Quote of the Day (Declan Hill, on This Era of Legal Sports Betting)

“Leagues are dancing with the devil. Here’s what happens. There’ll be one play that’s kind of weird and dubious and sports fans will start to go, ‘Was that legitimate?’ And then there’ll be another one. And another one and another one. And after a few years, the sports leagues will have a problem. Because their fundamental credibility is being debated by their fans.” —Declan Hill, Univ. of New Haven professor and expert on match-fixing, quoted by Kyle Hightower, “Pro Leagues Balance Profit, Integrity Risks in Legal Betting Era,” The Berkshire Eagle, June 14, 2023

By a majority vote that surprisingly cut across liberal and conservative factions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five years ago legalized sports betting. The decision unleashed massive growth in this business—and, I’m afraid, more opportunities for mischief than they could ever have foreseen.

Legendary sports-betting scandals, such the 1919 World Series involving the Chicago White Sox, were often attributed to the pitiful wages that players earned years ago. But I’m not sure that the influx of money in the free-agent era will cure such problems. Greed will come to the fore, no matter how much somebody already has.

Especially in prolonged postseasons, sports fans know how much chance can play a role in how far their favorite team can advance towards a championship. One unlucky bounce, one freak injury and they’re out.

Do we really want questions of legitimacy swirling around this?

This Day in Baseball History (Birth of Rogers Hornsby, Irascible ‘Rajah’ of Hitting)

Apr. 27, 1896— Rogers Hornsby, still considered a century after his prime to be the greatest right-handed hitter in baseball history—and a certain part of any all-star lineup of the sport’s surliest characters—was born in Winters, Texas.

Like virtually all baseball fans, I was first intrigued by Hornsby through a number associated with him: .358, giving him a lifetime batting average second only to Ty Cobb.

But my attention was gripped by him even more when I came across Fay Vincent’s Wall Street Journal piece from a few weeks ago. The former baseball commissioner had a tough time restraining his scorn for one of those new-school metricnomes who suggested that Jeff Kent might be the best righthand-hitting second baseman of all time.

Not a chance, Vincent countered, pointing to a stat that, he thought, was about as unlikely to be broken as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game consecutive hitting streak: Hornsby’s five-year stretch from 1921 to 1925, when the St. Louis Cardinal compiled a collective .402 batting average.

That achievement would have amazed Hughes’ teammates when he came to the majors in September 1915, when the thin youngster hit only .246 in less than a month. After the season, the young shortstop asked St. Louis Cardinals manager Miller Huggins what he should do. Huggins said, “Kid, you’re a little light, but you’ve got the makings.  I think I’ll farm you out for a year.”

Hornsby took Huggins’ colloquial advice more literally than was intended, immediately going to his uncle’s house, where during the offseason he performed as much farm labor, ate fried chicken and steak, and drank as much milk as he could stand.

When he returned to the Cardinals in the spring, Hornsby had added 30 pounds to his thin 135-pound frame, all of it muscle (and with none of it subverted by the common banes of that era, drinking and smoking). The strategy was the exact opposite of the one employed over this past winter by the Toronto Blue Jays’ first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who, after an aggressive conditioning program, has sweated off 42 pounds since last July. But the results were the same: a higher batting average (.313 for Hornsby, .338 for Guerrero at this point in the season).

Power would come in time: 301 homers during his 23-year career, to go along with two Triple Crowns, two MVP trophies, and seven National League batting titles.

What accounted for this power surge? The aforementioned muscle, along with standing back more in the batter’s box, abandoning choking up on the bat, and benefiting from the end of the “dead ball” era that saw the fadeout of the spitball.

But nobody could overlook Hornsby’s volcanic intensity and commitment to the game. "People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball,” Hornsby once drawled. “I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

"The greatest right-handed hitter?" fellow Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner asked Marty Noble in a 2013 article. "Doesn't it have to be him? Who else did what he did?"

Who else indeed?

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story for “The Rajah” (a nickname meant as a counterpart to Babe Ruth’s “Sultan of Swat,” and, of course, a play on his first name). Baseball historian Bill James picked him for “the biggest horse’s ass in baseball history.” In the mega-contract, steroid era of the last three decades, Hornsby has gained some stiff competition for the title, but the following characteristics continue to keep him ahead of the pack:

*Superstitious: Hornsby refused to go to movies because he believed cinemas’ flickering lights would damage his eyesight, and offered the same reason for why he professed to read nothing more than newspaper headlines. As former commissioner Vincent noted waggishly in his Hornsby piece: “Genius often comes wrapped in eccentricities.”

