I interviewed Henry Aaron right after the cops arrested his fellow Milwaukeean, Jeffrey Dahmer, and that was all Hammerin’ Hank wanted to talk about. Not because Dahmer used a hammer on some of his victims, but because Aaron believed that America’s most notorious serial killer would have turned out perfectly normal if only he’d played Little League as a boy.
I was once put on hold for close to an hour by Curt Schilling, the polarizing star pitcher, who apparently didn’t want to talk anymore about vanquishing the 2004 Yankees on one good leg, flamingo-style. And yet he was so flummoxed when he came back to the phone and found me still hanging on that he patiently answered all my questions.
I dragged an equally reticent W.P. Kinsella, whose novel inspired the movie “Field of Dreams,” to a frigid night game in Denver. When the snow started to fly, Kinsella became extremely downcast, but moments later I managed to swat away a screaming foul ball just before it rearranged his sinuses, and his whole mood lifted. In gratitude he wrote me a haiku.
Clearly this is the résumé of a true baseball expert, if not a savant, someone more than qualified to comment on the current state of the game. And so in that spirit let me just say to all those who worry about gambling ruining baseball, eroding its integrity, the same thing I said to Schilling:
Hello? Hello?
Gambling isn’t doing anything to baseball’s integrity. Baseball has no integrity. Not anymore. Indeed, many of the ills plaguing baseball are caused by everybody’s refusal to acknowledge this glaring fact.
For 100 years or so, baseball was based on integrity. (Other than spitballs and steroids, sign stealing and head hunting, colluding owners and entrenched segregation.) The only major sport to suffer a world championship asterisked by gambling, baseball was zealous about its self-policing and righteous in proclaiming its zero-tolerance policy. Then, seven years ago, the Supreme Court struck down a longstanding federal ban on sports gambling, and in unison baseball’s owners cried: Yee-haw! Let’s party!
Virtually overnight, Major League Baseball entered multiple partnerships with the gambling industry, permitted stadiums to be plastered with ads for gambling entities and betting apps, and even allowed sports books to operate at some of our most sacrosanct baseball cathedrals, including Wrigley Field, which is like nailing slot machines around the rim of the Grand Canyon.
The least surprising result of this instant paradigm shift has been widespread confusion among players about where exactly baseball now stands on the whole gambling thing. In the past year, five players, one umpire and one translator have been suspended, banned, fired or imprisoned for gambling-related activity, and those are just the ones who’ve been caught. It’s a pretty safe bet that not every bad actor is exposed.
Of course, the same confusion reigns in all major sports. Eleven N.F.L. players have recently been suspended, three N.B.A. players have been investigated, and last month a star college quarterback became embroiled in a wild gambling scandal that involved lurid screenshots of his Venmo.
My main concern, however, is baseball, because it’s my first love, and because we’re approaching the playoffs, and because the entire Cleveland Guardians season is taking place under a shadow while baseball investigates the team’s ace reliever and one of its starting pitchers. The starter bounced a pitch 30 feet from home plate reportedly at the same moment a surge of bets were made on him throwing a bad ball. I’m not saying he’s guilty, but the video resembles that time 50 Cent threw out the first pitch at Citi Field, a toss so wild that it almost hit a plane taking off from LaGuardia.
What’s notable isn’t all these players getting busted — it’s that baseball has the audacity to bust them. After making a deal with the devil, baseball still wants to perform the occasional exorcism? That’s incoherent. It might even be entrapment.
To eliminate this chaos, to restore sanity to the game, I urge one sweeping fix. Rip up the rulebook. It feels obsolete anyway, like a fold-up paper road map or the U.S. Constitution. If some games are fake, or played under false pretense, then it’s all a farce and no rule is ever technically in effect.
At the very least, get rid of that bothersome and pointless Rule No. 21, which prohibits “placing wagers.”
We live in an age of absolutes; half measures no longer work. Just as baseball once enforced zero tolerance, it must now adopt total tolerance. Full participation, plus full transparency, that’s what I’m talking about. Let players gamble all they want, so long as they do it out in the open.
Apart from the refreshing honesty, think of the drama.
The scene: A playoff game between the Yankees and Astros. Late innings, score tied. The Yankees have two pitchers warming up — a righty and a lefty. Since the batter for the Astros is left-handed, surely the Yankees will bring on the lefty …
But wait! What’s this? Inside a special box on the scoreboard we see that the lefty in the Yankees bullpen has 10 grand riding on the Astros. Maybe he’s not the best option after all.
