From baseball to March Madness, how gambling is ruining sports.
The 1919 World Series is famous for a few things, but most of all, it’s remembered as the worst gambling scandal in US sports history.
Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of taking money from gamblers to purposefully lose the World Series. Though some maintained their innocence, all eight were eventually banned from baseball for life.
If that punishment was harsh, it was largely justified. No sport can be expected to thrive if fans have reasonable suspicions that the games aren’t on the level.
In the decades that followed, sports did all they could to distance themselves from gambling. To this day, every sports commissioner’s worst nightmare is waking up to hear that one of their top players has been involved in a gambling scandal.
Which is basically what happened to Major League Baseball (MLB) this week.Oh no, Ohtani
Shortly after the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres opened up the 2024 regular season with MLB’s first-ever game in South Korea this week, news broke that Japanese Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara had been fired after Ohtani’s representatives accused him of stealing millions of dollars to place illegal bets.
At this point, no one is accusing Ohtani of engaging in gambling on baseball, which is strictly forbidden by the sport.
But still, there’s some weirdness here, not least that Mizuhara reportedly gave an interview to ESPN claiming that Ohtani has transferred millions of dollars from his account to Mizuhara to cover the interpreter’s gambling debts, only for Ohtani’s representatives to later say that no, he had actually been the victim of theft.
Honestly, the idea that Ohtani — who signed a $700 million contract this winter — would risk everything by being directly involved in gambling sounds absurd.
But that’s the thing about gambling and sports. You don’t have to be sure that players are placing bets to wonder if everything is on the up and up.
