you would have to go, all right, I meet you in person. We strike up a conversation. I'm like, hello, my name is Steve. I'm a physics major and I'm a degenerate gambler.

How would you like to make $5,000 a week just dropping a couple of fucking passes in a game? No harm, no foul. And then he'd have to go, ah, intriguing. $5,000 and all I have to do is drop a couple of passes? That sounds good. No one's going to be hip to that jive. But also for me to give you this money, I'm going to have to meet with you and I'm going to have to pay you in cash in an envelope once a week. Do not call me.

Just know this. If you come through, meet me at this bridge, meet me at this statue, meet me at this Walmart, meet me at this gas station at this time. And it would have to be in a place where there's no cameras. So you'd have to like, because they can go back and look at cameras and say, oh, look, they met up and there was money exchanged. So then you would have to go and you would have to like meet up in the woods somewhere, like in a place where you'd bury a fucking dead body. So you'd have to go out to the woods and then you'd have to meet up with that person because

everywhere has that. They can track you. And you'd have to leave your phone. You'd have to leave your phone at home because they could ping you on your phone and realize that both of you are out there is basically what I'm telling you is there is almost no way to get away with this shit but at least the risk could be worth the potential reward if you're a college player the risk is not worth the reward if you are a player in a professional level, but it could be easily tried. And if you do it, like a baseball umpire, like back to the original point of this with the

umpire, this Hobart, an umpire does control the game. An umpire controls the strike zone. The strike zone controls the game and changes the game. So I guess if anybody could pull it off, it would be him, but then everything is linked back. That's the problem. This isn't the good old days where like they'd have to tap your phone. Now they can just ping your phone anywhere. Now they can look in your DMs. They can look in your text messages. It is almost impossible to get away with. It would have to be the perfect setup for someone to be able to get away with this. And you couldn't bet a large sum of money every time. It would have to be a small sum that would have to add up over time because not too many people are betting 50 grand on an under catches for a guy in a college game. So if that

showed up, people would go, okay, that's, that's kind of iffy. That's weird. Let's look into this. So it's not like the good old days, you know, where, you know, some college kid, like in the Arizona state scandal, where there was just some guy that meets up with these guys. And or I think it was the Arizona State when the Boston College one like got involved with the mob. Once you start fucking with the mob, which isn't really a thing that happens in sports betting anymore because people just bet on apps now. But back in the day when you got involved with the mob, the Boston College point shaving thing involved the mob. And when the mobs in on it, they'll fucking kill you, and then you're stuck.

So you take the money once, and you think, all right, good, I'm in, I'm out. Nope, once they've made money off you, they're going to keep making money off of you, and they know they can, because they'll fucking break your goddamn neck if you don't come through for them. And if you fail for them, then they'll kill you.

So if they bet 50 grand on you, and you decide that given day, and that's happened, watch some some of the documentaries I know I talk about this a lot there are interesting documentaries about these dudes who've got involved in point shaving scandals Arizona State one was interesting the Boston College one was also interesting but when you get these guys in there and once you decide like if you go rogue that one day and you're like fuck this now this one even prop bets this was point spreads in a lot of these games like the prop bet thing wasn't a thing in the situation so like you just have to you know you can win but you got to win by less than 17 or whatever if you decide to go off one day and say fuck this we're gonna we're gonna say fuck the

mob and i'm gonna cover anyway they will kill you but that's the old days that's the 70s 80s 90s this is the 2000s where you can if you wanted to do it do it on your own well I guess technically and this would be a risk but if you're a player that knows you want to go out and make some money you could approach just some random jamoke that you see in class but even if you know them in class there'd be a link to each other in class so it has to be someone that you're not even in class with. You would basically have to walk up to some random person who is fishing in the woods where there's no cameras, no link to anybody. You don't have your phone with you. It's back at fucking home. You have to just go out and try to find someone like a weirdo in the fucking woods. And you would have to go,

all right, there's some dipshit fishing out here in the woods. Let me walk up to him. And then you'd have to hope that that's not some federal agent or somebody with some morals. And you have to walk up to him and go, listen, hello, I'm the wide receiver for the LSU Tigers. This is me. I'm Johnny Goodhands. And they're like, well, hello, Johnny Goodhands. I love what you do. Can I get your autograph?

You're like, sure. But can you do something for me? A little quid pro quo, as it were. And he'd go, well, what is it, Johnny Goodhands? What can I do for you, pal? And you say, listen, I need you to open up a FanDuel account. He's like, oh, sports betting? I don't sports bet. My wife would kill me. Fuck your wife. I'm Johnny Goodhands, and I want you to open up a FanDuel account. Then you'd have to make other bets, not just the bets on the unders

for Johnny Goodhands. So then you'd have to go spend your days like, here, Johnny Goodhands would have to give you $ bucks or something to fund the account and go, I want you to bet on random NBA games. I want you to bet on random college football games. I want you to bet on Ukrainian table tennis. I want you to bet on all this shit. And when you bet on all this, then Saturday comes around. I want you to bet on a couple of different things. Like I'll need you to bet on like a random over in this game. Like, oh, I need you to take my buddy, my buddy Jellylegs, the running back. I need Steven Jellylegs. I need you to bet on his rushing total. And I need you to take an over in that rushing total because I kind of throw everybody off the scent, right? See, then he

goes, okay. And then let's say he agrees to it. Then I need you to take a bet on the under on my yards. But I also don't need you to make it so big that it's like mysterious, that it's like, oh, there's something obvious here. Ping. Let's see this. So I need you to do this. We're going to do it all year and $1,000 a game, but I need you to bet $1,000 a game on everything that you bet. The problem is I then have to give you $10,000 to give you money to bet on. What I've concluded here is that there's truly no value in someone trying to fix this. There's no win. This is why I couldn't cheat on anybody or be a bad person because in my mind, I've laid out every single way that they could find you. They could ping your cell phone.

Like there's no way you can get away with shit. I couldn't be a murderer. Why couldn't I be a murderer? Because you're not going to get away with shit. I couldn't be a murderer. Why couldn't I be a murderer? Because you're not going to get away with it. There's no way to get away with murder in 2025 because every piece of data that's out there can link you back to the murder. You can't murder people, you can't cheat on your spouse, and you cannot rig sporting events for betting purposes. It is impossible to do in 2025. And now you know the rest of the story.