Is America at risk of losing the heart of her favorite pastime? As the baseball gambling scandal involving top MLB pitchers continues to unfold, many are left with an uneasy feeling about the state of modern sports.
On this edition of Pablo Torre Finds Out, Pablo and Jen dive into the MBA & NBA’s betting controversies, the booing of President Trump at the Commanders-Lions game, and how integrity erodes when leagues profit on micro-betting.
Pablo Torre is an American sportswriter, podcaster, and television host. He contributes to various programs at ESPN, including Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn. Keep up with Pablo on his Substack and podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian, and if it’s Monday, it must be Pablo Torre at Yale.
Pablo Torre
I’m underneath an over… not an overpass, but it feels like that, an awning at the Yale Library. I just spoke to some kids who have assured me that, as terrified as we are about whatever’s happened to MediaGen, they… they might have some ideas, which is really exciting. It’s really exciting to hear that generation.
Jen Rubin
Exciting. It gives me hope. Might have screwed it up, but I do have faith that people in the next generation will figure our way out of it. Gambling. Gambling.
Pablo Torre
Speaking of things that young people apparently really do enjoy, yeah.
Jen Rubin
So, the latest is baseball gambling. These are not just two run-of-the-mill pictures. These are pretty premier, you know, quality level, you know, famous brand name pictures. And they threw it all away for a few hundred thousand bucks. Explain this to us.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so the star name here is Emmanuel Clase, who is truly one of the greatest closers in Major League Baseball. We’re talking about two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians. But Class A is really the guy who you’re like, wait a minute, why was he involved in this? And what this is really connected to everything we’ve been talking about for weeks and months now, because in… again, let’s recap briefly, in the world of legalized gambling. There are these things called prop bets, in which there is a legal menu, a series of legal markets, for microbets. And so, the things that these two men, Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase have been accused of by the federal government, by the Eastern District of New York, a familiar character as well in these stories. They’ve investigated, of course, the NBA most recently. What these two pictures are accused of doing is essentially telling a network of bettors, based largely in the Dominican Republic. This is how fast I’m gonna hit the under on the pitch velocity for specific pitches. You could bet on how fast the pitch is gonna be, so they tried to throw them slower than what the legal gambling line was, as well as whether a pitch specifically was gonna be a ball or a strike.
And so, in the first pitch of a series of documented at-bats, they threw them way out of the zone. And so, what we’re talking about here is hundreds of thousands of dollars that changed hands, but the real headline, the sticker shock is. That they were doing this in Major League games, and it may well have cost them, as you appropriately led with, their entire careers in baseball.
Jen Rubin
Now, there’s, I guess, a hubris or naivete that they’re not going to get caught. We surely know that the betting markets have all kinds of devices for detecting blips and outside bets, and all the rest of it. So it was almost inevitable that they would get caught. The problem now is, as in the NBA, what do they do about it? What does baseball do, and how many other shoes and pitches, frankly, are to be dropped, before we get to the end of this?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, it’s worth pointing out that as many people have pointed out to me, there’s a bit of a parallel to, like, steroid testing, and I say it, I say it in two senses. One, there is, I think, this world that’s a lot bigger than what’s been reported already. But also, the people who have gotten caught have, as much as anything, failed an IQ test. It’s not that the sort of security protocols and the systems of governance here are so great that they’re catching everybody. They’re really catching the people who are most flagrantly breaking the rules, and don’t seem to have realized that in a world in which the federal government might demand to see your phone, and might be able to match text messages to documented video examples of you repeatedly throwing pitches out of the zone in direct correlation, allegedly, to what you texted to the multiple bettors you were working with in this alleged scheme that it might be what has the feeling of an open and shut case. And so, what do you do about this? If you are Major League Baseball, like the NBA, what you are doing is contemplating, I am told, how to shrink the menu of proposition bets, of prop bets that we’ve been talking about, such that the legal options for these micro-bets get smaller. And I think that’s the most obvious thing to do. Because it’s insane that you would be able to bet on something so hyper-specific, it almost, in some sense, feels like it’s a trap designed to catch people who wanted to use inside information to help rig individual aspects of games. So there’s that, and I think that’s the most obvious thing. But the larger conversation, of course, as now prediction markets like PolyMarket and Kalshi have entered the fray as well, and they’re trying to come for the business of the legal gambling operators, the question is, as always, who do you want to get in bed with if you are the owners and operators of professional sports? Because there are these conflicts, these questions that get raised, that it’s really hard to claim that you have a fully vested interest in stamping out the problems they’re in. If, in fact, you are profiting from the problems they’re in.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and I have to say, when you go to a major league ballpark these days, the betting aspect is very vivid. It’s there. It’s on the announcer. There are people walking around with the betting odds and the rest. It has, in some sense, fundamentally changed the environment of the sport. And we haven’t talked about that, too much.
