Gambling With The Game

You have to wonder what Pete Rose thinks of this whole Shane Pinto situation. Rose, as you may recall, is a baseball Hall of Famer in every possible respect, other than the fact that he’s not actually in the Hall of Fame. That would be because he was permanently banned from game in 1989 for betting on baseball.

Pere Rose becomes baseball's hit king.

In a similar scenario, Shane Pinto of the Ottawa Senators was recently suspended for 41 games by the NHL for his ties with online gambling, although the specifics of what happened exactly are still pretty muddy.

Interestingly, for what it’s worth, one thing that was made to be abundantly clear when this suspension was announced, was the clarification that Pinto "did not bet on hockey".

It seems his particular “crime” was more about a betting account he has, possibly being used a person he knows.

Rose, on the other hand, had his fingerprints all over his dubious endeavour. Rose bet, and he bet a lot. On his own sport.

Both cases are essentially the same but, what has changed drastically since 1989, is the optics of sports in relation to gambling. Sports betting, historically, has always had this awkward kinship with professional sports. Not officially aligned but certainly leaning the same way.

Betting ads on NHL arena boards

This was, of course, quite hypocritical. On the one hand leagues would be sure to distance themselves from the “dirty” underworld of gambling, while at the same time unofficially welcoming it to the fold for its legacy connections with pro sports as a whole.

Case in point, in 1976 when Jimmy The Greek, a Las Vegas gambler, was welcomed to CBS’ NFL Today pregame show for the expressed purpose of giving

parsing out out free betting advice. Problem was, Las Vegas was the only place in the United States with legalized gambling. The implication being that you would need to fly to Vegas to use this advice legally.

Wink. Wink.

With this, the NFL - which has always kept sports wagering at arm’s length - was now unofficially ordaining gambling’s massive role in the league’s historical popularity.

Fast forward to today, where every professional sports league has some sort of key sports wagering partnership.

The NHL,for example, has teamed with FanDuel and BetGM to bring sports wagering to the league and also to Canada.

Ironically, the precursor to sports betting in a number of Canadian provinces was run by their provincial gaming association. With this move, gambling on sports in Canada had gone from the image of seedy, smoke-filled back rooms to one of an official sports betting partnership with the various leagues.

Ever since, the media in Canada - all media in Canada - has been plastered with legal sports wagering ads. It had gone from invisible to ubiquitous.

Why the change? Well, it’s based on two things.

One, we as a society have become much more adult when dealing with these realities of life, regardless of the possible moral dilemmas they may seem to pose.

Sports betting simply isn’t seen the same way it was forty years ago and society doesn't stigmatize gambling the way it once did.

Beyond that, the other - and undoubtedly, more plausible - reason sports leagues have cozied up to the betting world is simply because of economics. Given the massive amounts bet on sports through side action over the years, it was only a matter of time until the leagues demanded a cut of the action.

Nothing can bend an "unyielding" strict moral code quite like the prospect of a fat wallet and, by entering into an above board (read: legal) agreement, there would be no need for people to suffer through any moral dilemmas.

Problem is, Pinto's situation is not about ethics. It’s about hypocrisy.

Gambling can be a legitimate thing, and with its legalization it is, but this intimate relationship can create a very slippery slope. That is, the people who actually play the sport can now also bet on it.

And all the while, this awkward alignment is aggressively endorsed by the leagues themselves, so it comes as no surprise that this was a big problem waiting to happen. It was only a matter before the ads would entice the actual players.

And now with the league’s righteous crucifixion of Shane Pinto, it shows that the powers that be, really haven’t thought this one through very well.

Pete Rose could tell you that.