Rot and the National Pastime
- Mike Dickey
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Roy Hobbs:"I didn't know you could bet against just one player,"
Gus Sands: "Oh, you can bet against anybody, anything. Strikes, balls, hits, runs, errors, anything, take your pick."
-The Natural
Another day of being in a funk, for so many reasons. This will be a short one, because I still have mounds of documents to review for a deposition after lunch, and need to write a memo to the court in the same case. Too much to stay on top of, and obsessed with fear of making a mistake. This definitely isn't fun.
Meanwhile, the NYT ran a short piece in the Athletic about MLB players experiencing regular harassment from disappointed bettors.
And it's been going on for a while--here's another article from last fall about the same issue.
Eight-one percent of polled players said they'd received angry social media messages, including threats to their families, from gamblers on social media. A lot of the other 19% either aren't on social media at all, or don't play much.
It seems like all of professional sports has embraced the gambling business, which advertises heavily both on TV and radio broadcasts of games, and in the stadium itself. College athletic departments have gotten in on the action, accepting sponsorships from vultures like Draft Kings while ostensibly enforcing an absolute ban on gambling among the athletes themselves.
Now, with the explosion of the prediction markets, we hear stories of pitchers rigging micro-bets on particular pitches, and in a couple cases getting indicted for it. And the tone-deaf MLB is in the midst of negotiating sponsorship deals with companies like Kalshi.
Why allow all this? The money's just too big and too tempting. That's obviously the draw. But the bigger question is why people continue to watch, and worse yet continue to support an industry designed to pluck folks' already inadequate wages?
That's the real issue--we've become a casino country, and are learning the hard way that turning our backs on the quaint set of virtues our grandparents took for granted carries the cost of living in an increasingly dystopian nation. In that sense, DJT is just a symptom of a rot that's found its way into every corner of our individual lives, of a country that's completely lost its way.
On that cheery note, I'll return to the drudgery that pays for all this gloom.
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