Pablo Torre
Yeah.
Jen Rubin
Does that hurt the sport, or is that what the market wants?
Pablo Torre
It’s a really good point, and the NBA has felt this, I think, very acutely, because if you think about what the NBA’s larger business concern is, it has been that we have been in… we as fans have prioritized individuals over teams.
Jen Rubin
Right.
Pablo Torre
And nothing has accelerated that perspective, that fandom, that sort of mutant sort of fandom that’s not interested in actual teams, but in the sub-subplots of individuals nothing has accelerated that like sports betting, like legalized sports betting, which has created a whole new menu, again, of incentives that are not the same as, did you watch the whole game, and did you care about who won or lost? And so, to me, there is this sort of poetic sort of, monkeypaw dilemma of, like, you wanted more money, but it came at the cost of the exacerbation of one of the biggest threats to your product. Which is that people care less about the games that we grew up watching, you and me at least, and they care more about these new games that have been invented that essentially, Jen, I’ll quote a friend of mine who put it, I think, really well. There’s a lot of just fracking going on cracking sports. They’re, like, thinking there’s more money to be gained in this if they just mine more often and deeper, but really what they don’t realize is that they are poisoning the entire well.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Pablo Torre
And that tracking of sports is something that will result in short-term gains financially, but might result in the end, actually, of the ecosystem that is actually the thing giving you all the money.
Jen Rubin
And in some respects, it also reminds me of the financial crisis of 2008, where we’ve gotten so fancy in devising ways to make money, that people lose track of the thing that is supposed to be underlying it, whether it’s the value of an actual house, or whether it’s the value of a baseball team. Something really interesting, which was that although there is a desire to perhaps limit the menu of prop bets, there doesn’t seem to be the will to get rid of them altogether. Is that just an impossibility? Is that the genie has gotten so far out of the bottle?
Pablo Torre
Well, I think the key thing here is that crop bets and parlays have been incredibly financially rewarding for the gambling operators. Because part of the theory was, hey, we can get people to pay attention to games if we give them reason to have, some investment in them. And so, into this world come the prop bets and parlays. Parlays, by the way, being the thing where you can combine multiple bets, and the multiplier effect is such that you put $5 in, maybe you get $25 out if this increasingly unlikely series of events happen. Which, by the way, always favor, of course, the house, the gambling operators, because the odds are not actually in your favor. So I think what we’re finding, what I’m hearing at the very least, inside of league offices, is this real sort of search for a conscience that is motivated not just by the ethics of, like, what do we want the perception of our game to be, and the morality of our game therein. They’re also worried about, are there diminishing returns and margins, if, in fact, it is revealed that the only people who are really profiting off of these microbets are people who might be scamming the system with inside information. Like, if you’re just a normal sports fan, and you’re like, hey, I want to make a ton of money off of sports betting, but the things that I am being led to believe are the best ways to do that are actually these things that get manipulated by people with way more information than me, I think that is, again, this diminishing returns premise economically for the leaks.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Now, you’ve also articulated what everyone, I think, believes, which is they just went after the biggest fish, the most obvious fish, the fish wearing the blinking neon sign that said, I’m cheating, I’m cheating. And there may be a whole bunch more. If you are the Major League Baseball owners, or the commissioner.
Do you try to go deeper? Do you try to find every instance, or do you try to, kind of hope that other scandals don’t come out, come up with some patch going forward, and kind of let bygones be bygones.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I’ll tell you what I believe that every commissioner in league office does in these cases, which is they try to shrink the size of the PR scandal.
Jen Rubin
Yeah.
Pablo Torre
Make the problem seem as small and as isolated and discrete as possible. Point to the fact that they were caught using, of course, this alarm system, which has been functioning, by the way, to catch the most obvious offenders, and they deserve credit for catching those people. But then, you don’t quite reveal to the public what else you’re doing to make sure that your games are not being manipulated in other, more nefarious ways that might, in fact, affect the outcome of games. And look, we’re dancing around really what was the precipitating moral crisis of Major League Baseball, which was, you go to the Black Sox scandal, certainly in the early 20th century, into Pete Rose, by the way, who is posthumously being lobbied by Donald Trump to make it to the Hall of Fame, but I digress. The point being, you have people who are evading the premise that in legal gambling, we have not gotten someone who is actively thrown a game. And I just think that… It’s just a matter of time until we get the proof that that has happened in the NBA, in Major League Baseball, because the incentives are all there. And you’ll just notice, like, the people that we’re catching, again, are not only the IQ test, failures, so to speak, it’s also people who were doing the thing that doesn’t, in their mind.
Jen Rubin
Equate to actually affecting the outcome of the game itself. Right. That’s how they justify it to themselves.
