Seems like they are determined to prove than commissioner Landis, for all his faults, wasn't completely wrong for the game.

Gross.

They should at least amend Pete Rose's MLB ban so he can enter the stadium sports books.

#1 For all his faults Landis was a solid choice for 1920. And it was for the best that he broke Ban Johnson's hold over the AL and not everybody could have done that. And I could wish that future commissioners had stayed on the same page as him in terms of the minors -- though I guess consolidation was always inevitable.

As for his role in preventing integration, I don't see it happening in pre-WWII America.

Other than (obviously) his role in stonewalling integration, AFAIC Landis was baseball's best commissioner. Today's owners would sooner hire Donald Trump than a reincarnated and updated Landis.

#5 Make no mistake though. Landis was very much a creature of ownership. Yeah he took a stand against the farm system, but at the time it was basically Rickey against the world and that's not a tough call for ownership.

And he took Cobb and Speaker's side in 1927 but that was specifically to break Johnson's hold on the AL. I have little doubt that had Johnson chosen the other side Landis would have switched.

Cigarette and gun manufacturers shake fist and note that they also provide legal goods and/or services and would like a prominent space at each stadium....

The weirdness surrounding the 2020 season made it easy to simply not watch MLB and not turn to MLB Network as a trial run for a real season. Now thanks to Strat-O-Matic and my vintage card collection, I know I don't need Manfred's bastardized vision of MLB to satisfy my baseball cravings. It will be far easier to never come back once the bookmaking rackets entwine their tentacles throughout all of MLB.

Cigarette and gun manufacturers shake fist and note that they also provide legal goods and/or services and would like a prominent space at each stadium....


Guns provide a lot more social benefit than bookies.

I know what mean. If I can’t go to the ballpark the OOTP players are as real to me as the ones from Manfred’s league. But there is a key difference: we had a pitcher hit a grand slam in a playoff game that he lost. Not sure if that ever happened in MLB, but in 2020 the remote possibility was taken away.

The weirdness surrounding the 2020 season made it easy to simply not watch MLB and not turn to MLB Network as a trial run for a real season. Now thanks to Strat-O-Matic and my vintage card collection, I know I don't need Manfred's bastardized vision of MLB to satisfy my baseball cravings. It will be far easier to never come back once the bookmaking rackets entwine their tentacles throughout all of MLB.

DMB does a great job for me. All we need the players for is to generate stats. And, not even that in my historical league. 1971 baseball kicks 2020 baseball's ass.

Vida Blue just went 35-3 for me with a 2.14 ERA in 320 IP. F*** anonymous RP and openers.

The ghost of Chick Gandil is ROTFLHAO at this.

This has to be one of the worst ideas in modern baseball history. Part of the appeal of Ban Johnson’s AL was getting rid of gambling and rough characters at this ballparks. Coming at it from a different angle, Leo Durocher was asked to take a year off for consorting with known gamblers, and A-Rod was given a stern talking to for hanging with Phil Helmuth and frequenting poker rooms. But it’s cool when an entire franchise opens a bloody sports book in its park. I just can’t even....

You guys are nuts. Get back to us when someone in your strat league scores a World Series game-winning run on a play with multiple errors and a near-TOOTBLAN...

This has to be one of the worst ideas in modern baseball history.

Second worst. After ghost runners.

Oh and yeah I hate the gambling thing too.

But it’s cool when an entire franchise opens a bloody sports book in its park.

Just wait until spring when you can follow your local team on the local Bally's Sports Network channel with the pbp crew shilling for more prop bets than you can shake the proverbial stick at.

Fox Sports North, which has televised Twins games on cable under a variety of names almost continuously since 1989, will be rebranded as Bally's Sports Network (or something similar) this spring, perhaps as soon as baseball's scheduled Opening Day on April 1. And along with a new look will come a new facet of broadcasts of Twins, Timberwolves, Wild and Minnesota United FC games: gambling.

Sometime next summer, the bullpen door will swing open, Taylor Rogers will jog to the mound, and Twins fans will fret as their closer tries to preserve a small lead.

Imagine longtime play-by-play voice Dick Bremer saying something like: "Rogers has converted seven consecutive save opportunities. Can he make it eight? If you'd like to place a bet on it, just go to your Bally's Sports app and click on 'In-game wagers.'"

Barf barf barf barf barf barf barf.

#16 I don't think it's a coincidence that the last major cricket gambling scandal was all about proposition bets. It's fairly easy to convince some players that no real harm is being done.

"Rogers has converted seven consecutive save opportunities. Can he make it eight? If you'd like to place a bet on it, just go to your Bally's Sports app and click on 'In-game wagers.'"

the PGA Tour did exactly this on The Golf Channel at an event in Las Vegas in November.

"low South Korean" was one bet onscreen with odds for the top 4 such players early in the second round of the tournament. the announcers even offered their "picks" in a couple of cases, like whether a player would birdie a certain hole.

ESPN+ had a gambling-oriented feed on one of the games this weekend. that's where every sport is headed - the traditional broadcast won't have much, if any, more than generic ads that now include casinos.

and the alternate channel will have constantly-changing odds and recommendations from the "pros" (Americans already are betting more money on "in-game wagers" than on pre-game odds).

as for prop bets, so far the leagues have been successful in getting US books not to offer "first pitch of the game a ball or a strike?" bets for just the reason that it has almost no impact on the result so seems taint-able.