*Cocky: He came by it early. Complimented as a 15-year-old about his play at second base, he responded, “Yeah, and there are eight other positions I can play just as good,” according to an article for the Society of American Baseball Research by C. Paul Rogers III.

*Irascible: Spelling his first name without the "s" was the least thing guaranteed to set the player off. “Hornsby knew more about baseball and less about diplomacy than anyone I ever knew,” one sportswriter observed about Hornsby. Calling his teammates “stool pigeons” one season was among the milder of his insults. The tactlessness was even worse when directed publicly towards individual players.

*Aloof: He didn’t bother communicating to players, fleeing the clubhouse as soon after a game as he could.

*Unhygienic: His quickness out of the clubhouse was enhanced by his speed in the showers—on the occasions when he deigned to take any.

*Unfaithful: With his cold personality, I’m not sure how Hornsby managed to get any woman at all, but he wed three—and, after his playing days were over, employed a mistress as his secretary. After being named in a divorce suit by an irate husband, he married the woman involved, Jeannette Pennington Hine. (Andrew Martin described the litigation—as well as the driving and gambling issues that also surrounded the slugger—in a 2011 article, "The Troubled Life of Rogers Hornsby.") I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn that, over the course of three decades with Hornsby, Jeannette took to drink.

*Antisemitic: While managing the Cincinnati Reds in 1952, Hornsby—unaware that Gabe Paul was Jewish—made an antisemitic remark to the general manager. After the season, Hornsby told a reporter he believed this was the real reason he was fired. Possibly—plus the fact that Hornsby never apologized.

*Racist: Veteran sportswriter Fred Lieb claimed that Hornsby had admitted to membership in the Ku Klux Klan. That assertion has never been verified. But Hornsby did occasionally boycott playing against black teams. That could not have eased his embarrassment when a young Satchel Paige struck him out five times in a barnstorming game.

*Toxic: Though he managed the Cardinals to a memorable World Series win over the New York Yankees in 1926, Hornsby continually wore out his welcome in the clubhouse. At the major-league level, he managed—and was fired from—six different ballclubs. He gambled so heavily on horses and accumulated such a frightening amount of debt that he was traded from the Cardinals after the 1926 season and fired as player-manager of the St. Louis Browns in 1937. In 1952, hired again by the Browns, he lasted only 51 games before he was terminated by Bill Veeck. The grateful players gave the owner a three-foot trophy that they had inscribed, “To Bill Veeck: For the greatest play since the Emancipation Proclamation.” 

Hornsby remained committed to his hard-bitten style all the way to the end of his life. Only he could have written, a year before his death in 1963, a memoir entitled, My War With Baseball.

Quote of the Day (Vanessa Selbst, on the 1st Generation of Online Poker Players)

“We were the first generation of online players, the first really good poker players. Most of the poker pros in the past were these rough-and-tumble guys that didn’t have a great opportunity in their lives who were like, ‘I don’t see myself having a traditional career, so I’m going out to try my luck in Vegas.’ They're not these nerdy math guys and girls who were sitting at home or at college with plenty of options but who then started making a lot of money by doing statistical analyses. That’s a different generation and that’s where we were.”— Vanessa Selbst quoted in in Stephen Foley, “Lunch with the FT: Vanessa Selbst—Triumph of the Nerdy Math Girl,” The Financial Times, Dec. 12-13, 2015

Quote of the Day (Ben McGrath, Contrasting Oldtime and Fantasy Sports Fans)

“Primordial sports fans, content to watch athletics as theatre, devote a mere six hours a week, on average, to the consideration of balls and pucks. Fantasy nerds do triple that.” —Ben McGrath, “The Sporting Scene: Dream Teams--Professional Sports Bets on the Changing Nature of Fandom,” The New Yorker, Apr. 13, 2015

This Day in Baseball History (Rose Surpasses Cobb as All-Time Hits Leader)

September 11, 1985—When the nearly 60-year-old career-hits record held by Ty Cobb was surpassed, it was done by a player, Pete Rose, fully the equal of “the Georgia Peach” in desire to excel—but also, it would turn out in a few years, a match for the Hall of Famer in a tendency not only to exceed yardsticks of excellence set on the diamond but also in codes of conduct off the field.