Pablo Torre
Exactly! In the NBA, Jonte Porter was a scrub who just took himself out of games early. In this case, we’re just talking about the first pitch of an at-bat. That slope, to be very realistic here, is so slippery that I can tell you, with some amount of informed certainty, that the incentives are so great that the temptation is quite real to do more.
Jen Rubin
Awesome.
Pablo Torre
So how do you preemptively act if that is something that you believe in the league office as well?
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Now, the NBA was first into this dirty pool, and how has that scandal been playing out, and what has the NBA, what’s the commissioner, been doing since that lawsuit, was revealed?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, they tend to throw their arms up and say, we don’t have subpoena power.
Jen Rubin
We are going to defer to the federal government. And that has been their position, and the NBA was caught in this very interesting pickle, by the way, in which the NBA.
Pablo Torre
According to my reporting, investigated Terry Rozier, the active current player for the Miami Heat, who has now been sidelined because he was named as a defendant in these, federal allegations for manipulating games, taking himself out of games early, etc.and I believe that the NBA’s position is, we investigated, we did not see enough to be able to sideline him ourselves, and so we allowed him to play, because we didn’t have the ability to get more information. And so, when the federal government came along, we said we’re gonna let the boys in blue take it from here and the problem, of course, is that that itself, according to my reporting and analysis is what you do when you want the PR problem to remain as small as possible until it becomes a massive, unavoidable problem. And so with Rozier, they knew, the NBA knew that the federal government was investigating. They just didn’t want to act on it, because they made this calculation. And so, in that case, what they’re finding is that there are questions that the public has around what did you know and when did you know it, and in fact, what I did on my show was we got statements from members of, certainly, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which wants Adam Silver to testify in Washington, D.C, as well as the Senate Commerce Committee, which wants the same thing. And… People in politics, they recognize that sports is fertile ground, it is an attention magnet… it is a magnet for American attention, and also, these sports, these leagues, are so culturally ascendant that they want to make sure that this is all on the up and up. And so the NBA is facing scrutiny from politicians in Washington, D.C, about how they’re handling all of this, too.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. And baseball is particularly vulnerable because, of course, they have the antitrust exemption. And that periodically comes up. That was one of the levers, if you remember, folks, that gave Congress the incentive to go ahead and have really in-depth hearings, which kind of broke out the steroid scandal. And as soon as they start talking that language, that’s serious stuff, because that’s the entire operation of baseball.
Pablo Torre
Oh, look, the whole premise of sports in America has been, these are not merely multi-bazillion dollar industries and assets, these teams, they’re also civic institutions. And that’s not merely the poetic description of them, they also receive often public money, public financing. They get governmental exceptions in various ways. The antitrust exemption in baseball, to be very clear, being the most flagrant one, I think, that the government has granted to any individual sports league, but in all of these ways, there are, I think both case studies and bits of logic that suggest that it’s not just like any private business. It’s sports. It’s the American way. People care, you know? Like, they’re also responding most basically to the fact that their constituencies, like, they’re concerned about this too. And I think that’s the… the public opinion shift, Jen, has been really eye-opening to me. Because you’d think, oh, all sports fans are degenerates, they just want to bet on this stuff.
Jen Rubin
Okay.
Pablo Torre
And I think people are… certainly the leagues are really waking up to the idea that people are bothered by the fact that the thing they watch cannot guarantee that the incompetence, the failure they’re seeing, is authentic mistake-making and authentic incompetence. You’re wondering, does this guy have money on the game? And that spells the doom of this thing that all of us, as a country, I think, are invested in actually protecting, if nothing else, because we love it.
Jen Rubin
That is… I couldn’t agree more, and there was a Pew poll, back early in October that says a majority of people really are worried about this. It’s not just you and me who are saying, oh, this should be a problem. It is the public for exactly the reason that you said. Now, if you are the head of a league that hasn’t yet been hit with one of these scaffolds, you are the head of the NFL, you are the head of the NHL, you are involved in the management of college football, which has its own Herculean challenges. What are you doing right now? Are you asking people to start searching? Are you asking people not to search? What are you doing?
Pablo Torre
So, there are two answers to this. One is if I’m a self-interested league executive, in which case I am trying to shrink the PR problem. That is what I would do to save my own business, or at the very least, protect it as much as I can. But that entails also being fully eyes open about everything I have heard and have detected. I think there are lots of bits of data that the surveillance systems around legalized vetting have alerted me to, that I’m never gonna say to the public, because that would be very scary and further degrade the economic proposition of the product. So that is what I’m doing in case study number one. In case study number two, in which I am trying to really have a sort of and I call it the, am I the good guy in the documentary test? In which, 10 years from now. I’m gonna be in some documentary, and people are gonna ask, like, what did you do when sports betting and the corruption scandals associated got out of control? What I’m doing is preparing for a world in whichI am advocating for legitimate and rigorous regulation.
