The Pandora’s Box of online sports gambling.

In 1992, as legalized casinos were popping up all over America, Congress passed a law barring sports gambling in every state but Nevada. (Betting on human sports, that is; dog and horse racing were still allowed.) The law was sponsored by an NBA Hall-Of-Famer, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey.

In 2012, New Jersey tried overturning that law. The NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL and NCAA all opposed sports gambling, and sued to keep it illegal. They won. New Jersey appealed.

And in 2018 the Supreme Court decided for New Jersey. It overturned Bill Bradley’s law. Now any state could legalize sports gambling.

And now the sports leagues, who once opposed it, all love sports gambling. It brings them money. Who cares about 1919, right?

(You should watch Eight Men Out if you’ve never seen it. It’s free on streaming and at your library.)

And I agree with The Atlantic’s Charles Fain Lehman; legalizing sports gambling was a terrible mistake. The online betting industry is ruining lives.

Which means that sports leagues are taking ad money from an industry that will vastly harm their customers.

The evidence is indisputable. Lehman cites several studies that show online gambling increases household debt, bankruptcies, domestic abuse. It targets vulnerable populations, anyone statistically more likely to experience financial distress. It targets the elderly. It targets military servicemembers.

Legalizing online gambling makes it easier for kids to gamble. Gambling sites ask for ID, but that’s not hard for internet-savvy kids to get around. Male influencers are idolizing gambling, and those influencers have many teenage followers. Every teenage male feels awkward and nervous about dating, about their adult futures; influencers pretend to have the secret lifestyle formula which makes them sexually attractive, rich and powerful. It’s a hard message for insecure young people to resist. Even though what those influencers are selling will result in those young males getting fewer dates and having less money.

And online sports gambling’s legal in 30 states now; oops, 31 as of last Tuesday! It’s not in Minnesota… but the gambling industry is heavily lobbying to bring it here. They lost an attempt in June to legalize it. Barely.

It’s bringing sports teams money, but at a helluva risk. I’m sure you remember the Ohtani interpreter story, right? Or maybe the one where a Jacksonville Jaguars team executive was stealing $22 million to cover his gambling debts? Or the NBA player who was betting on his own team to lose and gave confidential team information to gamblers?

After that NBA player was suspended, former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent (the one who banned Pete Rose) told a reporter: “When sports lose the perception that they’re honest, their sport dies … I’m 85 years old so I won’t be around, but I don’t think the next 20 or 30 years is going to be a pretty story about gambling in the sports world because the money is going to be so enormous, and wherever the money is enormous the corruption follows.”

What is online sports gambling, and how does it hook people?

Traditionally, if you bet through a bookie or in Vegas, it was on the outcome of a game. The bookie or casino would set odds based on how likely one team was to beat the other. And if everybody was betting on one team, the casino would change the odds to equalize out the bets.

The idea is that the total amount of money being paid out is about the same, whoever wins. Since the casino/bookie takes a small percentage of each wager, they make a profit either way.

A different kind of gambling is in “prop bets” and “parlays.” A prop bet is on something other than the final score. Say, on how many strikeouts Joe Ryan gets. A “parlay” is betting on more than one thing to happen; like picking the outcome of four different MLB games correctly. If you’re only right three times, you win nothing; if you’re right four times, you win big.

The danger of “parlays” is that the long odds attract bettors who need to win big, to cover their previous losses. This can cause them to make ever-riskier bets with the hope of huge payouts.

The even more extreme danger of “prop bets” is that bettors can bet constantly, during a game. On every at-bat! Again, hoping for that big lucky payout. You can bet on whether the player gets a hit, or a home run. The more you’ve lost, the more desperately you might want to keep betting.

(If you watched any Twins games on Apple TV+ this season, you saw odds on different outcomes for every at-bat in the corner of your screen. Those were for “prop bets.”)

While you can make traditional “win/loss” bets online, what online gambling companies heavily promote is prop betting and parlay betting. Because these are what get people the most addicted, and cause them to lose the most money. (It’s also causing NCAA players to face online abuse and even death threats from angry gamblers. MLB players, too.)

And make no mistake about it, the gambling industry makes most of its money from creating, then targeting, gambling addicts.

After the recent demise of Pete Rose (who was a giant jerk), Dave Zirin made this excellent point: “Rose should be remembered as an example of not only of the perils of gambling addiction but also why the leagues’ embrace of this revenue stream makes them predatory hypocrites. If we had a different discussion about Rose’s addiction 35 years ago, perhaps this epidemic the sports world has unleashed could have been avoided.”

“This revenue stream” isn’t just for sports teams! Not just for TV networks raking in gambling-ad money, either. Increasingly, states are relying on gambling taxes to fund basic services. New York took in $862 million last year! It’s mostly going to education, says NBC news — but, while education is good, funding it through a destructive addiction is not. (We wouldn’t want to fund schools with cigarette taxes, thereby losing school funding if people quit smoking!)

And, that’s New York, which taxes 51% of gambling revenue. Some states tax far less. A recent, excellent article by Amos Barshad describes how, during one recent period in Kansas, residents bet $194 million; but Kansas collected only $1,134 in taxes.

