Longtime sports gaming reporter Bill Ordine talked with PressBox about why the recent sports betting scandals matter, how suspicious betting patterns are flagged, the path forward and more.
This has been edited for content and clarity.
PressBox: Why should the MLB and NBA sports gambling scandal stories involving Emmanuel Clase, Luis Ortiz and Terry Rozier matter to sports fans? (Clase and Ortiz are accused of rigging individual pitches and Rozier is accused of manipulating his over-under props in a 2023 game.)
Bill Ordine: They should matter to sports fans because they cast in doubt the legitimacy of whatever it is you’re watching. If you’re a big fan of professional wrestling and the fact that those outcomes are not up for grabs, then maybe this doesn’t bother you. But for sports fans who believe that the whole point of spectator sports is that there is a pure unpredictability to the outcome and that the outcome is predicated all on talent and effort and, as we all know, luck, that’s a great appeal to spectator sports. We know that the people who are participating in them — who are quite skilled, usually world-class athletes — are putting out their best effort. And we know that there is this randomness of this thing called luck. That’s why it should matter to fans because what’s taken away here is the best-effort part of that three-legged stool.
PB: Why should these stories matter to sports bettors?
BO: First of all, there are a lot of things that should matter to the sports bettor, one of which is that in some cases these are events that were tied into parlays. Now we’re finding out that some of these parlays were adulterated by fixing. The average bettor should be concerned insofar that he’s got to wonder about what is it that he doesn’t know. What else is adulterated about the competition? If you can tinker with a first pitch, if you can tinker with an over-under in basketball, what else is being tinkered with, and is your bet really contingent on your own knowledge of the game? Or are you just out there flipping a coin and hoping that you are on the right side of the fixed portion of that event? That’s why it needs to matter to bettors. They are investing in their own knowledge of the game. What they don’t know is when the fix is in.
PB: How are suspicious betting patterns flagged?
BO: In the recent college basketball case [involving Arizona State, Mississippi Valley State and New Orleans], the players were shooting their mouths off. It was that simple. Let’s talk about the more sophisticated circumstances, there are companies out there — mainly based in Europe — that are finely-tuned analytics companies that are crunching the numbers, not just on point spreads but on the amount of money being wagered on thousands and thousands of events every day. They are kind of in a wind tunnel with all of these numbers flying by them.
Let’s say they are all on white pieces of paper. They need to be able to be sophisticated enough with their own algorithms to tell, “That piece of paper is not white. It’s blue.” I’m using this as a metaphor. The blue piece of paper is the one that’s an anomaly. It’s not like all the others. There’s something odd about that particular slip of paper. There’s something about those numbers — usually, the amount of money being wagered on an event — that is highly out of character with the amount of money that would normally be wagered on that type of event.
There are companies in Europe that are engaged by the leagues and by the teams. They charge a lot of money. Their whole business is to tell a team or to tell a league or tell law enforcement when a blue piece of paper makes itself evident among all these white pieces of paper that are flying by. They are computer guys. They’re computer-math-analysis-data guys who are looking for the oddity, the anomaly. And when the anomaly shows up, they blow a whistle.
PB: What happens next?
BO: This is as old as the gambling business itself. You get a bet for $20,000 on an event that you normally get a bet of $100. The company that is looking for those anomalies say, “OK, we’ve got one. We’ve got a blue piece of paper here. We’ve got an anomaly. We’ve got something strange.” They alert whoever they need to alert and then the investigation begins. They figure out who made the bet and they do a regular old shoe-leather kind of investigation. You go to the people who made the bet and say, “Why did you make this bet? Do you know this pitcher who threw that pitch? Do you know that player? Is he a family member? Is he a friend? Did you grow up with him? Do you have drinks with him?” They can easily do that. When an anomalous bet shows up, they’ll figure out who made it and then the investigation starts.
PB: In light of the Clase-Ortiz situation, MLB recently announced an agreement with major U.S. sportsbooks to cap bets on individual pitches to $200. Is it possible that will occur with a lot of other prop bets?
BO: The whole idea was if you take the incentive out of fixing the event, then people won’t try to fix the event. The league is putting it on the bookmakers to take away the incentive. … The problem is that there is so much money made. The odds are so high on parlay betting that the online sports betting business has dropped all pretense. They would want every bettor to make all bets on parlays. That is the problem. These wagers are the big profit margin for online sports betting companies. Getting them to dial it back on parlays in particular is going to be difficult. They integrate prop bets with parlays. Asking them to give up either of those components is going to be met with resistance.
There’s another component to this. The jurisdiction in which the wagering takes place, they make a lot of money. The state of New York takes 51 percent of the revenue — not the profit, the revenue. When you start making government a partner to this enterprise and then you start saying, “OK, now we want the enterprise to make less money,” well, you’re causing the government to also be diminished in terms of the amount of money they can raise. All of this is highly problematic. Having a league go to DraftKings and FanDuel — and that’s basically a duopoly now — and say, “We want you to stop doing something where you make a lot of money,” the reaction is going to be, “We might do it here, but don’t come back too many times.” This might be too little, too late. This train is really down the track now in terms of sports wagering in America.
PB: Is there anything that can be done at this point to put guardrails on sports betting?
BO: There really is. The place to look for this is Europe and the UK, which is a good decade or maybe 20 years ahead of the United States in terms of the sports wagering industry. There are governments in Europe now that are trying to roll back some of these problems. Can you put the genie back in the bottle? Yes, absolutely you can. Whether or not there is political appetite for that is really the question. Government makes a fair amount of money, especially local governments. State governments make a lot of money.
And there is always this issue: When a guy like me might suggest, “We’ve got to have national guardrails on this kind of thing,” the comeback is, “You know what, there’s this thing called the internet, and the bettors can always go bet with offshore operators. They can always bet with operators that are operating out of Central America or some place in Europe.” That still doesn’t take away some incentive for guys for cheating. There is really the problem, I think. You can try to stuff the genie back in the bottle — and they’re trying to do it in Europe right now, but then there is this business of, “Well, how about black-market operators? What do you do about them?”
Photo Credit: Colin Murphy/PressBox
Issue 296: December 2025 / January 2026
Originally published Dec. 17, 2025