Means of Escape

I was on a stranger’s couch, my wife on the stranger’s kitchen chair, five children asleep in the stranger’s beds; the only person resting in familiar territory was our unborn child, due on Tax Day. The idea came to me as all good ideas do: under duress from the I.R.S. We had sold stock to pay for the renovation that drove us from our home. The federal government wanted a sports car. We only had a minivan. Anyone who has ever stared at five-figure tax debt can tell you the first step toward recovery is to find a distraction. I turned to baseball. And right there on the screen was a favorite statistician’s account; the banner image showed a ten-dollar bet that was turned into twenty grand. My means of escape became my means of escape.

I concluded the sensible thing to do was bet on all of the two thousand four hundred thirty baseball games scheduled in 2024. Not individually, mind you. That would be crazy. Each day, I would pick winners in every game and submit a ten-dollar bet to the sportsbook. A full slate of fifteen games would convert ten dollars into anywhere from thirty thousand to ninety-seven thousand, though a single loss on the ticket would nullify all the winners. This is what in gambling parlance is called a parlay, a French word that probably means “delusion.” The word seems to have appeared in 1701, along with the earliest known use of “thoroughbred” and the founding of Yale, which is responsible for this whole mess.

Pete Rose did not go to Yale. He went to Latonia Race Track, a couple miles south of Cincinnati. There he’d wager and lose ten thousand a visit in a private lounge dubbed the Rose Room. It was located just above the press box. Baseball’s all-time hit leader and surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer died in 2024 without a bronze bust in Cooperstown. Rose was once asked about the bet he regretted most. His mind transported back to 1989, the year Bart Giamatti (Yale, Class of ’60) issued the lifetime ban; he did not hesitate, for gamblers have perfect recall about the bet that changed their lives.

“I had horse six, in front one night at Latonia . . . and a damn deer ran out of the woods and knocked my jockey off the horse,” he told Dan Le Batard, a future DraftKings partner. Rose’s life and legacy were ruined by the fifty-two bets he placed on the middling ’87 Reds, but it was the fourth race on Friday, January 13, 1989, that sticks out most.

A few months after the Le Batard interview, Rob Manfred, commissioner of the M.L.B., denied Rose’s request for reinstatement. Manfred, a Cornell man through and through (which is to say well-pedigreed, dumb, and self-conscious about it), struck a tendentious note in a formal letter littered with adverbs. “Significantly, he told me that currently he bets recreationally and legally on horses and sports, including Baseball,” Manfred wrote. “I am also not convinced that he has avoided the type of conduct and associations that originally led to his placement on the permanently ineligible list. . . . Allowing him to work in the game presents an unacceptable risk of a future violation by him of Rule 21, and thus to the integrity of our sport.”

I opened my first account on FanDuel, the official betting app of Major League Baseball, right there on the stranger’s couch. The league has not disclosed just how much baseball makes from gambling, but industry analysts estimate teams received more than a quarter of a billion dollars from such partnerships in 2024, trailing only the N.F.L. That’s a lot of money, but a far cry from the one billion dollars the American Gaming Association estimated would come Manfred’s way after Justice Samuel Alito (Yale Law, Class of ’75) struck down the federal law hamstringing sportsbooks.

Every gambler operates according to limits. Rose went to his grave insisting he never bet against the Reds, not even in ’87. I assured my wife that a) gambling losses are tax deductible, b) I would never bet on Sunday, and c) I would only wager on the sport I know. I had two thousand twenty-five chances to win that sports car and hand it over to the I.R.S. By Sunday, October 20, I had wagered my entire bankroll—sixty dollars and forty-eight cents—on the W.N.B.A. finals. Churchill Downs—proud owners of Turfway Park (née Latonia Race Track) and the seventh sportsbook account I opened in 2024—accepted the long shot, for they did not know that a friend of mine had used the McClintock effect to gauge the cycles of every team in the league.

Jack Richardson was a has-been at thirty. The wunderkind playwright was mentioned alongside Albee as the next Tennessee Williams. (America was evidently lacking in overwrought self-obsession during the 1960s.) He gave up Broadway as he had given up philosophy during a grad school stint in Munich. Having determined that man cannot live by thought alone, he decided chance was the way. Luckily, all those Paris Review bylines and mentions in the New York Times combined with the charm that established Elaine’s as the gathering place for the literati gave him enough juice to convince a publisher to let him write a book about gambling. For ten years he traveled from Las Vegas to San Diego to Hong Kong before releasing Memoir of a Gambler. After tapping out in Vegas, Richardson is left pulling levers on slot machines to see if there are any unused spins. A hundred-dollar jackpot is collected and immediately brought to a craps table. He rolls seven on the first toss. Bust again. “I had not expected gambling to create for me a world of total coherence, but neither had I expected a malicious one,” he writes. “It was no more than raw impenetrable data on which human qualities had been crudely forced.”