Uh-oh — now we see that the Yankees manager also has serious coin on the Astros. Fifty racks! Maybe we are going to see that righty.
Win probability starts to fluctuate, the scoreboard flashes like the Fourth of July, the crowd oohs and aahs as fans in the stadium and across the country load up on the Astros. But the batter has eyes, too. And a FanDuel account. Peering at the scoreboard, he steps out of the box and signals to the ump that he’s putting $100,000 on the Yanks.
National Pastime, meet “Squid Game.” For any skeptics who might scoff at such a scenario, I have news. We’re halfway there already.
Interestingly, the Supreme Court saw this coming. Justice Samuel Alito, in his decision seven years ago, checked off the harms prophesied by opponents of legalized gambling. Young people ensnared in yet another online addiction. Folks of modest means sliding into debt. Public faith in the legitimacy of sport subverted. Check, check, check. Alas, Justice Alito felt the court was unable to weigh in on this dystopic scenario, because the federal ban on sports gambling was flatly unconstitutional.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Parts were unconstitutional, and Justice Alito, a die-hard Phillies fan whose confirmation dinner featured an appearance by Philadelphia’s mascot, the Phanatic, averred that bad bits can’t be severed from an otherwise good law. One defect and the whole thing has to go.
In other words, I guess, if you find a spider in your bathroom you need to burn your house to the ground.
To Justice Alito — and five other justices — the legal microsurgery known as “severability” was the urgent problem, far more worrying than the mundane evils of gambling, and that makes me wonder about the unseverability of baseball itself — from gambling. In the olden days, baseball was little more than an excuse to gamble. Players and umpires in the mid-1800s routinely bet on their own games, and the diamond was the demesne of all sorts of touts and sharps and hustlers.
So maybe baseball is merely returning to its roots? Which would be the most baseball thing ever, given that the game is “entirely about going home,” according to its greatest commissioner and staunchest gambling opponent, Bart Giamatti. It was Giamatti who learned in the late 1980s that Pete Rose, manager of the Cincinnati Reds, and the game’s all-time hits leader, wasn’t just violating Rule 21, he was wiping his muddy cleats on it.
Today it seems that Rose was just a man ahead of his time. But Giamatti, a brilliant and charismatic scholar, author of a book about poetic representations of the Garden of Eden, felt that Rose had so desecrated the earthly paradise of the ball yard that only one penalty was appropriate — the same one God gave Adam and Eve.
The strain of arriving at this decision, combined with the combativeness and litigiousness of Rose, was too much for Giamatti. Days after announcing Rose’s lifetime banishment at a magisterial news conference, Giamatti suffered a fatal heart attack — 36 years ago this week.
Though he gave his life to keep baseball free of gambling, I think Giamatti would be amused, at a bare minimum, by the narrative symmetry of what’s unfolding. I can say that because I met him once, a moment I put at the very top of my baseball résumé.
He was the president of my university, and I was his biggest fan, therefore I asked him to be my adviser. We sat in his office and he explained that it wasn’t possible, because he was planning to resign soon and take a new job: running the National League.
I remember feeling awed and proud that such a towering figure was agreeing to watch over the game I loved. I remember being proud again three years later when Giamatti ascended to the commissioner job. And again when he stood up to Rose.
“I will be told that I’m an idealist,” Giamatti declared when laying out his case against Rose. “I hope so. I will continue to locate ideals I hold for myself and for my country in the national game as well as in other of our national institutions.”
I got goose bumps when he said that. Now a small voice in my ear asks: What did all that idealism get him? Or baseball, or the country, or any of us who believed we’d never live to see these bleak, ignoble clouds of corruption lowering over our Elysian fields?
Banishment, that’s what. Or call it self-exile. Either way, it’s a marked estrangement from the game we grew up with. To return, to remain fans, it seems we must embrace this new game. Maybe even replace the iconic cry, “Play ball!” Something along the lines of, “Betting windows now open!”
There are some stone-cold idealists out there who think this is all temporary, who expect baseball’s owners, or America’s owners, a.k.a. the Supreme Court, to change course. Part of me admires them and defers to them. They give me the same feeling I had when Hank Aaron assured me that a budding cannibal might’ve been a decent second baseman. Um, OK, if you say so?
The bigger part of me, maybe the part that grew up in Manhasset, Long Island, fears that the idealists are in for a world of hurt and frustration and repeated, brutal disillusionments — even more than Mets fans. And, as anyone from Long Island can tell you, that’s really saying something.
J.R. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes frequently about sports. He is writing a book about a University of Southern California class on the meaning of life.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Bettor Up appeared first on New York Times.
