There’s a lot to buy in on with the Red Sox, whether they’re playing well or not
The sports world seems to be skewing toward a place not where winning isn't No. 1, but where it's one of many.
COMMENTARY
There are no free spaces on the schedule, certainly not for a scrapper like the 2024 Red Sox. Even if Thursday’s destruction of the decrepit White Sox unfolded exactly as it would on paper — a Cy Young contender julienning a 15-47 team on a 13-game losing streak.
Tanner Houck threw exactly two pitches faster than 94 miles per hour, and he took a no-hitter into the sixth. Jarren Duran put Boston ahead two pitches in, with the first of 22 hits before UMass Lowell’s Danny Mendick’ started heaving eephus pitches in the ninth. It was barely worth the occasional flip over from the Celtics, and it’s not as though they were white knuckle most of the night.
I’ll single out one moment: Holyoke native Jamie Westbrook, he of the 11 years in the minors, hitting his first major-league home run off another Massachusetts kid in the big time, New Bedford’s Jared Shuster.
“I was trying to just slow down, because I didn’t want to be sprinting around the bases,” Westbrook told reporters. “I don’t know how fast I was going or not. But I wanted to take a moment to smile and appreciate it and just have that one for myself, because it’s special, man. It really is.”
The best. In a week where baseball was again faced with some of its worst.
Tuesday’s lifetime ban of Tucupita Marcano for betting was an inevitability the second the Supreme Court cleared the way for widespread sports betting in 2018. Same as Jontay Porter was in the NBA, same as Shane Pinto was in the NHL — at least until someone outdoes his vague “activities relating to sports wagering” that wasn’t directly betting on games.
The reaction has been its usual loud. Suspensions are hypocritical because MLB might move to Las Vegas. Pete Rose should be reinstated. These players should be reinstated . . . after all, Oakland reliever Michael Kelly — one of four to get a one-year ban, among them former Red Sox prospect Jay Groome — bet less than $100 in an industry with $11 billion in revenues last year. In a sports universe that feels increasingly dependent on the gambling industry.
Stop. Casino employees can’t gamble at their place of work, and baseball players can’t either. It’s an old rule, it’s a known rule, and anyone caught breaking it knew the wrong when they were committing it.
That repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act that brought this David Ortiz DraftKings playlist into your life? The four major US sports leagues and the NCAA all fought for the better part of six years to keep the law in place. The NBA and MLB only hired lobbyists to shape the new world when it became increasingly clear the pointspreads were coming.
Their hands are hardly clean, of course. And things will only get worse as this all is increasingly bankrolled by the three ‘S’s: Streaming, Saudi Arabia, and same-game parlays.
But look at where we are. Massachusetts made double what it thought it would in the first year of wagering in the state. The 18 Bally-branded regional sports networks across the country at the core of the bankruptcy that might destroy the whole RSN model? Part of their restructure will be a likely rebrand under FanDuel colors.
We are miles down the road of sports as sidelight. Put another way, we’ve come a long way from selling safety razors on the Green Monster, even as we end up at the same place.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Marcano suspension fresh in mind, I sat down with the intention of seeing just how pervasive sports betting is in a Red Sox broadcast. NESN aired four and a half hours of coverage, with an hour of pre and post around a 2:22 game, and I expected to be inundated with gambling chatter and buckets of free bets.
I was inundated, alright. By 111 companies or products who either bought airtime or ad space at Fenway that came up on the broadcast. And that’s if there weren’t a few more I missed on the ribbon boards and ticker.
The three primary sportsbooks in Massachusetts — DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM — ran 11 30-second spots during the broadcast, with Boston-based DraftKings underwriting part of the pregame, MGM on the rotating boards behind the plate and on the Green Monster, and FanDuel’s nightly Same Game Parlay getting its nightly spotlight.
It actually hit Wednesday, a nearly 17-1 shot of a Rafael Devers homer, a Rob Refsnyder hit, and Nick Pivetta reaching eight strikeouts. There’s two weeks of betting them with house money for the regulars!
To be clear, it’s a lot, especially to someone like myself whose dreams of gambling as moneymaker died decades ago. But Toyota had that many spots by itself. Ford, Chevy, Honda, Nissan, Kia . . . they’re all represented. And it’s not even another Subaru Summer yet!
One hundred and eleven advertisers. We all see it every day. It’s not a surprise in the sense that we all know sports is the last great ratings safe haven. But I can’t help but wonder how much of it we just tune out, overstimulated by it all. Or how much we just absorb without really realizing.
I chuckle when I think back to the day, earlier this season, where my wife noticed the advertising sleeve patches vary in placement between right- and lefthanded batters and pitchers, maximizing their air time. If you go in looking for that stuff, you could find yourself missing the game.
I never noticed Sox victories are sponsored by a law firm, because “results matter.” Or that the batter’s stats that pop up each plate appearance are sponsored, and those sponsors rotate in three-inning blocks.
You ever notice, because it’s now superimposed as opposed to applied in real life, the ad on the back of the mound changes? Or that a car company sponsors the popup with distance and velocity after home runs? Or that there can be dugout camera angles featuring four distinct ads — top lip of the dugout, protective screen, back wall, and coolers?
Or that the company that sponsors the NESN studio at Fenway is different from the company that sponsors the studio in Watertown? And that the latter company also sponsors the fifth inning of Sox games, and is different than the Ford F150 trucks that sponsor the final five minutes of Bruins’ periods?
This is all, admittedly, a bit of a meander. There is a point, and it’s not that Joe Castiglione excitedly describing that cobb salad should make it into his Hall of Fame speech this summer. (It should. Along with a Shaw’s plug.)
Accept that people are going to bet. They are. There is a market, and there are enough other vices we accept as everyday life that I’m not going to go crazy over another one. We need to be sure it’s not allowed to run roughshod, though it almost certainly will because, well, America.
Be concerned about how gambling, as fantasy before it, is going to further degrade the experience of watching sports. Not just via athlete harassment, but the way — as fantasy did before it — it pushes winning down the list of priorities.
Teams used to need to win to make the most money. They still do now, but they’ve diversified into real estate. Into multi-ownership portfolios. Into the everything else. They can run themselves as these Red Sox have in recent years, making good on the experience and the promise of better days and, hey, only 83 wins for a playoff berth!
Going to games, similarly, used to be about everyone wanting to see their teams win. It still is, of course, but fantasy tweaked that dynamic some. You could win even if your team didn’t. Gaming does a little more.
Profit has always been the pursuit of sports and their owners. Make no mistake about that. It’s just that it used to be that winning was really the only way to get there.
The sports world seems to be skewing toward a place not where winning isn’t No. 1, but where it’s one of many. It’s not what any of us signed up for. Nor should any of us buy it.
There are no free spaces on the schedule. Nor should there be any free support from those on the outside who make it all matter.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com