June 13, 2025 • 39 mins
Seg 1: Money Rules in MLB
Seg 2: Baseball Betting and Market Forces
Seg 3: Is Sports Gambling Inviting MLB Corruption?
Seg 4: The Changing Face of Baseball Quality
Seg 2: Baseball Betting and Market Forces
Seg 3: Is Sports Gambling Inviting MLB Corruption?
Seg 4: The Changing Face of Baseball Quality
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views and opinions expressed on the following program are
those of the host and guests and do not necessarily
represent those of any organization, including one generation away.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
No, that's what was free.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Of enterprise, and freedom is special and read.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
This is Liberty Nation with Markangeldes, a production of Libertynation
dot Com, going after what the politicians really mean and
making it all clear for your freedom and your liberty.
Liberty Nation with Markangeldes.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Hello, Welcome to Liberty Nation Radio, head Coast to Coast
on the Radio America Network from a flagship station in
the nation's capital, WWRC in Washington, d C. I'm your host,
Mark Angelides. Something a little bit different for you today.
We are going to be discussing baseball and gambling. How
have the money betters and the moneymen impact the game?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Is it better?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Is it worse?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
You decide.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Our fantastic panel today has the facts and the fury.
Remember Liberty Nation Radio sponsorlibuit Nation dot com, where you
can access podcast, breaking news analysis, and a range of
biting and brilliant shows to wet your appetite for freedom
and your fondness for the great American Constitution, and you're
on Liberty Nation her coast to coast on the Radio
American Network. I'm your host, Mark Alidi's on today's special
(01:16):
baseball edition. We are joined by longtime host of this
here radio show, mister Tim Donner, also a big baseball fan,
Joe Shaefer, and economics guru Andrew Moran. Thanks for being here, guys.
Now I should preface that we are going to be
talking baseball today, and I should really really point this
out that on my side of the Atlantic, we essentially
(01:38):
just call that low cricket. So that's my level of
baseball knowledge. And now that I've insulted the entire panel,
what I'd really like to talk about, specifically concerning baseball
is that Joe Schaefer here just wrote a fantastic article
recently on the pages oflibit nation dot com regarding the
(01:58):
reaction to to gambling becoming so prevalent among Major League
Baseball teams and even the stadiums. So, Joe, do you
want to kick us off here and give us your
thoughts and do hold back on gambling in Major League Baseball?
Speaker 4 (02:19):
So you know, I've been a fan of baseball for
a long time. I actually got away from the game
for almost twenty years. I just stopped cheering for it,
came back to it, and it just seems that the
modern game, the way they treat the fans is it's
almost despicable. The story I wrote about it, it is
(02:41):
related to gambling, and it's we got to kind of
set the scene. I'll try to make it short pitcher
for the Houston Astros.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
His name is Lance mccullis Junior.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
He signed a eighty five million dollar conc five year,
eighty five million dollar contract in twenty twenty one. Began
in twenty twenty two. Promptly got injured, missed most of
the last three years, came back, got sheld in his
first game. So disappointing contract, disappointing performance. You know, he
(03:13):
allowed seven runs and only got one guy out. You're
gonna get booed for a situation like this. Some of
colors gets brewed, he gets goes out whatever. At the
after the game, he says something that his life and
his children, his wife, his children's lives had been threatened.
And the way he said it is I understand Astro.
(03:35):
We all love the Astros. People are asked he he
made it seem like Astros fans were threatening his family's
life because of a performance. And what he had to know,
what the Houston Astros have to know is this is
very common on social media. It happens every night, and
it is coming ninety nine point nine percent of time
(03:55):
from gamblers upset that they lost a bet. Yeah, you know,
some guy misses a free throw in basketball, a pitcher
gives up a home run. Kill yourself is one of
the more mild posting CNX. So they know this, and
yet for him to throw those fans under the bus.
