#sports-gambling

#sports-gambling

The Justice Department says that Clase and Ortiz repeatedly threw pitches out of the strike zone as part of a scheme with gamblers who would wager on those pitches to be balls. Sometimes, the bettors would also wager on the velocity of the pitches. These were the first pitches of at-bats, where sportsbooks offered action on whether it would be a ball or strike.

From time to time in this column, I like to look at something I wrote in the past and see if it holds up to retrospective scrutiny. Early last year, after the baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani and his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara were ensnared in a major gambling scandal that ended with Mizuhara in jail, I wrote a column titled "Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse," in which I expressed concern for the "integrity of the game," and worried that betting by athletes and others around them—Ohtani himself denied any involvement and was never charged with anything—might begin occurring with such frequency that it would cause the public, including children, to lose faith in what they were watching.

NEW YORK -- Former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges he profited from rigged poker games and provided sports bettors with non-public information about injuries to stars LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Jones, a onetime teammate of James, said little during back-to-back arraignments in federal court in Brooklyn, letting his court-appointed lawyer enter not guilty pleas in a pair of cases stemming from last month's federal takedown of sprawling gambling operations.

Jaylen Brown admitted that he isn't fully up to date on the details in the illegal gambling scandal that led to the arrests of three NBA figures, but he isn't a fan of the betting culture that's made its way into sports. The Celtics star called for more player support from the NBA on sports gambling, believing players have been made vulnerable to social media attacks due to wagers placed on them.

Months after this investigation commenced, Malik remains uncharged and is not the target of this investigation,