(You can read Barshad’s article at the Defector website, which lets you read a few free articles per month; it’s also cross-posted on The Lever, which lets you read for free if you subscribe to their newsletter.)

Barshad writes that gambling companies spent $36 million on a recent campaign to make sports gambling legal in Missouri. (That campaign won, with 50.1% of the vote.) But they won’t stop there. They want ALL online gambling to be legalized – including casino-style slot gambling. That’s going to mean mostly poorer people getting taken big by a handful of all-but-unregulated companies.

After all, most gamblers lose. When someone tells you they always win at the casino, they are lying. If you always won at a casino – even through perfectly legal means! — they would ban you from entering. The following “commercial” is from a 2015 John Oliver episode (when online fantasy sports were the rage):

So who’s going to gamble – and lose – most frequently? People addicted to gambling. (I’m addicted to several things, but not gambling; the one time I put money in a slot machine, it felt like putting money in a vending machine and watching your candy bar get stuck inside.)

Corbin Smith of Defector mentions how people trying to beat an addiction are taught to avoid their addiction’s triggers. If you drive home from work by a casino or favorite bar, you can drive home another way to avoid the casino or bar.

But how can you go without the internet, these days? How can you avoid driving by the casino when the casino’s in your pocket?

The Guardian has been doing a good job tracking the rise of sports gambling, and the rise in gambling-related harm. In 2022, Americans bet $94 billion on sports (legally, that is). In 2023, it was $120 billion. This year, Americans bet $23 billion on the Super Bowl alone.

About 1 in 50 Americans has a serious gambling addiction; but keep in mind, not all Americans gamble, and less than half follow sports. 39% of men under 50 (and 20% of women) have bet on sports. At LEAST 10% of those have had financial problems because of it. This tells me that a significant number of sports fans are struggling with a gambling habit.

So while sports teams are making money from gambling ads, those ads are hurting their customers. Who will have less money to spend on tickets, on concessions, on merch.

Some will be forced to give up watching sports, altogether. The temptation to gamble while watching the game will be too great.

But wait – doesn’t this site have ads for sports gambling? Yes, it does. So, sometimes, does Baseball Reference. ESPN has a whole show devoted to it. It looks like, for now, online sports gambling is here to stay. So what should we do about it?

Well, for one, I don’t think sports leagues should be embracing gambling money. For all the reasons mentioned above. It’s going to force some fans to stop following sports; the temptations for corruption are too great; and players themselves are being threatened by angry gamblers. Gambling is going to hurt sports in the long run.

Since when have owners cared about the long run, though?

I do think that we should prevent the legalization of sports gambling here in Minnesota. Or, at least, if we do legalize it, let’s only do so at places that already attract gamblers, like casinos and racetracks. Casinos are extremely vigilant about keeping underage patrons from gambling. And adults who want to gamble have to actually go to a casino to do so. A study mentioned above found no significant link between casinos adding sports betting and larger numbers of people harmed by gambling addiction. While, again, online gambling hugely increases the risk of addiction.

But politicians are going to be sorely tempted, either by campaign contributions from gambling companies, or by the thoughts of what they could do with gambling tax money.

Another notion would be to allow online sports gambling, but NOT on “prop bets” or “parlays.” (Certainly not prop bets on individual college athletes, which is banned in four states to try and stop death threats.)

We could also require gambling websites to put, in large format, right on top of their front pages, a warning about the risks of addiction and links to addiction treatment help. Right now, those sites have these – but they’re in little tiny print way down at page bottom. We could also ban companies from targeting the most frequent gamblers with push advertising.

It’s certain the federal government won’t step in to protect customers, not any time soon. But our state officials could. If we ask them to. And it’d be nice if we got the option Missouri voters had – to decide if we want this at all.

I’ll finish by saying this. I’m not preaching at anybody to stop gambling, if they enjoy it and set a firm budget on how much they can lose. I used to enjoy playing nickel-ante poker with friends in my 20s. (We mostly just talked about music and movies, anyways.)

Mrs. James once had a casino gambling problem. She fixed it by setting a $100 limit; she would keep playing until the $100 ran out. But she’d only allow herself to do this if someone was there with her to keep her from breaking her $100 rule. (And this is someone who quit smoking cold-turkey, without any problems.)

At one point, she signed up for a Customer Rewards program at one Minnesota casino, and we got free hotel stays a few times a year! Since a hotel costs about $100, it was a mini-vacation for us.

Those free hotel offers stopped coming, though. Because to get your rewards, you have to use your rewards card, which tracks your winnings/losses… and the casino figured out we weren’t losing enough money to make it worth their while.

This is what gambling companies do – they encourage you to lose more. And we should be awfully careful about letting them run wild without a lot of oversight. Oversight I don’t trust every state government to provide, and oversight I REALLY don’t trust sports leagues to provide.

As Keith O’Brien, author of a recent Pete Rose biography, put it: “Today the leagues want us to place our bets — during the next commercial break, as soon as possible and as often as we can. They make money from licensing deals and profit from the engagement that sports gambling creates. But no one wants to discuss the reality. No one wants to admit the truth. The next Pete Rose is out there right now, and we are almost certainly cheering for him, just as we once cheered for Charlie Hustle.”