A couple of days ago, a remarkable article by Bob Nightengale of USA Today detailed some of the things players face with the ubiquity of gambling surrounding the game and the ease with which bets are being placed on various baseball events, largely the “prop bets” on specific plays and players.
This is above and beyond the recent bans of several players, from Tucupita Marcano facing a lifetime ban from the game, and several others receiving one-year suspensions, for betting on baseball.
Here’s just one example from Nightengale’s article:
“You hear it all, man,” Arizona Diamondbacks closer Paul Sewald told USA TODAY Sports. “You blow a save, you don’t come through, you get it all. “(Expletive) you. You suck. You cost me all of this money.
“(Expletive) you. (Expletive) your family. I’m going to kill you and then kill your family.’
“It gets ugly really quickly. It’s scary, and it’s sad. It used to be fans who were upset because you blew the game for the team, but now it’s gambling. These people don’t really care about the Diamondbacks. They just care about their bets, and we’re talking about money they don’t have that they are losing. So, it’s a very scary spot.”
Scary, indeed. The article quotes several other players by name with similar stories, as well as an unnamed executive.
What has MLB done about this? From the article:
The Major League Baseball Players Association began publicly voicing concerns about player safety after a Supreme Court decision that ultimately opened the door for it to become legal to gamble on sporting events in 38 states and the District of Columbia, with teams constructing sports-betting sites outside their ballparks. The union negotiated Amendment 61 to the collective bargaining agreement requiring teams to be proactive in curbing fans’ aggressive behavior toward players.
“Clubs shall include in their fan policies a prohibition against betting-related, abusive fan speech and behavior that is directed at players, players’ family members, club personnel or umpires. …
“The parties will jointly develop a safety hotline for players to report any threats, potentially threatening communications or other inappropriate sports bettor-related conduct or contact that a player or any member his family received related to sports bettor (e.g., social media messages threatening violence as retribution for a gambler’s losses.)”
The amendments also restrict teams from placing gambling information on their scoreboard before and during games: “No betting lines on player-specific performance or other player-specific betting-related information may be displayed on in-stadium videoboards or other in-stadium signage during a game or during pre-game warm-ups.”
As you can well imagine, a fan policy is all well and good, but is that really going to stop such behavior? It would be nice to think so, but realistically it won’t. Further, although Amendment 61 prohibits gambling information being posted on video boards at ballparks, we have all seen all the gambling information during game broadcasts — on Marquee Sports Network, in fact, there’s a between-innings bit involving studio host Cole Wright and whoever’s with him as an analyst putting forth prop bets for the rest of the game.
I think you can see the dangers here. The reason this is all being done is that MLB has seen the writing on the wall regarding regional sports network TV rights fees, which have already begun to dry up and eventually might vanish altogether. Over the last few decades those rights fees have been a very large chunk of team revenues. And it appears to me that what teams (and the league as a whole) have done to try to replace these revenues is to go heads-first into gambling (or “gaming,” as they are more likely to call it). Again, from Nightengale’s article (the player quoted is Diamondbacks reliever Logan Allen):
MLB will soon implement an automatic strike zone, likely in 2026, sparing the umpires of all of the vitriol they receive. If you’re an umpire, do you really want the threats that await if you happen to miss a pitch in late innings?
“When that happens, you watch,” Allen says, “it will be a huge thing where people will start betting on automatic strikes. If they do the challenge system, there will be an over-under on how many times somebody challenges the ball and strikes in a game. How many are overturned? How many are wrong. They’ll start having (betting) lines for that, you just watch.”
Yes, so don’t forget to stop by the Caesars Sportsbook when you walk through the gates of Chase Field to catch the Diamondbacks. Who needs to sit in the Wrigley Field bleachers when you can hang outside the ballpark at the DraftKings Sportsbook? Why brave the elements watching your first-place Cleveland Guardians when you can plop inside at the Fanatics Sportsbook at Progressive Field?
The article also cites a criminal case brought against a gambler named Benjamin Patz, who made death threats to players on nine different teams. He pleaded guilty, and this was his punishment:
Three years of probation and six months of home confinement. Not a single day of jail time.
I don’t know what the answer is here. Nightengale concludes:
The genie is out of the gambling bottle, death threats, corruption and consequences be damned.
Sadly, he’s correct. We can all hope the worst doesn’t happen, but if and when it does, MLB can’t say it wasn’t warned.