You'd think there would be better things to bet on in Washington, such as whether Trump will have to be dragged out of the White House by his fingernails. (Or Biden by his fingernails. Or Harris by hers.)

I'm generally in favor of legalized sports gambling (while having absolutely no interest in participating myself), but the explosion of sports betting commercials over the last year is more than a little uncomfortable. Can Jamie Foxx please stop exhorting me to "put some skin in the game?"

I don't really have any moral objections to gambling either, I just don't want it constantly in my face while I'm trying to watch the game. As a musician, I'll play gigs in casinos no problem while I have a few friends who won't and that's OK. As a sports fan though, I'm insulted by the insistence that I need to have some action riding on the game in order to enjoy it to its fullest and I'm saddened that that games themselves are devalued to being nothing more than a vehicle for gambling addicts to get their fix.

Fox Sports North, which has televised Twins games on cable under a variety of names almost continuously since 1989, will be rebranded as Bally's Sports Network (or something similar) this spring,

I swear on 27 stacks of Bibles and Korans that I thought this was satire.

So the end game future state to all of this is that the casinos are actually going to wind up producing/presenting the games? Long way from Moe Green and a desert stopover for GIs on the way to the west coast.

I don't really have any moral objections to gambling either, I just don't want it constantly in my face while I'm trying to watch the game.

I can see there being a big enough market that the leagues will sell just a raw feed from the stadium with just ambient stadium noise, and the PA announcer, so that people can just opt out of all the bullshit. No commercials of any kind. Probably eventually mixed in with some kind of VR.

I don't know; I mean there's always been gambling on sports, a lot of it corrupt and illegal. And of course game throwing. I'd taken a bong hit or two in the pregame, but told my boys (***) in real time in the late afternoon and early evening of January 1, 1986, that Ronnie Harmon (**) was throwing the Rose Bowl. As long as the total amount of gamblers and amount wagered doesn't rise too much, and there's no game throwing, I'm not entirely sure I should be losing my #### over this for anything other than aesthetic reasons. (*) Certainly open to persuasion and further contemplation in either direction.

(*) Nothing against aesthetic reasons, of course. What this is is just another kind of silly and soulless development. That matters, I'm just not sure how much. So Red Sox games in the 1950s were produced by Tom Yawkey, a virulent racist, and in the 2050s, they'll be co-produced by the Sands casino or the MGM Grand. I'm not sure where to come out on that.

(**) No fumbles the entire season, four fumbles in the first half. Missed a wide-open receiver in the end zone on a halfback option pass by 25 feet. Just an inexplicable performance and things that came to light after the game made it pretty clear that he was.

(***) There were almost certainly some women there, too, which for the current purposes is neither here nor there.

I don't know; I mean there's always been gambling on sports, a lot of it corrupt and illegal. And of course game throwing. I'd taken a bong hit or two in the pregame, but told my boys (***) in real time in the late afternoon and early evening of January 1, 1986, that Ronnie Harmon (**)

Wasn't the only time Ronnie took the easy money.

Buffalo vs Cleveland finish

I'm generally in favor of legalized sports gambling (while having absolutely no interest in participating myself), but the explosion of sports betting commercials over the last year is more than a little uncomfortable.

Same here. I think generally this won't be a problem for big sports because players are paid too much for much shenanigans and there are too many eyeballs (in Europe it is the bookmakers who have helped ferret out match-fixing because of unusual betting patterns). The one that has to worry is the NCAA, since those athletes are much more susceptible to match fixing or point shaving, and not as many people are keeping tabs on Toledo vs. Central Michigan.

I think generally this won't be a problem for big sports because players are paid too much for much shenanigans

That's a goo pitch to use when propositioning a player

Memory says were were talking about $50K for the latest major cricket scandal. That's not exactly chump change for somebody who occasionally makes major league minimum.

And yeah, it was sports books who spotted unusual betting patterns.

That's a goo pitch to use when propositioning a player

I think you'd need to talk to Gerrit Cole about a goo pitch.

I think generally this won't be a problem for big sports because players are paid too much for much shenanigans

Money is just one motivation for gambling. Michael Jordan doesn't bet six figure sums on a single hole of golf because he needs help paying the mortgage.

NJ just checked in with its December gaming report, and a record $996.3 million was legally wagered in the Garden State last month.

that's up for a 7th consecutive month, and is another national record.

$6 billion bet in 2020. books kept about $400M, and $50M of that goes into the state tax coffers.

Most of the revenues would be Jets Giants and Eagles money.

The prop betting is the elephant in the room, in game betting is a rhino.

more than 20 percent of the NJ "handle" in 2020 was on multi-team parlays, which brought a 15.7 pct "hold" for the books compared to 6.6 pct overall.

if you bet 10 grand on an NFL season just on classic point spreads and over/unders, you can expect to lose maybe $500 or so - and losing $1000 would be amazing. you would do well to break even - and excellent to make $500.

unless you bet insane amounts of money relative to your salary, the basic bets will have you slowly and mostly painlessly bleed to death. start playing 10-team parlays - even with "teasers" - and you'll spurt blood like a co-ed in a slasher flick.

almost 80 pct of the wagers in NJ were not even on football (NFL or college), much less Jets Giants Eagles money.

smaller markets would do a much larger pct of biz on the local team, though. NH debuted sports betting a couple of years ago in time for the Patriots to win and cover in the Super Bowl. taxpayers lost millions, as the state lottery runs the show there.