The SportsThink Review #113

September 27, 204: Betting and its Discontents, Baseball Lineups

Welcome new readers! The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related content.. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter. The newsletter is free, but comes with two requests. 1. I’m always open to suggestions, so send me the good stuff that you read! 2. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with other folks who might enjoy it as well. Finally, I try to focus on non-paywalled writing, but if you find yourself unable to access anything, just hit reply to the email and I’ll do my best to get you a copy. Thanks for reading!

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Howdy folks, happy Friday.

I’ll start with a quick reminder of a couple events that are coming up: my public lecture on the history of Longhorn Olympians (October 17, in Austin) and the Sports Technology and Innovation: New Perspectives symposium I’m hosting (October 21-22, in Washington, DC).

Here’s the registration link for “Forty Acres, Five Rings: A Historical Celebration of Longhorn Olympians.”

Here’s the registration link and some program info for the Sports Tech and Innovation event.

And here’s the registration link for the evening keynote at the Smithsonian, featuring NFL Chief Innovation Officer, Gary Brantley.

And now, on to the content…

Gambling and Losing

I’m not a gambler, but I do enjoy gambling. I went to college during the turn-of-the-century poker boom and my campus apartment living room was basically a 9-month-long game my senior year. I think we all more or less broke even by graduation. There was similar action downstairs, but those guys were math and physics majors—keen on pot odds and that sort of thing—playing 8 hands of Omaha online during their live game.

I like Vegas and casinos. I like placing a bet at the sportsbook and getting my ticket, then frantically pulling it out every 10 minutes to make sure I haven’t lost it. I indulged in these things in those halcyon days before diapers and mortgages, when the disposable income was truly (foolishly) disposable. Today, I humor the possibility of loading up the occasional 5 dollar parlay if freedom-loving Texas ever legalizes sports betting. (And yes, nerds, I know how a VPN works, but my kids deserve a father who respects the law.).

For years, I was an advocate of the widespread legalization of sports betting. I’m not a Libertarian, but I am pro-liberty and am generally of the belief that if we can legitimize black markets whose participants are going to do the thing anyway, we probably should try to do so. But now, with online sports betting legal in 30 states, and thanks to those aforementioned VPNs, effectively legal everywhere…I guess I still support legalization? But what a mess. The bar-keep/bookmaker of days gone by seems almost pastoral all of a sudden. We’ve made it so easy and so accessible for people to ruin their lives, that the appeal of prohibition begins to at least make sense in the abstract. But Pandora’s Box is open and here we are, with all of the major leagues that once pretended gamblers didn’t exist embracing betting with open arms; there’s so much action and Americans can’t get enough of it.

This topic has been rolling around in my head for a while now and I’d come across a couple pieces this week that I had planned on sharing. Then I got Michael Weinreb’s latest newsletter, A Casino In Your Pocket, which not only links most of the pieces I wanted to share, but also captures my feelings on the matter so artfully. I may not write as well as Michael, but I take some consolation in independently coming to the same conclusions as he has, particularly that the lack of friction now involved in placing bets might be the death of us. Please read it for the healthy perspective and the nostalgia for really, really big television sets. (And please trust that my newsletter isn’t some bizarre front to Weinreb more clicks, I just share a lot of his stuff because it’s great.)

The only thing I can add is that while the human-financial toll of modern sports betting is certainly it’s most damning feature, we’re also paying an aesthetic cost as gambling has all but suffocated sports programming. The attention to spreads and lines and props and whatever is as gauche as it is exhausting and I will wring my hands for parents having to explain to their kids what all those extra numbers are all about. My kingdom for a broadcast that doesn’t mention betting. And those talking heads sharing their picks and telling you how to bet? Remember that they are nothing but grifters and charlatans. If their information was valuable, they wouldn’t be sharing it with you, but quietly betting their own money. If you’re going to make the bet, have the guts to make it for your own reasons.

Batting By The Numbers: The Evolution of Baseball’s Perfect Lineup (Neil Paine and Michelle Pera-McGhee, The Pudding)

This is fantastic, interesting for the history and analysis as well as the beautiful presentation. From the article: For most of baseball history, there was a set pattern of roles in the batting lineup, passed down to managers through decades of experience. But those rules are changing as baseball evolves, especially with analytics increasingly guiding decisions. The 1993 Blue Jays might not look the same in 2024. Those Blue Jays serve as the basis for the study here, which re-configures that team’s lineup for the analytic era. Very cool piece.

And a few more, in brief….

• Having grown up obsessed with tearing open a wax pack, I enjoyed this brief history of Donruss baseball cards.

• More baseball: Tim Keown’s really well-written eulogy for the Oakland A’s, a reminder that while pro-sports may just be a business at the end of the day, it’s a business built on real people, with real feelings.

• For the annals of people doing absolutely amazing things, here’s the story of Tara Dower breaking the record time for completing the Appalachian Trail by 13 (!!) hours.

• Around this time last year, I wrote a bit about how hard football kicking is, so I dug this piece suggesting that NFL kickers might be too good.

As always, thanks for reading. Please share the newsletter, send me your thoughts, and share cool things with me.

See you soon,

Tolga