Rose lost no time in beating Cobb’s record of 4,192 on this evening. Latecomers to the game might have been annoyed that the Cincinnati Red legend slapped a hit (characteristically, it was a single) off the San Diego Padres’ Eric Show in the first inning.

Unlike, say, Alex Rodriguez, Rose never showed nervousness. In this case, he didn’t have to, anyway: as player-manager, he could keep writing his name on the lineup card, not having to worry that he might lose his position to a younger, better player.

The evening was treated as one of the great moments in baseball. Rose received a Corvette, along with a phone call from President Ronald Reagan. It was all in keeping with a carefully burnished public image with few if any public dissenters.

As I indicated last year in a post marking Rose’s banishment from baseball, the man who broke Cobb’s record for hits was “an irresponsible, skirt-chasing, records-obsessed, gambling-addicted, felonious has-been.” That conduct was present from the beginning of his career, as were the well-springs of Cobb's behavior.

What were the sources of each man’s competitive fury? One incident spurred Cobb in particular: three weeks before he made his debut in center field with the Detroit Tigers, his mother accidentally shot and killed his father. (The pathologically jealous William Cobb was sneaking around the house, hoping to catch his wife in the act with a lover, when she, suspecting the silhouette near the window was an intruder, shot and killed him. She would be acquitted of murder seven months later.) "I did it for my father,” Cobb admitted later about what drove him. “He never got to see me play ... but I knew he was watching me, and I never let him down.”

Young Cobb, like young Rose nearly 60 years later, provoked the anger of team veterans. Some took the rookie hazing beyond the acceptable limits because they wanted him off the team. Tiger manager Hughie Jennings permitted the razzing to proceed until, convinced that Cobb had the guts not to back down, he finally passed the word that it had to stop.

Rose survived his own hazing in 1963. Reds veterans, annoyed that manager Fred Hutchinson was benching second baseman Don Blasingame—who’d hit .281 and played creditable in the field the year before—in favor of the 22-year-old Rose, gave the youngster the business.

Rose’s attitude didn’t help matters. His competitive drive—notably, sprinting to first base after a walk—was so comically histrionic that sharp-tongued Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford had already christened him “Charlie Hustle.” Whatever latitude teammates might have given him for brashness (the same confidence meant he’d hit anybody under any circumstances) quickly vanished when they realized something else almost immediately about him: he felt the unwritten rules of the game didn’t apply to him.

Years later, pitcher Jim O’Toole remembered an incident in Pete Rose: Baseball's Charlie Hustle, by Mike Towle: During spring training, the Reds had gone to Mexico City. At one club, Rose had called a stripper over to the table “and bingo, he had her down on the table doing something no one should be doing in public….I broke in a few years earlier than that, and if I had done something like that as a rookie, I would have found myself right back down in Double-A. But Pete got away with a lot of stuff that normal players couldn’t have gotten away with. He was just different.”

Veterans took extreme exception to a rookie assuming such prerogatives for himself. The only way Rose survived that season was because of an outlet that would never have occurred to the racist Cobb even if it had been open to him: assistance from African-American veterans. Vada Pinson and Frank Robinson, who knew all about snubs because of the color of their skin, made sure they took Rose under their wing. They not only made him feel accepted, but taught him some of the niceties of the game.

In another sense, they could only get so far with him. New York Met fans still seethe over the fight Rose picked with shortstop Bud Harrelson during the 1973 playoffs. Less understandable, because it occurred with no high stakes involved whatsoever, was Rose’s home-plate collision with catcher Ray Fosse during the 1970 All-Star Game—although it’s the type of play that Cobb, who sharpened his cleats (the better for stealing bases), might have appreciated.

One other similarity between the two players: involvement in gambling. Rose’s is well-documented—and finally, after 15 years of stonewalling after his banishment from baseball, confessed. Cobb’s is far murkier.

A former Tiger teammate, Dutch Leonard, claimed after the 1926 season that he, Cobb, and two Cleveland Indian players, Tris Speaker and Joe Wood, had conspired to fix a game in the 1919 season. The matter eventually came to the attention of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who eventually exonerated the accused players.

But ever since then, many have wondered if Landis was trying to contain another potentially damaging baseball gambling scandal on the order of the “Black Sox” series of 1919. A scandal involving a future Hall of Famer (or, in the Cobb-Speaker affair, two) would have wounded America’s pastime as much in the 1920s as it did 60 years later. Cobb--who, like Rose later, had been serving as player-manager for his longtime team--moved on from the Tigers in his last two years in the big leagues, playing for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics.

