I read the responsible gaming disclaimer eleven times a game. Eleven. I’ve timed it. Four seconds each, which comes out to forty-four seconds a night where I am legally a public health service and the other three hours where I am a man in a headset telling you that tonight’s pitching change is brought to you by an app that lets you bet on whether the next guy throws a strike.
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So on Tuesday, when Congress demanded MLB protect fans from gambling ads, I found out about it the way I find out about everything: it came across the muted monitor in the booth, wedged between a promo for our regional network’s true-crime docuseries and a graphic asking viewers which reliever was more likely to hit a batter. The hearing was streaming live. The stream had a pregame show. The pregame show was presented by a sportsbook.
I want to be clear that I’m not above any of this. I’m a forty-one-year-old former long reliever with a 5.11 career ERA and a lower back that clicks when it rains. I got this job because I’m affable and cheap. But I would like somebody, at some point, to explain to me the physics of the thing they’re asking for.
The mechanics of the ask
The senators want MLB to shield the viewing public from gambling ads during baseball broadcasts. Fine. Noble. Except the broadcast is not a thing that contains gambling ads the way a sandwich contains mustard. The broadcast is gambling ads. It’s gambling ads all the way down, with nine innings of baseball suspended inside them like fruit in Jell-O.
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Let me walk you through a half-inning. The half-inning is presented by the book. The pitching change is presented by the book. The replay is presented by a second book that is suing the first book. The strikeout has a sponsor. The strikeout has had a sponsor for two years and the sponsor is a mattress company, but the mattress company is now sixty percent owned by a private equity fund that also owns a book, so functionally the strikeout is a gambling ad wearing a nightgown.
Between innings we do the Responsible Gaming Moment of the Game. That is a real segment. It is thirty seconds long and it is presented by the book. I say the words “know your limits” while a graphic of a smiling cartoon umpire holds up a hand, and then the graphic wipes and I say a nine-leg parlay pays six hundred to one. Same voice. Same guy. Same four seconds of air between them. If you were listening in your car you’d assume it was a bit.
What it’s like from up here
Here’s the part nobody in that hearing room has to sit with. I can see the crowd. I look at them all night. There is a section down the third base line — 118, 119 — full of dudes in their twenties who do not watch the game. They watch their phones and then look up at the field to confirm what the phone told them. Somebody hits a routine flyout and forty guys groan in unison like a church congregation that just found out about the pastor. It’s the saddest ambient sound in American life. It’s the noise of a crowd that has been converted into a customer base and can feel it happening in real time but can’t stop.
My brother-in-law Dale is down forty-six thousand dollars. Not to a bookie. To an app. To a piece of software that generated him a same-game parlay using an algorithm the company describes in its marketing as “intelligent,” which is a hell of a word to use about a machine whose entire function is convincing a forklift operator in Ohio that he has a read on whether a shortstop will record two total bases. Dale has never in his life had a read on anything. Dale once bought a timeshare in a state he’d never been to. But the app sends him a push notification that says his lineup is heating up, and Dale, who has not been told he was heating up by another living entity since roughly 2009, responds to that.
So yes. Protect the fans. Please. I am begging on Dale’s behalf. I just want to note who is doing the asking.
Because a staffer from one of those offices emailed our network in June asking about tickets, and in the same thread asked whether we had any promo codes left over from the spring giveaway — the deposit-match one, the thousand-dollar risk-free bet that isn’t risk-free, it’s just a coupon with a body count. And in the second deck, in the suite that gets the good shrimp, there is a regional VP for one of these companies who attends every homestand and has never once looked at the field. He watches the crowd. Same as me. Different reason.
The hearing clip made air in the sixth. They ran forty seconds of a senator saying the leagues have a moral obligation to their supporters, and I said something about how it’s an important conversation, and then we came out of break and I read a line of copy about live in-game odds updating pitch by pitch, and nobody in the truck flinched, and nobody in the stands flinched, and my producer’s voice came in my ear to say we were tight on time so trim the disclaimer.
Trim the disclaimer. That’s the whole hearing, right there, in three words from a guy making eighty grand a year in a trailer behind the loading dock.
Bottom of the eighth, two out, nobody on, and I read the number. One-eight-hundred, and then the rest of it, fast, the way you say a thing you’ve decided doesn’t count. Section 118 didn’t look up. The shrimp guy didn’t look up. Dale texted me from his couch to ask if our second baseman was day-to-day.
I told him I didn’t know. He said that was fine, he’d already put the money in.