Hiltzik: Legalized gambling is already ruining sports

Question for Major League Baseball: What do your current sports betting partnerships look like?

This question arises at the moment as the league faces a potentially historic scandal involving historic superstar Shohei Ohtani.

The Dodgers slugger insisted he had nothing to do with the alleged illegal gambling committed by his friend and former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, who was fired from the team.

Mizuhara initially claimed that Otani compensated him for gambling losses. The Ohtani camp then claimed that Mizuhara covered those losses by stealing from the players. Ohtani says he has never gambled on sports.

At this point, there is no particular reason to doubt Ohtani's innocence, but if it turns out he was involved in baseball gambling, the consequences would be dire.

A league penalty for betting on a game in which a player is not involved (including professional or amateur games up to and including youth leagues) will result in a one-year suspension. Bets on games involving players will be penalized with a permanent ban. If you place a bet with an illegal bookmaker, penalties will be up to the league commissioner.

No one has yet been charged in the incident. The alleged bookmaker appears to be the main target of a federal investigation. But it's safe to say this isn't what the Dodgers, the league, or Ohtani wanted to begin the 2024 season.

But the really nail-biting irony of this episode is that it happened as Major League Baseball, like the nation's other major professional sports leagues, has fully embraced the idea of ​​gambling on games.

After more than a century of avoiding anything to do with gambling, MLB has named gambling companies FanDuel, DraftKings and MGM Resorts International as official sports betting partners.

When it signed the deal with FanDuel a year ago, the league called its new partner “an industry leader in innovative fan engagement opportunities, while also reminding us of the importance of doing so responsibly.” praised.

If you read this, you'll see the hypocrisy and irony of professional leagues justifying their collusion with the gambling industry. But they say it's about “fan engagement,” or keeping TV viewers in front of the set even during close games involving out-of-market teams. On the one hand, they encourage “responsible gambling”.

right. Such reminders can help, just as the exhortations to “drink responsibly” appended to television ads for beer, whiskey, and bourbon have successfully eradicated alcoholism in the United States. There is no mistake.

The partnership between sports leagues and the gambling industry comes on the heels of a nationwide expansion of officially sanctioned gambling. Utah and Hawaii are the only two states that prohibit all forms of gambling. Other companies sponsor riverboat casinos with lottery tickets, poker clubs, Las Vegas-like games, or contract with Native American tribes for their own casinos.

All but 12 states allow some form of sports betting, including California, where a ballot measure to legalize sports betting in 2022 was rejected outright. Gaming advocates, including the state's Native American tribes, say it's the earliest voters can take a new crack at the issue. Probably 2028.

The dangers of this expansion are clear. They have created a new underclass of gambling addicts, with little fulfillment of the assurances of advocates that state-sponsored and regulated gambling would create a new risk-free revenue stream for state and local budgets. . The results of some matches have been called into question even if no evidence of match-fixing has been found.

Can sports leagues prevent the kind of corruption that led to national sports betting bans in the past? The answer is clearly no. Even if Otani is ultimately found to be completely clean of illegal gambling, a new scandal, perhaps even more devastating, will almost certainly lurk on the horizon. It may not surface in the next few months or years, but it will happen.

Before we take a deeper look at the risks leagues face from collusion with gambling companies, let's take a quick look at history. The episode that firmly separated professional sports and gambling was the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the World Series at the behest of a gambling syndicate led by Arnold Rothstein. It was done.

All eight were acquitted at trial, but all were permanently banned in 1921 by former federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was newly appointed baseball commissioner.

The next milestone in baseball is that Pete Rose, one of baseball's stars as a player and manager, will be involved not just in the game of baseball, but in his team, the Cincinnati Reds, and perhaps even in it. He was suspended in 1989 for allegedly betting against the United States. Rose was also permanently excluded from the Hall of Fame.

The National Football League had its own scandals in 1963, when star players Paul Hornung and Alex Karras were caught betting on football games and received one-year suspensions.

These events occurred at a time when MLB, the NFL, and other major leagues were trying to keep gamblers from playing games at arm's length. Their policy couldn't be clearer.

