Kyle Sammin: The next Black Sox scandal is coming
The Phillies’ victory in Game 2 of the National League Division Series against the Mets was an instant classic, one that will add a chapter to the long and storied rivalry between the two teams. (It was the only part of the series worth remembering for Phillies fans, but let’s not get into that.)
I was lucky enough to be at the game and amid the celebratory atmosphere — after the fifth inning, anyway — one discordant note kept ringing in the background. No, it wasn’t the Phillies bullpen. It was the ESPNBet ads featured prominently on the scoreboard and on the facing of the right field upper deck.
Team owners have always been happy to run advertising wherever they could manage it, but the pairing of Major League Baseball and professional gambling was forbidden for nearly a century. To see baseball and gambling hand-in-hand now is jarring to a long-term fan and troubling to anyone who understands the history of baseball and betting.
Pete Rose passed away last week, in case anyone needed a reminder of what used to happen to ballplayers who dabbled in that forbidden vice. One of baseball’s all-time greats, Rose broke Ty Cobb’s record for hits in a career, a mark many thought would stand forever. A hometown hero to the Cincinnati fans he played most of his career in front of (after a memorable detour to the Phillies from 1979 to 1983,) Rose should have been a first-ballot, no-doubt Hall of Famer.
But besides being a world-class athlete, Rose was also a top-notch gambler. Jayson Stark’s reflection on Rose’s bifurcated career is the best I’ve read on the man since his passing. The Hit King, Stark writes, was also the Bet King. Everyone who watched him play and admired his hustle, grit, and consistency has to reconcile that other legacy, too.
Despite baseball’s then-rigorous restrictions on any association with gamblers, Rose bet on the horses, on other sports, and eventually even on baseball. That would have been bad enough as a player — it was what got eight White Sox players banned for life in 1921 — but as manager of the Reds, Rose had even more influence over the team and even more susceptibility to being compromised by gamblers to whom he owed large sums of money.
Because this is the thing about gambling: everyone who does it long enough ends up like Rose, owing a bunch of money. In Rose’s day, that meant owing money to criminals, often members of a mafia organization. The potential for blackmail is obvious there. But modern bettors are more likely to owe DraftKings or FanDuel of ESPNBet. Does that make it better?
Yes and no. A corporation is not going to break your thumbs when you can’t pay, but they will ruin your credit. Letting people run up debts on the credit card can ruin lives every bit as much as a loanshark’s beating.
Charles Fain Lehman wrote about sports gambling for the Atlantic last month, and the studies he cites are damning. One study found that “for every $1 spent on betting, households put $2 less into investment accounts,” along with “big increases in the risk of overdrafting a bank account or maxing out a credit card.” Another found that when a state legalizes online sports gambling, it “increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent.”
There were others — the entire article is worth your time — but none showed a good effect to legalizing gambling, and all showed bad consequences, mostly concentrated on those who can least afford them.
Organized gambling preys on addicts, but baseball doesn’t mind anymore because they get a piece of the action. And even the bland corporate owners aren’t adverse to some unethical pressure tactics, if the allegations of a recent federal lawsuit are to be believed. Former Jacksonville Jaguars employee Amit Patel sued FanDuel in federal court claiming that the company incentivized his problem gambling, even contacting him “as many as 100 times a day between 2021 and 2023, on several occasions contacting Patel on days he was not gambling to find out why.”
If the gambling companies behave this way to problem gamblers, that’s bad enough, but doing it to employees of teams threatens not only the individual addict’s well-being but also the integrity of an entire sport.
Baseball came down hard on gambling after gamblers induced several members of the White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series — the infamous Black Sox scandal. A century later, those lessons have been conveniently forgotten because the gamblers have made partners of the league through their advertising and the government through their taxes.
The next Black Sox scandal is inevitable as long as sports gambling is legal and openly associated with sports. It may be happening already. Earlier this year, MLB banned Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano for life for betting on baseball, the first such ban on an active player since 1924. Shohei Ohtani, the greatest player of the current generation, also had a brush with this vice when his friend and interpreter was banned when it was discovered that he owed millions to bookies.
How much was Ohtani involved? Baseball doesn’t want to know. But the owners and commissioner can’t keep closing their eyes to this growing threat to the integrity of the game and the well-being of the fans – even if the gambling companies will do anything to keep them looking the other way.
Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.