His manager backed them up. He said, oh, all the
(04:16):
things Lance has done for Houston, how can they do
that again? A slur on the fans. The media didn't
question him at all over it. You know, it's common
that baseball, in pro professional sports is so in bed
with professional gambling. Now you can these teams have official
sportsbook sponsors. The Houston Astros bet MGM. They say, sign
(04:41):
up with MGM, make a bet in the game. You
can throw the first pitch at an Astros game. So
they want the Astros fans to go to the game.
They want them to bet, but they don't want them
to get upset at the players when they lose their bet.
And my point in the article is that this is exploitative.
This is exploitative of the fans who care about the game.
Baseball had a record twelve billion dollars in revenue last year,
(05:05):
and they're getting it from toxic means. You know, when
you're in you're encouraging gamblings that he can afford Lance
mccullor's eighty five million dollar salary. And then Lance mccullors
turns around and points a fan at Astros fans who
cheer for the team, when he has to know that
it's gamblers who make these wild, crazy threats. And you
(05:26):
know that happened May tenth, I believe was the day
June second, it came out what we all knew, what
I mean was without a doubt he's he He was
talking about a social media post by an overseas gambler
whatever that means, some guy in Europe who admitted he
was drunk and he was angry and he wrote something
(05:47):
stupid on the internet.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
So you know, lancemer closer is a.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Yeah, and he throws the whole fan base under under
It just seems to me that you know what, you're
not allowed to criticize the eighty five million dollar baseball
player anymore. This is very aristocrats and peasants stuff to me.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
You know, this is like, you know, yeah, we'll.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
Take your money, we'll do what we can, but you
you're not allowed to criticize us. It's exactly the way
it came across. And I think, you know, if you're
a Major League Baseball fan, you really, you know, should
you have to put up with.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
With your with these players treating you this way?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Well, what's your take on that?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Well, I suppose it's fair to say that sports does
not become immune to other societal trends. So threats on
social media have become almost the new or often they're
veiled threats, but sometimes they're direct. So I think Lansma
(06:52):
Colors is just feeling the same heat that everybody else
does when they say something controversial and told. I mean, look,
you have the former director of the FBI who went
on social media and showed a picture of a seashell
formation that he came upon on the beach, saying eighty
(07:15):
six forty seven. So you've got sort of a culture
of lawlessness going on, and sports certainly isn't immune from that.
But I find the incredible thing about this relationship between
Major League Baseball and gamblers. And by the way, it's
(07:36):
not limited to Baseball, NBA, NFL, but the MLB is
particularly pronounced with their open alliance with gamblers. I mean,
at National Park in Washington, you can go in and
it's like into the racetrack. You can go bet on
(07:58):
that particular properzy, which team is going to win or lose,
how many runs are going to be scored. Whatever. You
can do it right there at the ballpark, just like
you're betting on a horse race. And the ironic thing
about that is what nearly ruined the sport. Just over
one hundred years ago was a gambling scandal called the
(08:19):
Black Sox scandal, which led to the hiring of Kennefsaw
mount landis the first Major League commissioner, who immediately deep
sixth all of the members of the White Sox who
had been found guilty in court but they were found
found not guilty in court, but they were found guilty.
(08:43):
Behy the commissioner who booted them out for the rest
of their lives. So he would be to use the
sort of old time phrase, Kenne's mounts would be turning over,
spinning over in his grave, Well, that baseball not only
relaxed its standards about gambling, but was actually in bed
(09:08):
with gamblers. And we're talking about a sport where the
all time hits leader, men who had more hits than
the other twenty thousand, roughly members of the exclusive community
of Major League players, was kicked out of the game
and excluded from the Hall of Fame for gambling. And
(09:30):
yet here we are, just a couple of decades later,
and baseball is in bed with gamblers, and so, of
course what could go wrong, And a lot of it
has gone wrong, and we've even seen some players suspended
for betting on baseball, which they're strictly prohibited from doing.
(09:55):
That's the first thing that when the commissioner visits all
the spring train cans of all the teams in Florida
before the season begins, the first thing that they traditionally
have been told is you may not, under any circumstances
gamble on baseball, and you cannot be involved with gamblers.
