The sports world needs a new Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
I don’t mean an exact clone of the guy. He’s fallen into disrepute in recent years for alleged racism and his failure to integrate baseball, of which he was commissioner from 1920 to 1944.
I mean the part of him that had no tolerance for gambling.
Eight players for the Chicago White Sox were charged with conspiring to fix the 1919 World Series. They were acquitted despite their own confessions, which they later recanted. Landis, as commissioner of Major League Baseball, was unmoved. He understood the threat even the whiff of association with gamblers posed to the game.
As the Baseball Almanac describes it, Landis didn’t care about the jury’s verdict. He issued a statement that said, “No player that throws a ball game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever again play professional baseball.”
The eight players involved were banned for life. Everyone else got the message.
A scandal in Cleveland
On Sunday, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were indicted for allegedly accepting bribes from gambling after agreeing to throw certain types of pitches at certain times. These days, legal sports betting allows people to place proposition — or “prop” — bets that concern a player’s individual performance. In this case, it involved types of pitches thrown and their velocity at certain times of a game. Similar bets may be placed on the performances of athletes in other sports as well.
The indictment against the two Cleveland players said, in one instance, gamblers “won approximately $27,000 … by wagering that a pitch thrown by Clase would be faster than 94.95 mph.” On some occasions, Clase was allegedly talking to gamblers on his phone in the dugout.
“Ortiz agreed to throw balls (instead of strikes) on certain pitches in exchange for bribes or kickbacks,” the indictment alleges.
In total, gamblers reportedly won at least $460,000 from these conspiracies.
The very next day after the indictments were made public, Major League Baseball announced a deal with prominent U.S. sportsbooks to limit prop bets on individual pitches to no more than $200 and to not allow these on parlays.
An ineffective solution?
One commenter on a New York Times story about this may have said it best: “This is like putting a (bandage) on a severed femoral artery.”
Unlike Landis, current commissioner Robert Manfred apparently doesn’t see the dangers that not only a whiff but a full-on blast of gambling will do to his sport. The same may be said for commissioners of the other major sports that have deals with legal gamblers.
Last month, ESPN published a timeline of gambling scandals in all major college and professional sports since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that states could make sports gambling legal. Thirty-nine states have since passed laws making such things legal. Utah is not one of them.
The list of scandals is jarring. If nothing else, it illustrates how they are growing in number each year. Only a few weeks ago, Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones were arrested in separate gambling investigations, some allegedly involving mobsters.
Leagues are ‘the marks’
Writing for The Atlantic, David A. Graham said, “Major leagues have welcomed the industry with open arms and greedy palms, signing contracts with betting companies and bringing casinos into stadiums and arenas, but they act astonished when gambling starts to corrupt their own players.”
League officials, he said, think they are partners with the gambling industry, “but they’re really the mark.”
“They see money on the table and can’t resist trying for it, forgetting that the house always comes out ahead.”
As I’ve said before, a league’s credibility is its greatest asset. If it’s lost, a lot of cities and states will be on the hook for tax subsidies provided for stadiums and sports districts that people no longer attend. Regaining respect would be a long, painful process.
Given what he did in 1920, I have no doubt Judge Landis would know what to do today. Sever all ties with gamblers, regardless of how much money that might cost. Don’t allow a single whiff.
Who has the guts and foresight to do that today?