This Day in Baseball History (Ace Denny McLain Suspended for Gambling)

February 19, 1970—Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s suspension of Denny McLain for involvement in a bookmaking operation began a downward spiral in which the two-time Cy Young Award winner ended up suspended two more times that season, out of baseball within three, and in a seemingly unending circuit of bankruptcy, divorce and criminal courts over the next three decades.

At first glance, the title of the autobiography of later raucous pitcher David Wells, Perfect I’m Not, sounds like an echo of one by the Detroit Tiger’s righthanded ace, Nobody’s Perfect. But listen more closely: Wells’ is flatly declarative about his night-owl escapades, whereas McLain’s is the last refuge of amoral people worldwide: Everybody does it.

Wells’ halfhearted exercise regimen resulted in a bad back and an early departure from his scheduled start—and the Yankees’ pivotal loss--in the 2003 World Series against the Florida Marlins. But McLain’s association with bookies not only sidelined him for most of the 1970 season, but, more crucially, put him out of commission for many of the last frenetic weeks of 1967, when the Tigers were locked in a four-way, down-to-the-wire pennant race.

McLain’s three-month suspension coincided with my first serious interest in the national pastime. All I knew at the time was that he had won a combined 56 games in the last two seasons, and that he was as bright a star as the game had.

I didn’t understand until much later how necessary his suspension was for the integrity of the game, or how his career came to constitute one of the worst cases of wasted talents multiplied by absolute amorality in the entire annals of a sport far gamier than we’d care to admit. (As far back as 1865, members of the New York Mutuals had been involved in betting on a game.)

Even the slightest baseball trivia fan knows that McLain became the last winner of 30 victories in a season in 1968.

Unfortunately, many will also know that what should have been his Hall of Fame trajectory was considerably shortened through no fault but his own, and that during his post-career he would be convicted of offenses whose seriousness—racketeering, loan-sharking, extortion, cocaine possession, and stealing from his company’s pension fund—and redundancy sorely strained Americans’ natural wish to forgive and forget someone who commits a mistake.

Most baseball fans didn’t have a clue what was going on in the weeks after September 18, 1967. As if the first-place Tigers hadn’t suffered enough of a blow earlier that day—a 10th-inning, come-from-behind win by the hot Boston Red Sox—word got out that they’d be without McLain’s services for the most crucial stretch of the season. The talented 23-year-old, still with a chance to secure 20 wins and a pennant for his team, was suddenly, and mysteriously, injured.

What happened? Hard to tell, especially because McLain changed his story a few times. (Story A: he’d stubbed two toes while he woke up after watching TV. Story B: he injured them when he ran after raccoons rummaging in his garbage. Story C: he kicked something--a water cooler? a locker?--after a heart-breaking loss.)

But sometimes the simplest story makes sense, and in February 1970 Sports Illustrated provided one: he’d become involved in a bookmaking operation as a partner, then had his toes stepped on and dislocated by a mobster who told him he’d better pay a $46,000 gambling debt.

Unlike Pete Rose or the infamous “Black Sox” of decades earlier, McLain had not bet on his own team. Bowie Kuhn could only establish that McLain thought he was a partner in the bookmaking operation and was probably the victim of a confidence scheme.

Still, several teammates thought their ace was gone for one, maybe two, seasons. Kuhn’s three-month ban, then, was something of a relief.

McLain’s return came on July 1, against the New York Yankees. As a Bronx Bomber fan, I can remember watching the game on TV, as well as the intense interest in the contest (71 writers and nearly 54,000 fans—the most in nine years--showed up at Tiger Stadium) and the announcers who observed that the pitcher, for all his greatness, tended to serve up “gopher balls.”

And that’s what happened then, too, as McLain was forced to leave the game in the sixth inning behind 5-3, having served up homers to Jerry Kenney, Bobby Murcer and Thurman Munson. It was a portent of the fastball that had suddenly gone AWOL.

It would take me all day to tell all of the strange, sad things that happened to this once-great pitcher thereafter, but here’s just a few of them, besides the ones I’ve already mentioned:

* After baseball, his weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds;

* In 1992, a beloved daughter died in a tragic car crash;

* In the late 1990s, while in prison for financial hanky-panky with his company’s pension fund, he came to share a cellblock with John Gotti Jr.; and

* In his third autobiography, this felon—who continually let down his teammates, his fans, and especially his family—had the nerve to write that his teammate, Hall of Famer Al Kaline, was guilty of dogging it at times in the field.