(10:17):
And yet now the teams themselves are sponsored by gambling outfits,
and for example, in the New York Mets broadcasts, which
I watch up frequently, in the fifth inning, they come
on with here's the current odds, and here's what the
(10:38):
odds are for this particular parlay. And I still find
myself incredulous that they're not just allowing, but encouraging gambling.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
We're going to be back after this show break, continuing
the conversation don't go anywhere.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
For your freedom and your liberty. Liberty Nation with Mark
Edge Ladies.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
And you're back on Liberty Nation Radio or remain your host,
Mark Andony's We're continuing our baseball themed conversation with Tim Donner,
Joe Shaffer and Andrew around now. Earlier, Joe, you're explaining
about the article that you you've written on pagelibtenation dot
com about how death threats against players and then the
(11:31):
the fans just getting blamed for this kind of thing
even though it'squit are ubiquitous online talk online is very
very cheap. And then Tim, you ran this around with
it essentially a history essent on why baseball does not
allow gab or did not allow gambling. Andrew, as a
resident economist, is the is the money too much to
(11:56):
resist for the Major League Baseball teams?
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (12:00):
Of course, I mean in every avenue of our society.
You can bet poly markets on the biggest betting websites
in the world today, and you can bet on pretty
much everything. You can bet on whether a celebrity is
gonna trip during the award ceremony. You can bet on
who's gonna win an election. You can bet if Trump
is gonna not follow Elon Musk, you know, before July first.
There's all these different things that you can bet on.
(12:21):
So majorly baseball is taking advantage of that situation. The
interest has made it easier. The treasure trove of baseball data,
it can make it, you know, quite intriguing. You know,
you can. It's the fans' fault, though, for their behavior
toward betting. I can't. I can't really fault Rob Manfred
for embracing betting in baseball. Yes, it is odd to
(12:41):
see when you're watching Fox Baseball and you see all
the hosts saying, oh, yeah, there's a two to three
odds of you know, of this baseball player and hanging
a home run to right field. It is strange to
see that, but we have to acclimate to it. Now.
You can just ignore it or you can participate. You've
always you've been always able to gamble on on base.
Up here in Canada, we have pro line. You know,
(13:02):
you go to the store or you go to a
website now and you just bet on you know, whether
the Boss Red Sox will lose one run in extra
innings to the Tampa Bay Rays with the New York
Yankees as they've always been doing lately. But anyway, you know,
so so I really, I really don't have much of
an issue. I just blame more of the fans. I mean,
also the Internet. I mean, I don't know if you
(13:23):
guys are you guys are on this. Of course, in
two thousand and three, the NLCS Florida Marlins Chicago Cubs,
there was a fan in the stands and he caught
a ball that was supposed to be caught by a
bray you and out of the Chicago fan base went
at Apple plectic. You know, this was before, of course,
the prevalence of of of of the internet. So people
went on sports talk radio and s are bashing that
(13:44):
fan and saying, oh, how dare you do this? He
has to watch out, he has to watch his skin,
all these different things. So the Internet overall has just
made everything a lot easier to do, and of course
it expands the pie for a lot of companies and
gambling and base balls brands.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
So I mean, it's it's yes, it's quite common, though,
isn't that that if if a behavior is incentivized, because
that what they're asking for when they're putting, When when
they're putting betting locations within a a Major League Baseball stadium,
that they're encouraging a behavior and the behavior has come
with other things. And Joe you pointed out in your
(14:20):
article they put a ten cent beer night on and
we're then surprised when people over indulged in beer and
a riot broke out. It's you kind of could have
figured something would happen, And they don't seem to be
making any I mean, it's just my opinion. They don't
seem to be looking at.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
What's the way to.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Mitigate the the inherent dangers that come with gambling.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
And that that is the central theme of what I
was trying to get across in the article that Yeah,
I'm actually agreeing with Andrew.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
I love betting. Back in the day when I was
younger and more.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Reckless, I enjoy I enjoyed I enjoyed gambling on sports responsibly.