There were fourteen ball games played on June 21, 2024, none more important than the Blue Jays at Cleveland. On the mound, some back-end Toronto starter against Carlos Carrasco. It would require a heart of stone to root against Carrasco, a father of five whose prime was derailed by cancer. The sportsbook has set the run line at nine. The gambler’s heart is not made of stone, but his brain is if he doesn’t take the over at +105.

What is +105, and why is it so enticing? Before the 2024 tax season you thought gambling was expressed in ratios. Every writer knows to be wary of colons. Who in his right mind would take out $1,000 upon seeing 1:1.05 odds? American odds, as they are called, show you how much money you stand to collect on a hundred-dollar bet. You have spent your morning studying weather maps so you can know what game to bet a mortgage payment on: You are not stupid.

Carrasco took the mound in twenty-one games last season and registered three quality starts (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer). The gambler looks at M.L.B.’s feel-good story of 2020 and then checks the weather, eighty-nine degrees, wind blowing out. “Very hot, very sunny day in Cleveland. Carrasco’s pitch is hit well by Schneider, left center field. And the first pitch of the day is the first Blue Jays hit.” Carrasco is scratching his head, cheeks glistening in sweat, as the ball is tossed back in.

Cleveland scores seven runs in the second. It should have been eight, but Austin Hedges got thrown out at second. The sportsbook is nervous; it knows Carrasco is the worst pitcher in baseball. It sees your thousand-dollar bet and offers you one thousand seven hundred dollars to walk away. The Blue Jays forget they are batting against the worst pitcher in baseball. Seven strikeouts, one run, pulled after six innings because he is your age. He hands the ball over to an anonymous swingman whose name you will never forget. Pedro Avila mows down the Blue Jays before contracting the yips in the ninth. Out, single, walk, walk.

George Springer is up. Springer, like the playwright Richardson, is a has-been in his thirties, batting below two hundred. But Stephen Vogt, who spent his career being Oakland’s feel-good story before becoming a manager, must have heard the announcers mumble that Springer has the third-highest average among active hitters at Progressive Field. He trots out to retrieve Avila. In comes the red-hot set-up man, Sam Hentges. Double play. Seven-one.

According to the Center of Excellence in Gambling Research at Yale, there are six reasons people gamble: enjoyment (fun!), excitement (funner!), camaraderie (my friends are having fun!), impressing the crowd (strangers are having fun!), high roller treatment (rich people are having fun!), and the challenge (math is fun!). I.R.S. debt didn’t make the list; neither did “make every moment more.” There must be a reason America’s most popular sportsbook chose the latter as a slogan, one that is beyond the comprehension of Yale psychology majors.

When you read about the billions of dollars that are siphoned from sports fans into the pockets of people who have never watched sports, you picture foreclosed homes and repossessed autos and college funds drained by Dad’s poor decisions. The gambling industry has gone to great effort to reassure you that ninety-eight percent of people who gamble bet pocket change. They have the data to prove it, which is why those apps are legal in thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia, and will spread to more states as lawmakers recognize their relative harmlessness.

Richardson saw modern gambling’s insidiousness in the facsimile of innocence, as Las Vegas drifted from Wild West whorehouse culture to tourist destination. He preferred an honest world that “made no attempt to soften the facts of gambling, to pretend that waiting for a wheel to stop or a card to be drawn was a holiday diversion.” He could tell back in the seedy Seventies—when casinos were family-owned establishments (in the Sicilian sense) and the card counters sported disfigured knees and mangled fingers—which way American vice was headed.

“On the Strip, an appearance of fun and triviality is kept up by player and management,” he writes. So he moves off the Strip, where “there is no effort made to keep gambling from becoming the only pattern of life. Here a player need not be ashamed to reveal that he is serious and fearful.” He calls it quits in the middle of a heater, a beautiful prostitute under each arm.

It is surprisingly easy to mistake the FanDuel logo on your phone for the Disney+ icon, so similar are their neon blues. Nothing throws you off your parlay preparation quite like encountering the bulging eyes of a C.G.I. princess. The correct app is opened up, and you can’t help but notice the Disney-fied Dayglo in the gambling app. You almost expect your phone to start blaring “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” when you click on the latest odds boost that only kicks in when you have exceeded +400.

The casino knows that gamblers hand over their money out of boredom rather than avarice. And this is the most sinister aspect of all. It confirms every wife’s suspicion that sports are meaningless. When you set out to “make every moment more,” you are conceding that sports are only worthwhile if they can be converted into a market good.