Song Lyric of the Day (Billy Joel, With a View of Pete Rose Overturned by History)

“Rose, he knows he's such a credit to the game

But the Yankees grab the headlines every time

Melodrama's so much fun

In black and white for everyone to see.”—Billy Joel, “Zanzibar,” from the 52nd Street album (1979)

Time has shown how radically Billy Joel’s ripped-from-the-headlines judgment on baseball and morality needs to be revised.

In the late Seventies, it was hard to argue with him: Pete Rose was coming off a 44-game consecutive hitting streak with the Cincinnati Reds, proving that sheer willpower could lift a ballplayer of average skill to the height of his profession.

Meanwhile, the Yankees were dismaying longtime fans, as bullying owner George Steinbrenner, combative, alcoholic manager Billy Martin, and egotistical slugger Reggie Jackson engaged in a daily triangular psychodrama.

It all changed on this date 20 years ago, when Rose’s fall from grace was dramatically confirmed.

Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti announced that the owner of the record for most lifetime hits was being suspended for life for “conduct not in the best interests of the game,” related to betting on contests—including those in which he was involved as manager of the Reds. Subsequently, Rose went to jail on charges of income-tax evasion.

Hank Aaron’s recent support of Rose’s reinstatement—actuated partly by his disgust for the drip-by-drip stain left by the steroids scandal—comes from a man far better than his statement’s beneficiary.

If Rose sits now on the sidelines of the game he loved, it’s his own fault. I’m not referring here strictly to his original sin, the betting itself, but also to the 15 years of stonewalling on which he embarked as soon as he was implicated in the scandal.

Americans, a forgiving people, would have embraced someone who confessed to a gambling addiction so powerful that it even caused him to ignore the enormous risks associated with violating Major League Baseball Rule 21(d), the ban on betting on one’s team—a restriction that’s posted in every clubhouse.

In 2004, Rose finally copped to what the 225-page Dowd Report had documented in damning detail at the time of his banishment: not only had he bet on the Reds, but he’d wager as much as $10,000 per game.

The former hits leader and his defenders say that he never bet against the Reds, but they ignore the following:

* Even a decision to abstain on the part of an habitual gambler can be read by others as a signal that the team will be in the tank that day.

* The possibility of debts too steep to be paid would have opened Rose to severe pressure from the underworld and possibly affected the course of a pennant race. This happened to Denny McLain in 1967, when the young pitcher’s involvement in a bookmaking operation led him to be visited by a mob operative who, while threatening far worse, dislocated two toes on McLain’s left foot. Had the pitcher not missed several starts down the stretch, he might have helped the Tigers win the pennant that year instead of falling one game short. (Incidentally, Rose and McLain collaborated on a book two years later: How to Play Better Baseball. I wonder if they traded betting tips? Actually, on second thought, I don’t.)

Rose stained the game and betrayed his players with his misconduct, as Giamatti noted with his grave but spot-on summary of the case. In his autobiography, the pathetically titled My Prison Without Bars, the banned ballplayer had the gall to write: “I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way."

As he elaborates, Rose demonstrates only that, in his transparent lack of remorse, there’s one career he might still be suited for, if a job in baseball (increasingly remote, given not only his dangerous gambling addiction but even his professed lack of interest in managing compared with the thrill of hitting) remains outside his reach: politician. “So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans and family that it hurt. Let's move on."

It might be just as well that Rose allows people like Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench and Mike Schmidt make the case for allowing him back into the game and onto the Hall of Fame ballots, because every word he says or writes is a self-indictment that reveals his profound callousness and lack of concern for the damage he caused.

At the same time, with each passing year, the ’78 Yankees look better and better. Disregard their crazy owner and the even crazier manager he dumped halfway through the year (then re-hired for the next year), and concentrate on the 25 players (yes, even Reggie).

Remember this about that sometimes brawling, always mentally tough squad: When everyone else had them counted out at 14 games down (including Jim Rice of the Red Sox, who, with his recent comments on Derek Jeter, proves he remains clueless about character), they refused to give up.

When making the playoffs at all, without the option of a wild-card slot, was far harder then than it is now, the Bombers became the exemplar of determination and perseverance against all odds.

They, my friends, represent a “credit to the game,” not an irresponsible, skirt-chasing, records-obsessed, gambling-addicted, felonious has-been who might be 68, but has the moral sense of a six-year-old. In fact, that last statement might even be an insult to children.