Jen Rubin
Yeah.
Pablo Torre
Because I am making the calculation that my self-interest is actually boosted by a real governmental intervention that suggests that accountability is the only way forward.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely.
Pablo Torre
That statement, you may have noticed, Jen, in our larger politics, is not a popular one. No one invites regulation if they have the ability to avoid it, but to me, I just think that it’s inevitable. That the public outcry will be inevitable, such that you want to be able to say before even we got this scandal publicized, me, Roger Goodell, or me, the commissioner of the SEC, Greg Sankey, I was already calling for something resembling a shrinking of the prop at menu, but on top of that actual research and regulation about what is able to be legally bet, and I’m just doing that because I think that the… the long game is the right game to play here.
Jen Rubin
I think the analogy to the hero in the documentary is perfect, because there always was that one guy, you know? Don’t you want to be that guy? Now, I would be very remiss if I didn’t talk about my favorite moment in sports Sunday night. President Trump attended a Commander’s game, and having learned nothing from showing up at the U.S. Open Tennis tournament, decided to be introduced to the masses he was booed, I don’t know, for, like, two straight minutes? I don’t think I’ve ever heard quite that reaction from the crowd. First of all, way to go, my fellow DC citizens and sports fans. What do you make of that? And in that same vein, his idea that he now wants the stadium named after him? Yeah. Oh my god, how… this is Formula One for having to get half the population to never set foot in the stadium.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, it is so perfect, the way it happened. It was such a perfect, like, sometimes no poll can capture the energy of just the stadium booing something.
Jen Rubin
Yeah.
Pablo Torre
And it’s… honestly, it’s the poll that I wish a certain crew of U.S. senators had consulted or they decided to just cave to a guy who is unpopular in ways that are increasingly undeniable.
Jen Rubin
Clearly.
Pablo Torre
So I just offer that as a larger context for what did we learn at the Commanders-Lions game. We learned that this dude is really not liked right now, particularly by people for whom Washington, D.C. and the surrounding environs and the shutdown of the government is not an abstract concept, but a real one. It’s very clear who could be blamed for this. It was the guy getting booed. So it’s hard for me to divorce that from the a larger strategic decision to just…
Jen Rubin
Totally collapse.
Pablo Torre
And defect to him. So, I say that. But the other thing about the naming rights thing. This is… this is how this administration operates. And it’s not merely the naming rights, it’s the pardons that he just granted to everybody involved with the 2020 election the whole premise of, if you want… by the way, in the gambling scandal we were just talking about, I will tell you, Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier both hired, as their attorneys, former Trump attorneys.
Jen Rubin
Why do they do that?
Pablo Torre
It’s because there’s a playbook for how to get personal quid pro quo favors from this administration. And so when Josh Harris, the owner of the Commanders, is contemplating this thing that Trump is truly speaking into existence, it sounds like. He’s doing it because Donald Trump helped him get whatever approval he needed for the new stadium in its new location. And so, the quid pro quo, aka abject corruption of this administration, what it’s doing is it’s… and this is the difference between, like… and even, by the way, a pardon, which is insane to me, that we’re just numb.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Pablo Torre
Just like all of this stuff, but let’s just even be numb to that for a second. The idea that you would, again frack sports, that you would take this thing that people would love, but hollow it out, and put it underneath the banner of something that they hate. Is just… It seems like very short-sighted thinking, even if there’s money on the table for you to grab.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. And, you know, this is really, you know, ruining the crown jewels of sports. If you’re given this thing, you know, why would you try to to do this awful thing to it. But I do have to commend you, that whether it’s the parts, Knocking down the East Wing, Putting those ugly gold letters.
Pablo Torre
Oh my gosh.
Jen Rubin
Say, Oval Office, creating a stadium. Building a heroic arch to himself? This guy has gone full Caligula, Nero, I mean, we are talking somebody who is completely off the balance beam, and I think it should be a lesson to the rest of us. I gotta let this happen! He’s gonna take every bit and shred of society and everything you love and squeeze it dry.
Pablo Torre
Yeah.
Jen Rubin
We better put an end to it when we can.
Pablo Torre
Look, there’s another way, it’s an older, more ancient way of saying, don’t be the bad guy in the documentary. Don’t be the one fiddling while Rome burns.
Jen Rubin
There you go.
Pablo Torre
There’s another reference that I think somewhere here on this campus, they’re probably, hopefully, still teaching kids, but don’t be… Absolutely. Don’t be that guy, either.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Well, Pablo, as always, sports, life, politics, it all comes together, so enjoy your time at Yale, lucky kids that they are, and we will look forward to having you back next week.
Pablo Torre
Yep, talk to you next week, Jen. Thanks.
Jen Rubin
Bye-bye.