But what I see today with sports is, and I'll
use it again, a toxic approach to revenue streams. It's
almost an adversarial relationship with the fans where it's not
their game anymore. When you know, when I was a kid,
(15:20):
I grew up with eighties baseball, and you felt like
you were a part of the team. He really did.
He felt like you were part of a game. Now
it seems like a one hundred transactional exchange, a consumerist relationship.
You know, half these sports and tim tim those baseball
is the worst. They're more like clothing lines and professional leagues.
(15:42):
They've got a new uniform every day because they want
to sell it for three hundred dollars a pop at
the store. And yeah, okay, it's on the fans if
they want to be stupid there, you know, buy all
that stuff over and over again with many of them do.
But with gambling, it's even more dangerous because you're taking
people who are fans game don't have eighty five million
(16:03):
dollar contracts, and you're encouraging behavior that often they cannot afford.
As someone who bet probably a little too much when
I was younger, I understand this situation, how it feels
when you bet more than you can afford to lose.
That just happens all the time. And you know, how
much money do you need a seven hundred million dollar
contract for a tani? Can we knock that down to
(16:24):
six hundred million dollars and not ruin people's lives with
this gambling? For the gambling, but the aggressive marketing is
the problem, and the fact that it seems like they
just want the revenue stream.
Speaker 5 (16:36):
They don't really care about the fans.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
So Major Season Baseball is to say, I feel a
market based response coming from Andrew.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
As opposed to morality.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
We have to we have to realize something. We tend
to forget this. I forget this too when I watching it.
When you know, we'll focus on the Red Sox. Baseball
is a business. It is entertainment's the goal for the commissioners,
for the baseball owners is to maximize revenue. And you're
completing about six hundred million dollars contracts. That is the
market approach to these contracts. You know, Uh, Tim Dawner's
(17:08):
boy Cohen the New York Mets. He has a limited
pocket if he wants to bid eight hundred million dollars
for Juan Soto and the next big biggest baseball owner.
Let's say John Henry, the Boston Red Sox. He can't
match that. That is the market at Best Pictures, they
get a premium no matter how much the risk, no
matter how risky that position is, you're gonna bid up
(17:30):
the price because of how demand they are and how
limited there are of these, of these left handed pitcher
who can throw ninety five cutter, a foreseam fastball, you know,
to to you know, in the put in in a
World Series game. That's what you're paying for. So this
is a business. Major League Baseball is a company. It's
not a charity. It's not a non profit organization. It's
(17:50):
not even the business of morality. You know, I don't
know why we have to we have to look to
corporate America to determine our morality.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Well, you know that trends are in Major League ballparks
are to provide various forms of entertainment and amusement at games.
It used to be you just go to the park
and you watch the baseball game. Now I've got a
place like the Arizona Diamondbacks have a hot tub and
a pool just over the right field fence. You have
(18:19):
all kinds of distractions for kids with slides and batting
machines and stuff. And so it's all about trying to
draw in the more disinterested elements of society. You might
come to baseball if they're going to have a really
good time and don't just have to watch the game
(18:40):
the whole time. So it's all about increasing the brand
by offering more and more to the consumer, and that
includes the opportunity to gamble.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
I want to continue that theme after this short break.
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
No, that's what was free.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Of enterprise, and freedom is special and ate.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
This is Liberty Nation with Mark Angelides, a production of
Libertynation dot com, going after what the politicians really mean
and making it all clear for your freedom and your liberty.
Liberty Nation with Markangeledi.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Andrew back on Limity Nation Radio Head Coast Coast and
Radio American Network. Remain your host, Mark Angelide's and we
continue our conversation on betting and sports with our Major
League Baseball panel of fans, Tim Donner, Andrew Moran, and
Joe Schaeffer. Now, Tim, you brought up something that I
just started pinging in my mind. In the last segment,
(19:50):
you were talking about how it's become more of an
all encompassing way to all of these distractions that they have,
the hot tubs, the batting cages. It's to bring in
people who are not necessarily there for just the pure baseball.
