Betting on Baseball Is Not the End of the World
Fear not, purists: The Supreme Court’s ruling on sports gambling was right on both the law and the ethics.
OK, maybe you have some reason to be mad right now.
Photographer: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Even before this week’s Supreme Court decision striking down federal restrictions on sports gambling, it was already shaping up as a rough season for baseball lovers. Many of the game’s biggest stars have been faltering. And with a quarter of the season behind us, there seem to be only two really good teams — the Yankees and the Red Sox — both of whom have been trying to buy the pennant, never a happy thought for purists. Worse, the season features an unusually large number of horrible teams, climbing over (perhaps we should say under) each other in their race to the bottom.
And then this gambling thing comes along — and, boom, panic. Major League Baseball warned of “profound effects” on the game. Some worries were distributional — questions about who will get richer and who will get poorer. But most of the concerns echoed former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, the man who banned Pete Rose from the sport. Vincent met the decision with a question: “How do you protect the integrity of these games?”