It's Friday, November 14, 2025.

I'm Albert Mueller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian

worldview.

Well, you know, who would have thought?

It turns out that sports betting scandals are just continuing to ricochet. In this case, the latest

casualty is Major League Baseball. And you have two players who have been suspended, and they're

likely, if found guilty, to be banned from baseball for the rest of their lives, for another

gambling scandal. And so it is really interesting. We have to come back to this because it's a

huge story. But on this Friday edition of the briefing, I want to look at the human cost, but I want

us just to understand for a moment, when you ask the question, who saw this coming, the answer

should be every sane person. Who saw this coming? Anyone who had eyes to see. The great delusion here is that anyone thought that you could add

vast billions and billions and billions of dollars in gambling, and it would not lead to perverse

effects. These perverse effects are already showing up. They're going to show up in sport after

sport after sport. And you know, what's really interesting is to hear a lot of people say,

well, you know, it was only professional baseball, as if, you know, what's really interesting is to hear a lot of people say, well, you know,

it was only professional baseball, as if, you know, well, at least it wasn't collegiate sports. But the betting mechanisms could just as easily apply to collegiate sports as to anything else.

And with collegiate sports, you're just going to have domino after domino fall.

One of the big issues is that in this latest scandal, it was prop bets, as they're called,

that were at the center of it.

These are proposition bets.

And this allows betting on even individual plays.

Now, this is why baseball is particularly vulnerable.

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