And the first thing that popped into my mind was
was women's basketball. It seems that that has everything going
(20:12):
for it except the game itself. It's like, I mean,
that's insulting.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
But it's well, I will say much about sports in general,
but comparatively, if you want to watch.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Good basketball, it's it's the men's basketball, right, I mean,
Kaitlyn Clark.
Speaker 6 (20:30):
That's the only reason why WB is that's the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I mean, Caitlyn Clark, who was a college sensation, has
really enhanced the value of women's professional basketball simply by
her presence. But yes, I mean, you have to do
things to attract fans that may not otherwise go. Another
example is at ballparks. Now, it used to be you
(20:55):
go to the ballpark, you get a beer and a
hot talk and maybe a hamburger in some fries. These days,
they have incredibly sophisticated cuisine available at ballparks far and wide,
and you can get any number of different cocktails, mixed drinks, sprintzers,
(21:16):
whatever it is you want. It's almost like going to
a restaurant now when you go to the game. Yeah,
so's it's all about trying to cast the widest swath
possible in attracting fans. And let's face it, gambling is
(21:36):
attractive to people who are prone to want to have
more on the line in watching something than just whether
a team wins or loses because you're a fan. But
you could also say, look, I mean this is inevitable
horse racing. Where would horse racing be without the ability
(22:00):
need to bet at the racetrack. I mean, in other words,
you go to the racetrack. If you can't bet on
those races, you probably are going to go And I
think that and it's what has sustained horse racing over
the years. So I suppose it to inevitable in this
online world where it's easy to bet that baseball would
(22:22):
be infected with the same virus if you want to
call it that that other sports have been for a
long time.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
So I just want to come in on this. There's
The idea that gambling and sports is a new thing
is of course not not not real. I mean, the
people used to bet on charioteers.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
It was. It was one of the.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Main functions of chariot racing that you know, you go
there and you bet on it. But I wonder if.
Speaker 7 (22:52):
The the cooperation between the the major league teams, because
this is new, the cooperation between the teams and the
people who are putting the who are offering the best,
that's a newer dynamic, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Well, I think yeah. The danger that you've got in
the electro and Andrew take it from there. The danger
that you've got is with these billions and billions of
dollars on the line, are we not invariably headed to
a scandal similar to the Black Sox scandal over a
(23:32):
century ago, where a player is being paid not to
try as hard, not to pitch as well, et cetera.
It seems inevitable that we'd be headed in that direction
with all this gambling money flowing back and forth.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yep, you want to tell you that.
Speaker 5 (23:49):
I just think at some point we have to stop
talking about.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
I've always acknowledged that sports is a business, going back
to the nineteen twenties and early baseball football, all of it.
It's about increasing revenues constantly. But again, and you know,
if you if you really want to read up about
a great commissioner, Pete Roselle, the National Football League commissioner
during the glory days of professional football, when it surpassed
(24:15):
America as America's game in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.
He always understood one crucial business business point integrity, the
integrity of the game and the idea that you are
are presenting a product of, you know, pure sport for
(24:37):
the fans.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
I feel like that's gone today. It's gone.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
It's a consumerist experience these when you've got these players,
When an NFL quarterback is making fifty million dollars a
year and some of them are making more of that,
to me, it's inevitable that the integrity of the game
is going to suffer at some point. It's happened a
long time ago. Take this in so many fascinating directions.
(25:04):
One of the most compelling things about sports is of
the ideas it's a meritocracy. You can either hit one
hundred mile prior fastball or you can't and that's it.
But you know that's not even true anymore because these
kids today, from the age of eight nine years old,
they're in travel leagues hockey and baseball or especially So
(25:25):
you've got to have money from the get go just
to start this stick. So you know, you've got kids
who are poor and young, but they never even get
that opportunity, and you weed it out by the time
you're ten eleven years old. So sports is not a
meritocracy anymore. It's rampant with nepartism. NFL football coaches are
all the kids of you know, kids and grandkids of
(25:47):
another coach or a player. And you know, Gonzaga NCA basketball.