Every man who bets on the outcome of a football drive or at-bat or Olympic breakdancing sees it as Waterloo, 9/11, and the Shot Heard ’Round the World—the Battle of Concord and Bobby Thomson’s—rolled into one. We become numb to iconic moments on the playing field because their only significance is how they made us feel and what they did to our wallets. We used to be able to tell our wives that sports embodied civic pride and authentic culture and excellence (fun!), but in our data-driven age fun for its own sake is forbidden. This attitude storms from the court to the stands with all the energy of Ron Artest. Everything must be optimized, synergized, and leveraged for profit. Even the bar has become unbearable. The dive used to be the Roman Senate, Greek Forum, and Oxford Union combined. It was a place where a man could declare that Matt Harvey was washed up, Anthony Rendon didn’t love the game after winning the World Series, and Jacob deGrom was throwing too much gas; outrages to be sharpened by people who actually watched these acts. Such declarations were subjected to heckling and rhetorical combat, all manners of fallacy welcomed and parried with non sequiturs and counter-fallacy. Go to a sports bar today and you will not hear such talk. Only the data counts. “Josh Naylor’s slugging is for real,” someone might declare. “He started the year at +700 whenever a righty was on the mound and now he’s at +380.” This isn’t Rome, just Caesars Palace again.

The corruption of barroom chatter is only one casualty. League rules committees used to tinker at the edges, but now they engage in wild swings year over year. American sports have always changed to suit wherever the money was coming from. In the twentieth century, this meant encouraging scoring to please a broadcast audience. But television revenue is shrinking in significance, and gambling enterprises are filling the gap. Each offseason brings further changes to replay review or, in the case of baseball, the automatic strike zone. Leagues transfer ever more authority from the first-hand witnesses to events on the ground to a booth in New York City. The rules committees insist it is about utilizing technology to ensure fairness, but it is obvious to any observer that this is not the case. Sports are games no longer populated by human beings but by idealized marketplaces. The libertarians and financial pros, having ruined shipping and manufacturing, are now out to destroy sports.

The late Norm Macdonald went bust three times before the advent of iPhone gambling. Mobile gambling used to mean ducking out of the Saturday Night Live cast party early in a limousine and traveling an hour and a half to Atlantic City, back when luxury hotels outnumbered the Cash4Gold joints that now dominate the landscape. There is a legend that his friends swear is true: Norm once went on a heater and left the casino at dawn with sixty thousand dollars in cash. He packed the bankroll into a bag and descended the East Boardwalk, which sported carnival rides designed to alleviate parental guilt in the days before Disney+ and iPads. He approached the surf and threw the bag into the ocean. It was the only way to stop the casino from reclaiming the gold.

“Most people would think it’s the wins that keep the gambler going, but any gambler knows this is not true,” Macdonald said. “When the red dice hit the green felt with a thunk and you’re declared the winner and the chips are pushed toward you, you feel relief. Relief is all. And relief is fine, but hardly what a man would give the whole rest of his life to gain. It has to be something else.”

I placed my Carrasco wager on Bet365, the lousiest of gambling apps, exactly the type of operation Jack Richardson favored. No Disney DayGlo here; it is honest enough to use dollar-sign green. The odds are execrable, bonuses comical. The closest to a celebrity on its ad roster is that Breaking Bad actor who never played a sport but has played a desperate addict. As the 2025 baseball season kicked off, it ditched the celebrity for a green screen. The commercial shows a batter being robbed of a surefire dinger by an outfielder perched atop the foul pole.

Bet365 is a British company. Its marketing department probably did not watch Ken Burns’s Baseball. Mickey Mantle, a corked bat aficionado (Hall of Fame, Class of ’74), hit five hundred thirty-six home runs in his career. When Burns and P.B.S. came calling, Mantle wanted to talk about a meaningless no-doubter he hit in spring training ’63, for alcoholics possess perfect recall about amusing minutiae. Mick hit a towering drive, rounded the bases, and returned to the dugout. Everyone was laughing at the right fielder who scaled the fence in a futile attempt to grab a ball “a hundred feet over his head.”

“Hey Mick, did you see ole Charley Hustle out there trying to catch that ball?” Whitey Ford (admitted ball scuffer, Hall of Fame, Class of ’74) said. Pete Rose embraced the moniker whether it was used to mock his try-hard tendencies as a rookie or his uncouth associations as baseball’s last player-manager. They are rooted in the same soil.

On March 13, On March 13, Manfred announced that he was re-instating Rose after receiving a petition from the late Charlie Hustle’s daughter, no doubt after receiving competitive bids from North America’s gambling interests about sponsoring the presser. Thirty days later, I took my last fifty-one cents at Caesars and bet it on the Tigers. As of April 4, 2025, my account said two hundred sixty-eight dollars, four cents. The laws of compound interest say that I should be able to pay off the I.R.S. by April 12. History and common sense say that I will be wearing a sandwich board by Monday. The screen says Josh Naylor Anytime Homerun +750, high humidity at Nats Park.