Latest Rose scandal shouldn’t affect MLB’s sports betting stance – ESPN
In a 2012 deposition testimony for the New Jersey sports betting case, recently-retired baseball commissioner Bud Selig said that gambling is “the deadliest of all things that can happen” to a sport.
“It’s evil,” Selig stated. “It creates doubt and destroys your sport.”
Three years later, new commissioner Rob Manfred is reconsidering baseball’s longstanding opposition to the legalization of sports betting. Leave it to Pete Rose to remind him why his predecessors avoided gambling like the plague.
Will the new Rose revelation change MLB’s softening stance on the legalization of sports gambling?
In February, Manfred, appearing on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” said sports betting needed “fresh consideration” and that he planned to meet with owners to discuss baseball’s “institutional position” moving forward. Manfred’s remarks were measured yet jarring to anyone accustomed to baseball’s century-long disdain for sports betting.
Selig’s position was shaped by baseball’s history of gambling scandals. The Office of the Commissioner, in fact, was created to deal with the aftermath of the Chicago White Sox being accused of throwing the 1919 World Series. Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher was suspended for the 1947 season for an alleged association with gamblers. Rose, in the 1980s, added to those scars by betting on baseball, including games he was involved in as a player and manager, and then denying it for years.
Manfred is attempting to look past it all and examine whether a federally-regulated sports betting market would better protect the integrity of baseball and potentially identify if someone involved with the game, like Rose, is betting on it. Manfred’s tempered remarks on “Outside the Lines” came just weeks into his tenure and three months after NBA commissioner Adam Silver confidently outlined his league’s support for legalizing sports betting in an op-ed in The New York Times. Weeks later, at the MIT Sloan Analytics Conference in Boston, Manfred credited Silver with starting the conversation and agreed with his counterpart about the need for federal regulation.
“Without embracing everything [Silver] said, certainly the idea of a federal system in government — whatever that system is — uniformity at a federal level seems like a pretty good idea to me,” Manfred said at the conference.
But while Silver has received public support from owners and team executives from his stance on gambling, Manfred has not. Baseball’s owners have been slow to back him publicly. And now Rose, baseball’s gambling hangnail, resurfaces.
“Outside the Lines” obtained documents that detailed Rose’s daily betting activity from the 1986 season, his last as a player. In 2004, Rose admitted that he bet on baseball during his years as a manager, but has maintained for 26 years that he never bet on baseball during his playing days.
MLB did not release a statement following the OTL report and declined comment for this story.
Alan Denkenson, a bookmaker in New York City from 1975 to 1987, knew Rose was betting.
“You’d hear the same story over and over,” said Denkenson, who never took action from Rose but was in a circle with bookmakers who did. “They’d say, ‘Pete Rose is a [expletive]. He lost X amount of money, but didn’t pay X amount of money.'”
Indeed, in his 2004 autobiography, Rose acknowledges placing some of his action with New York City bookmakers.
“On any given week,” Rose wrote, “I might have been down 10 or 15 grand with Gio’s guy in Franklin, but I might have been up with my guy in New York, or Florida or Dayton.”
Michael Sokolove, author of the 1990 biography “Hustle: The Myth, Life, And Lies of Pete Rose,” heard similar stories. Rose bet, lost and eventually stiffed his bookie before moving on to the next one. Bookmakers didn’t care, though. Rose was a “complete square, a sucker,” Denkenson said, and his action, even on the Reds, had no impact on the betting market odds.
Documents in the “Outside the Lines” report show Rose bet around $2,000 per game on basketball, football and baseball. He lost $15,400 on one day and dropped $25,500 in his worst stretch from March to July 1986.
“He paid a bunch of weeks in a row and then he just said, ‘I’ve lost enough to you,'” Denkenson said. “I’ve seen those kinds of customers before — they’re great customers. You have a customer who’s not going to win, you know you’re going to win and you know you’re probably going to get stiffed on probably 10 percent of what he lost. You accept that with bells on. You only hope he loses a little each week so he [keeps betting] forever.”
Today, Las Vegas locals say Rose can be spotted regularly sitting by himself at the race and sports book at the Mandalay Bay casino. It’s the type of ugly, sad image that fuels the stereotypes that surround sports bettors and comes at a time when baseball is more closely aligned with the gaming industry than ever.
MLB has equity in daily fantasy sports operator DraftKings, which recently applied for a “pool betting” license with the United Kingdom Gambling Commission. In the U.K., operators are required to be licensed by the gambling commission to offer games that are considered fantasy sports in the U.S.
“We are exploring international opportunities and as such have applied for the necessary license that is required to operate our skill-based Daily Fantasy Sports product in the UK,” DraftKings CFO Tim Dent said in a statement to ESPN Chalk. DraftKings has no plans to expand from its core skill-based daily fantasy product, according to CEO Jason Robbins. Major League Baseball does not consider daily fantasy sports a form of gambling.
In the meantime, baseball is expected to move forward with its evolving stance on sports betting legalization, despite the latest revelation of Rose’s betting past.
“This is a sensitive issue for MLB,” said Adam Krejcik, managing director at Eilers Research, a consulting firm that works closely with the gaming sector. “But at the end of the day, we don’t think it will impact their approach to sports betting. We believe they will move forward with a more open mind, potentially aligning themselves with the NBA.”
ESPN Chalk’s Ryan Rodenberg contributed reporting to this story.
About Us
Free Shipping
If your order is $35 or more, you may qualify for free shipping. With free shipping, your order will be delivered 5-8 business days.