I always I just can't get this out of the
met John Stocked in the Hall of Fame guard played
for the Utah Jazz. He was a lum of Gonzaga University.
He got his untalented kid to be a star starter
on their final four team for I think two three seasons,
(26:10):
actually finagled him to play in the NBA for a
couple of games. He should not have been starting on
a Division two basketball team. So it's not a meritocracy anymore.
It's an aristocracy now. And it's the money doing this,
and it really does feel like woods served for the
peasants watching these perfumed dandies while I put in that article,
you know, and some playing Croqueta and sub Court and Versailles,
(26:33):
and we're not even allowed to boo them because Lance
mc cullers will say you're threatening to murderer his kids,
saying it's all gone called business. What made it fun
to be a fan in the game, to me is
just all this bigness is just destroying that.
Speaker 5 (26:50):
And Andrew, what do you think of that?
Speaker 6 (26:52):
What I'm so curious in baseball right now? What how
has meritocracy been diminished in any game?
Speaker 4 (27:00):
If you're eight years old, If you're eight years old
and you don't have money, you don't get on that
travel league team.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
And that travel league team leads to.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
You becoming a prospect on a premier high school team.
And that hot premier high school team gets you drafted
or get you into the club. It's a pipeline. Wayne
Gretzky commented on this in Hockey fifteen odd years ago.
He said, someday it's happening. Right now, the NHL is
just for Canadian kids and American kids. It's just going
to be a sport for rich kids. And if you
(27:30):
see the backgrounds of these NHL players today, that's exactly
how it's turned out. You're weed it out before you're
ten years old if you actually come from this money.
So it's not a meritocracy and the way it used
to be.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Well, but I think it's fair to say that, like
the same thing is in the job market. Generally, you
can get a job in sports, you can make it
on a team through nepotism, but you're not to last
because you have to perform. I mean, it's a performative
(28:05):
form of entertainment like most everything else. If you can't act,
maybe you could get hired to go to Broadway, but
you're not going to You're not going to last if
you can, you know, if you can find your way
onto a major league team somehow, if you go, oh
for twenty, you're finished. You're not going to be sustained.
(28:29):
So I agree to some extent that there's this nepotism,
but sports is still all about performance and if nothing else,
if you can't perform, you're going to get booed off
the field, and that by itself will be a humiliating
experience in addition to being you know, basically sent to
(28:51):
the minors, are removed from the team because you're not
good enough.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Again, it's not a pure clean sport anymore. And to me,
it's inevitable when the money gets this big. You know,
I'm not being naive about it. I am expressing I
guess some surprise that fans are prepared to be treated
this shabbily by players and Lams. McCullers, to me, is
the perfect example where because he didn't enjoy being booed
(29:19):
for his poor performance, he accused you soon Astros fans
of potentially murdering his children. I think that's what we're
at today. They do not want the average fans to
give them any guff. Give us your money, bet on
the game. Fine, don't criticize us. Were we're on this, We're.
Speaker 5 (29:39):
In elite, you know, you don't criticize us.
Speaker 6 (29:40):
And why cheer for that?
Speaker 5 (29:42):
Why be a fan of that? Is what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
We're going to be back after this shall break to
find out the future of fandom in Major League Baseball.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
For your freedom and your liberty. Liberty Nation with Mark
edge Alitis.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
And you're back on limbtin Nation Radio or Remaina host
Mark Antoni's we'll continue our talk with Joe Schaefer, Andrew
Moran and Tim Donner on Major League Baseball. It's a
bit of a special.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Edition for you.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Now for our last segment here, I guess the question
I want to ask is we've talked about how from
some aspects, money has been bringing down the respect for
the game that many people had. But is it a
better game now than it was twenty thirty forty years ago?
Because I'm not a big football fan. By football here,
(30:36):
I mean soccer. But if you take a player from
the nineteen sixty six World Cup, Britain's last glory day
in terms of international football, and you take the players,
the key players from that team, you put them against
middling players today, I think it would be night and day.
