Is Gambling Ruining Sports?
The Sam Sanders Show
KCRW & Sam Sanders
4.9 • 709 Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sports betting is a billion dollar industry chock full of scandals.
Journalist Baker Machado breaks down how gambling has infiltrated sports from the collegiate to professional level, how players get involved, and how betting companies push fans into spending money they often can’t afford to lose. Spoiler alert: it’s all legal.
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The Sam Sanders Show is a production of KCRW and Sam Sanders Productions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey listeners, it is the season of giving. Get that warm, fuzzy feeling. Make a donation, |
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| 0:13.6 | slash give. |
| 0:20.8 | Hey, y'all, it's the Sam Sanders show from KCRW, all about the things that entertain us. |
| 0:26.9 | This week, sports. |
| 0:34.3 | If you're like me and you don't really follow the sports world, then you might be missing one of the most dramatic and important culture stories of the moment. |
| 0:43.8 | I'm talking about sports gambling. |
| 0:45.8 | It's big right now. |
| 0:47.5 | And there have been so many sports gambling scandals lately that I had to break it all down with the journalist Baker Machado. |
| 0:53.8 | There's drama with this. The mob is involved in this. You have millions of dollars at risk here. |
| 1:00.2 | This is a perfect Sam Sanders story, by the way. |
| 1:03.6 | Baker hosts the Front Office Sports Today podcast, where he has been covering all of these crazy gambling cases. |
| 1:11.0 | And I asked Baker, with all these sports gambling scandals, how much should we worry about them? |
| 1:16.6 | Really? |
| 1:17.6 | Let's get into it. |
| 1:23.2 | Baker, I'm bringing you here because there have been a few headlines that have made me think about sports a lot and wonder if professional sports and even collegiate sports right now is in trouble. |
| 1:36.6 | I ask this because I've seen a lot of headlines that seem to indicate that that's the case. |
| 1:42.2 | And it's the case because of sports gambling. The latest |
| 1:45.5 | headline, there's a scandal involving current and former NBA players rigging games, caught |
| 1:52.1 | up in fraudulent sports bets, and this story even includes some mafia ties like La Costra Nostra. |
| 1:58.5 | That's just one headline. As an Angelino, I have been following for a while now the Shohei Otani gambling scandal, |
| 2:06.4 | which took down his interpreter and involved some $300 million in sports wagers and theft. |
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