This year was the first time in a long while that I managed to catch the World Series.
It had been nearly a decade, by my back-of-the-napkin estimate.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered just how thoroughly gambling — pardon me, “predicting” — had wormed its way into the sport that refused to forgive Charlie Hustle until after his death in 2024. (And even then, the posthumous lifting of his lifetime Hall of Fame ban hardly screams reconciliation.)
From stadium billboards to official partnerships between ballplayers and gambling apps, the audacity and shamelessness of it all is breathtaking — and I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of gambling TV spots flooding the airwaves. We outlawed the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, yet we’re somehow comfortable with a half-naked Sydney Sweeney coolly enticing audiences to blow the kids’ college fund on a sporting event. (The real lesson here is that the tobacco lobby needs to take a peek at Big Gambling’s homework.)