I think the middling players would they're so much faster
(30:58):
and more aggressive in their plays, and that their skills
are especially a lot of South American players that the
skills because they both learned to play in very tight quarters,
which means they can manipulate a ball rather than just
passing and kicking over distance. That there's a very different sport,
but away from soccer for now, and let's get that
(31:20):
question to baseball. Is it a different game? Is it
better for the fans the actual gameplay? Tim What don't
you kick us off on us?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, all you have to do is look at an
old tape of a game from the nineteen fifties or sixties,
looking to build the builds up the players, the muscular builds,
the scale at all, outline of the players, and you
can see that it's an entirely different game. Now balls
(31:50):
can be hit much further, Pitches can be thrown much faster.
I mean, it used to be when somebody threw the
ball one hundred miles an hour or twenty years ago,
it was a headline in the baseball among baseball enthusiasts, Wow,
we hit one hundred miles an hour. Now you've got
(32:11):
probably four or five pitchers on every pitching stat that
can throw the ball more than one hundred miles an hour,
and nobody pays much attention. The athletes are clearly superior
to those of the old days because they have so
much more available to them to keep themselves fit. Another
(32:32):
big thing is that it used to be that baseball
had such paltry salaries and most players had to hold
down another job in the off season. But now with
an average salary and the average salary of four million
dollars for major league players, they turned baseball into a
(32:54):
year round endeavor and they're working out through the entirety
of the offseason, through the laid full in winter to
get ready for the next season. So the quality of
the game is no comparison now to thirty or forty
years ago. Does that mean that the product is better? Well,
(33:14):
that's open to the eye of the beholder. But there's
no question that the athletes in baseball are faster, stronger,
pitch better, run, faster, and just all the elements that
make a baseball player. It's clearly a superior product. But
(33:38):
as I said, and I'm sure Joe Away and this
if not Andrew, whether the fact that the players are
so much more advanced is separate from the issue of
whether the product that's put on the field is better
than when we were all growing up.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
What do you say, Joe, Is it a game that
you enjoy more as an adult or as a kid,
And is part of that a nostalgia issue.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
It's not just nostalgia, although that is a big part
of it, and I would think Tim would agree with me.
Everything he said was unassailable. But the big difference between
the game that I grew up watching, that he grew
up watching and today is fundamentals that these players do
not have fundamentals, And a lot of it is the
game today is based on home runs and power pitching
(34:27):
to get these guys to throw one hundred miles per hour,
but they can only go five innings because they're throwing
maximum every pitch. You know, Nolan Ryan, who threw one
hundred miles per hour thirty years ago when he was
forty years old, could throw one hundred and forty pitches
and go eight nine innings. So are these pitchers better.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
Than that today because of that? I don't know.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
The big difference to me with baseball is bat on
ball contact hitting. Where are the three hundred hitters? And
I understand it's harder to hit you now, these guys
throw one hundred miles with the ball moving and all.
Just a complete lack of three hundred hitters. And the
idea which is prevalent with this analytics driven thing in baseball,
the idea that a bas hit can be a bad
(35:11):
thing that you can hit a single, and it's like, well,
statistically a guy who strikes out, you know, four or
five times and then hits one home run is better
than a guy who's hitting three thirty and they're all singles.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
I've never bought that.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
I've never accepted that Rod Carew, you know, is a
great player. Rod Kru would be a great player today.