In 1992, when Congress debated outlawing sports betting in all states except Nevada, where sports betting had been abolished, then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue argued that legal sports betting meant that pro football would be illegal. “It would reduce it to a quick buck, a stopgap, a tool for the desire to get something,” he testified. Something even if there is nothing. ” The bill was passed as the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) and signed into law by President George W. Bush.

In 2003, the NFL rejected a Super Bowl ad from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau that didn't openly mention sports betting, but the city's image as a gambling mecca was enough.

And in 2013, Tagliabue's successor, Roger Goodell, found that “sports gambling harms the goodwill, integrity and integrity of NFL football and the fundamental bonds of loyalty and dedication among fans.” issued a statement opposing New Jersey's efforts to overturn PASPA. And the team. ”

However, the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in 2018, allowing states to make their own decisions regarding sports betting.

Then states and leagues embraced gambling with unseemly haste. At the time of the Supreme Court's decision, approximately $5 billion was wagered on sports in the United States, all of which was wagered in Nevada. Last year's total was about $120 billion.

The league has entered into agreements with betting companies that allow point spreads and other betting factors to be discussed on the air. Streaming telecasts of ballgames will broadcast the latest predictions, including the likelihood that a batter will strike out in the count, 3-2, and the likelihood that a batter will come to the plate with a run. Who are they for? These are for viewers who place in-game bets on such temporary offers.

Can it keep viewers engaged? Apparently. In a survey conducted by Variety magazine last year, 49% of viewers said they would continue watching a losing game if they lost their bet, compared to just 29% of non-betters. Since advertising dollars are dependent on the attention paid to the games, this type of effort is at least a win-win for the league and its advertisers, if not necessarily for the betting SAPs.

In the past, leagues saw gambling as a competing revenue stream and had little compunction about avoiding it. But now they live with gamblers and reward them with commercial “partnerships” and joint marketing deals.

As a result, there seems to be no limit to how much leagues can encourage gambling. Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, where the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers play, has a sports book on site so fans can place bets without leaving the venue. Coincidentally, Cavs coach JB Bickerstaff reported receiving threats from gamblers upset with the outcome of the game.

“They got my phone number and started sending me crazy messages about where I live, my kids, etc.,” he said. “We may have a 10-point lead, but the spread is 11 and people are yelling at me to leave players to cover that spread. … I think that's too much.” I think so.”

How do we know that expanding gambling will lead some players, coaches, and others to ruin? Because it's already happening. The NFL suspended 10 players last year for gambling. Last year, the University of Alabama fired baseball coach Brad Bohannan, effectively suspending him from the NCAA over evidence that he leaked player injury reports to gamblers. Thirteen current and former University of Iowa and Iowa State University athletes and two student managers have been charged in an investigation into illegal gambling. Ten people pleaded guilty.

Some games and in-game calls are under the cloud. Last month, the Temple men's basketball team's blowout loss to the University of Alabama at Birmingham prompted gaming regulators to issue a warning after betting lines moved suspiciously strongly against Temple on game day. Rudy Gobert of the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves was benched for a technical foul for making a money-counting gesture to a referee after an unfavorable call, suggesting the referees were to blame. (Minnesota won the game anyway.)

You don't have to be a moralist to be concerned about the impact legalized gambling will have on the health of college and professional sports. All you need is a realist.

The players are young men and women with more money than they ever dreamed of making in their lives and the naivety that comes with youth. It's no wonder they transfer their confidence in their superiority over mere mortals from the playing field to the gambling tables and sportsbooks. It may not be long before gamblers are promised points in exchange if they run into financial difficulties.

When it comes to gamblers, if there's one thing I learned hanging around the card counters in Las Vegas a few years ago, it wasn't for the play, it was for the magazine articles, but professional gamblers… Everyone is always looking for a game they can win. Even the tiniest edges. What could be more advantageous than having players and coaches on the inside?

It's probably too late to turn the tide back on. There is so much money in sports betting that it will be nearly impossible to stop its continued growth. They will be stuck when the inevitable scandal breaks out and hits the league and its political supporters. The integrity of their game will be under a permanent cloud. Sports aren't as fun as they used to be. And they only have themselves to blame.