Despite public health concerns and mounting scandals, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have mostly ignored the issue.
A Massive Baseball-Gambling Scandal Is Brewing. But Sports Betting Has Already Exploded — and Congress Couldn’t Care Less.
Rose’s propensity to wager money on sports — sometimes as much as $30,000 a day — had been legendary in baseball circles for at least a decade and well known inside the offices of Major League Baseball, too. Once, baseball’s director of security had even been dispatched to Cincinnati to meet with Rose to voice his concerns about Rose’s debts and dealings with bookies on the edges of the mob.
It’s a scene that is impossible to imagine today, 35 years later. As Opening Day approaches, Major League Baseball has embraced sports gambling like never before, as the long-verboten practice has been legalized in state after state. Baseball fans this spring can legally bet on Aaron Judge to lead the league in home runs , Bryce Harper to be named MVP , or Pete Rose’s old team, the Cincinnati Reds, to win the World Series .
“States, in my opinion,” Giamatti said that morning in late August 1989 at the New York Hilton, “exploit a human weakness because perhaps politicians aren’t interested in making hard choices in the allocation of budgets.” It upset him, and he said that gambling had no place in baseball, no place in sports whatsoever. “The more one associates with gamblers,” Giamatti said, “the more perhaps one loses — and it’s very hard to win.”state and federal judges agreed with Giamatti.
It’s a massive cultural shift, and while the benefits for the leagues and the gambling platforms have been obvious, the downsides for the public are only just becoming apparent. The political action committee of the American Gaming Association, the trade group representing the casino industry, has made more than $300,000 in campaign contributions since 2017, according to data collected by the Federal Election Commission. A single executive at DraftKings — legal counsel R. Stanton Dodge — made more than $60,000 in campaign contributions on his own in 2023, according to FEC figures.
According to a 2023 Rutgers study analyzing prevalence trends in New Jersey — one of the first states to legalize gambling after the Supreme Court ruling — racial minorities and men had double the rate of high-risk problem gambling when compared to white gamblers or women. Betting online had tripled since the previous prevalence study six years earlier. The study found that people who bet online tended to do it more often.
Tonko thinks there needs to be more safeguards to protect the public and has twice introduced bills that he believes would provide this protection., introduced this week, would ban gambling platforms from advertising during live sporting events; prohibit people from making more than five deposits in a 24-hour period; make it unlawful for platforms to use AI to track people’s gambling habits; and authorize federal health officials to collect data to see what’s happening.
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Sports gambling was a gateway drug to online gambling and the lotteryBusiness Insider tells the global tech, finance, markets, media, healthcare, and strategy stories you want to know.
Read more »
NBA League Pass launching in-app live betting in latest lean into sports gamblingLiving betting is coming to NBA League Pass.
Read more »
Florida rivals ask courts to stop online sports gambling off tribal landsThe state of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida are raking in millions of dollars from online sports betting, thanks to a compact that gave the tribe exclusive rights to run sports wagers and casino gambling on its reservations.
Read more »
Florida rivals ask courts to stop online sports gambling off tribal landsThe state of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida are raking in millions of dollars from online sports betting, thanks to a compact that gave the tribe exclusive rights to run sports wagers and casino gambling on its reservations.
Read more »
Florida rivals ask courts to stop online sports gambling off tribal landsORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The state of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida will be raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from online sports betting
Read more »
DC Bets On FanDuel For its Sports Gambling App, Folds on GambetDCThe website that Washington lives by.
Read more »