Major League Baseball has a mess on its hands with the gambling scandal involving Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, but you can bet it won’t be foremost on the minds of the Ricketts family Monday.
For the first time, the Cubs will have a home opener that includes team-approved legal betting next door to Wrigley Field. Where some might see danger or moral murkiness in that, Cubs ownership will see one thing: a big pile of money that wasn’t there before. The club has a $100 million contract with DraftKings.
What a strange situation this is. Like all MLB players, Cubs players carry the commandment with them at all times — thou shall not bet on baseball — and they’ll carry it Monday as they drive past the DraftKings sportsbook on the way into Wrigley. Even as fans sit inside the 17,000-square-foot venue and place bets to their hearts’ desire, MLB will continue to fight against an enemy it knows can ruin public trust in its game.
That’s the foremost fear with the Ohtani case. Fan gambling has opened up enormous revenue streams for teams, but the possibility that the game’s biggest star gambled on games could critically injure a struggling sport. And, yet, if there’s a message that sports leagues are sending specifically to young men these days — major-league ballplayers fall in that very demographic — it’s that gambling is way cool.
At best, Ohtani is dealing with a betrayal by a former interpreter who might have stolen $4.5 million of his money to pay off illegal gambling debts. At worst, there’s concern that the money was used to bet on baseball games, perhaps even Dodgers games. In between are some awkward questions. How was Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter, able to wire $4.5 million from Ohtani’s bank account to pay a bookmaker without the star knowing? How was an interpreter who made about $300,000 a year allowed to build up that kind of debt with a bookmaker?
And now a question that would get me laughed out of the Filthy Rich Capitalists of America annual meeting: Don’t the Rickettses have enough money that they don’t need to deal with the potential trouble of a sportsbook? I already know the answers:
The money will help the team become more competitive on the field.
If we don’t dive into the pool of sports gambling, someone else will.
People are going to bet, regardless of whether it’s legal or not. They might as well do it at our place.
The result of this massive, all-in approach to legal gambling is a world in which sports and betting are now so intertwined that you can’t look at one without seeing the other. More than ever before, people are being led to sports by gambling, not the other way around. If you think sports leagues care how fans get introduced to their product, you’re mistaken. They care about how much more money they can make.
If people want to spend their cash on legal betting, fine by me, with one exception. Sports gambling clearly is being marketed to young males, and it can’t come as a surprise to teams that underage gamblers are being drawn to the glitz. There’s going to be a societal price to pay for that.
The message that gambling is exciting and now mainstream has already had a negative effect on the NFL, which suspended 10 players last year for violations of the league’s gambling policy. It must be a tortured intellectual exercise for teams to have to tell players to stay away from betting when those same teams are making millions of dollars off legal gambling.
I don’t believe that gambling is the root of all evil, but the speed and enthusiasm with which big-time sports have embraced it has been dizzying. It wasn’t long ago that NFL officials would get irritated if anyone said gambling was the driving force behind the league’s huge popularity. Now the NFL actively pursues gamblers’ money. It has partnered with DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars Entertainment. If the Bears ever get a new stadium, a sports betting facility very well could be part of the deal.
Sports gambling is illegal in California, but it’s only a matter of time before the state caves in to the inevitable. The Ohtani story will not be seen as a cautionary tale. It will be seen as a high-profile blip that has nothing to do with the gobs of gambling profits that can be used to improve the “fan experience’’ of watching a baseball game. But how soon before the “fan experience’’ becomes the gambling first and the game second? Or are we there already?
The Ohtani scandal and the Cubs’ first game with a sportsbook on their property can be chalked up to bad timing. But it’s a reminder that the legitimization of sports gambling has happened very, very quickly. And that, at times, it can be very, very awkward.
