Where have you gone, Shoeless Joe?

Joseph Jefferson Jackson was one of the Chicago White Sox players banned from baseball for taking bribes from gamblers in the 1919 World Series.

Major League Baseball has no place for gambling, ruled Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first baseball commissioner. In all, Landis banned 18 major league players for taking bribes, knowing about bribes or for meeting with gamblers.

As stated above, Landis ruled MLB has no place for gambling.

Except today, MLB advertises gambling organizations on its MLB TV channel.

The Atlantic did a good job on this six months ago, with Sports Gambling Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen.  A few words by Will Leitch:

"In every Major League Baseball clubhouse, a sign with Major League Rule 21(d) is prominently posted. The rule deals with gambling. It says that any player, umpire, or employee of a team or the league who bets on a game they’re not involved in will be banned from MLB for a year; if they are involved in the game, the ban is for life. Elsewhere in these ballparks are gambling signs of a different kind: ads and sponsorship logos for DraftKings, BetMGM, FanDuel, and the like.

…

"Today, though, the lessons of the Black Sox scandal have been lost to time. There appear to be no such fears about the corrupting effects of gambling, a vice that, like so many before it, has become corporatized.

"The NFL, NBA, MLB, WNBA, and NHL (not to mention some college programs) have all signed lucrative deals with sports books such as MGM, Bally’s, PointsBet, and DraftKings. The Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting in 2018; last year it was a $26 billion industry. That number is expected to skyrocket over the next decade—especially when a pandemic isn’t slowing down sports. The future of money in sports is gambling, as anyone who watched the first two weekends of NFL games this season can tell you. This tsunami of advertising—and the oceans of cash it generates—puts the integrity of the games we love at risk. For all we know, the next big gambling scandal might already be happening."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/micro-betting-could-destroy-sports/620188/

In 2020, “sports betting ... was a $26 billion industry.” Somewhere, sometime, money talks will lead to a big time throw down by players or a team. When sports rules makers turn away from regulations and tradition, preferring money, the curtain will hide the man pulling the levers.