A second major gambling bombshell in less than a month is rocking the entire sports world. But we shouldn't be surprised that it is happening, or when it continues to spread.
This latest corruption is in Major League Baseball, once known as America's Pastime, following last month's sweeping array of charges against 30 people, including two NBA players and a coach.
Two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with multiple counts, including wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery, and money laundering conspiracy.
Sports gambling has burgeoned beyond who wins and loses, and even spreads, and has become increasingly micro in attempts to lure gamblers into more bets and skim more money for the House, which is a collaboration between gambling corporations and professional sports themselves.
The baseball gambling was so micro it was on individual pitches. The feds charged the players with intentionally throwing balls to benefit inside bettors wagering these "micro-bets." With a nod to Jeff Foxworthy, you may have a gambling problem if you are betting on every pitch.
This followed the feds charging more than 30 people, including a coach and two players, in a broad National Basketball Association sports-rigging operation tied to — absolutely zero surprise here — organized crime. The feds say it was three families with La Cosa Nostra, the mafia.
So now the Senate Commerce Committee has opened an investigation into gambling corruption in Major League Baseball while seeking more information on the NBA gambling scandals. The committee could get really busy if it stays on this route.
These scandals, and the many more that will follow, poison the games. A highly controversial non-penalty call in a pivotal play in Sunday night's NFL game between the Detroit Lions and the Philadelphia Eagles had fans asking for days who was making the bets and how much the refs were paid. There is no evidence of that, but given the level of gambling and the predictable scandals, that sort of speculation will only ramp up.
Refs have long been the bogeyman for losing fans, but now suspicion is shifting to wagers by powerful gamblers or mobsters. And that has the real potential to undermine all sports and sour the fan base.
That the significant sports associations all agreed to these gambling expansions — for a piece of the action, of course — says a lot. They already minted money, but saw an opportunity for more, blind to the reality that it could cause real damage to their sports over time.
Beyond the damage to the games so many Americans enjoy for the pure pleasure of the sport, this is the result of a culture increasingly detached from traditional American morals. That culture, receding in the rearview mirror, promoted the values of hard work, fair rules, and the integrity of an individual. "A man's word is his bond" was once a well-accepted part of our culture. Not any more.
There is a lot of blame game out there, pointing to the players, to gambling interests, and sometimes to the major league associations. All perfectly fair. But the bigger problem is in the societal mirror.
Professional athletes once exemplified hard work, excelling at their craft, teamwork, and national pride. There were always scofflaws, of course. Human nature pervades any culture. But we had moral guardrails on behavior and a rootedness in pursuing excellence. Children were inspired to pursue excellence and learn the value of being a part of something bigger than themselves.
Now we are bound to vacuous, fleeting entertainment on the ubiquitous screen in our hands, and any avenue to do the least work and still get by. One of the most prevalent economic impacts of blowing up the guardrails has been the devaluation of hard work and the search for the easiest route.
Laws, arrests, and Senate investigations are all worth pursuing — rolling back legalized sports gambling would be a start. But these are attacking symptoms of the underlying sickness in the culture. Great masses of Americans, with massive help from public education and a weakened, compromised church, have abandoned our Christian foundations, American exceptionalism, and the things that propelled us forward to greatness.
That there would be millions of people wagering for cheap entertainment and an unearned buck, that there would be massively wealthy monopoly associations greedy for ever more, that there would be criminal organizations infiltrating the gambling system, that there would be players, coaches, and others rigging games, was all as predictable as the sun rising in the east.
It becomes clearer all the time that the only ultimate solution is a mass return to our moral foundations.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children, seven grandchildren, and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