I don't know if teams would even want Rod crew
and the team today because.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
He didn't hit enough home runs.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
But for me, that style of baseball was better. It's
not nostalgia. As a fan, I enjoy watching the ball
getting in the gaps, getting the field that the fielders
having to make a play, the base runner is running,
and to me, that has been so it's not gone,
but it's been reduced, and I'm kind of hoping it
(35:56):
comes back. You're seeing some really good hitters coming up
into the game nowadays. I'd like to see a return
to the three hundred hitter and just fundamentally sound sports.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Well you reckon Andrew mbg A make baseball great again.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
Well, I'm in a bit of both camps. I'm with both
Tim and Joe. I mean, but I mean, you have
to give credit to Rob Manfred. He's the commission of MLB,
and despite his ridiculous handy handling of the astros cheating scandal,
he's made some positive moves to you know, appease all
size the argument. You know, one of the things he
did was introduce the pitchclock. Now I was hesitant because
I'm a purist. I love, you know, when when pitcher
(36:33):
step out of the box and try to do the
mounted excuse me, and they try to do head games
with the opposing players, YadA, YadA, YadA. But overall, that
pitch count has made the game a lot more joyable,
especially if you're if you're a forty year old person
who has to work the next day and doesn't want
to stay up till midnight watching a game between the
Tampa Bay Raids and the Cincinnati Reds. You know you
don't want to do those. Sorry, Joe, I'm just kidding.
(36:54):
Thanks to me. But over I and also other things
that I mean, they banned the shift, and they made
the base is bigger to encourage more base running stealing.
So all these things they're trying to do a balancing
act by by by Major League Baseball. But I think
but you know one thing you'll learn, Mark, is that
one thing that baseball fans love is statistics. And you
(37:15):
go back, you look at some of the greatest hitters
in in MLB history, and they will not be able
to stack up with some of today's pictures. You know,
you see the movement on these nine eight mile power
or you know, curveballs or sweepers or cutters. It's just
absolutely phenomenal what these pictures are doing. Uh with with
with with with you know, high speed. Of course, they
break their arms and they have to have Tommy surgery
(37:36):
a couple of times, but that's so much who's if
you watch the product, it's it's just.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
So No, I don't think so, I think it. It
is consistent with a bigger, more spectacular product, where things
are bigger, faster, stronger. But like Joe said, short, you
(38:02):
now have some teams that are no longer willing, like
the New York Mets, to spend massive amounts of money
on starting pitchers because they all break down, and a
starting pitcher only pitches five or six out of every
forty five innings, it's not worth the investment. So it's
harder to calculate where we're headed because of the breakdown
(38:25):
of starting pitching, where they're told to just go as long,
throw the ball as hard as they can for as
long as they can, and wait for their arm to
blow out inevitably. And this is the thing with gambler,
is that you're sort of it's a different angle on
this question, but you're sort of gambling against the inevitable
(38:48):
injuries that players are getting to an incredible degree that
Los Angeles Dodgers have fifteen pitchers on the injured list now,
especially for people that are betting long term, like who's
going to win the pen, and who's going to win
the World Series, or even who's going to win a
given series between a couple of teams. There's so many
(39:12):
variables now that you know, I think gambling it is
following a base for more than it is leading it.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Joe Shaefer, Andrew Moran, Tim Donner, thanks for being here,
and that's all we have time for on this week's
edition of Libutination Radio Head Coast to Coast on the
Radio American Network. Count in your host, Mark As. Thank
you to our guest today Andrew Moran, Joe Shaefer, and
Tim Donner. You are appreciated and thank you the listeners
at home for tuning in each and every week. Please
remember Libertination does not endorse candidates, campaigns, nor legislation, and
(39:46):
this presentation is no endorsement
The views and opinions expressed on the following program are
those of the host and guests and do not necessarily
represent those of any organization, including one generation away.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
No, that's what was free.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Of enterprise, and freedom is special and read.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
This is Liberty Nation with Markangeldes, a production of Libertynation
dot Com, going after what the politicians really mean and
making it all clear for your freedom and your liberty.
Liberty Nation with Markangeldes.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Hello, Welcome to Liberty Nation Radio, head Coast to Coast
on the Radio America Network from a flagship station in
the nation's capital, WWRC in Washington, d C. I'm your host,
Mark Angelides. Something a little bit different for you today.
We are going to be discussing baseball and gambling. How
have the money betters and the moneymen impact the game?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Is it better?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Is it worse?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
You decide.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Our fantastic panel today has the facts and the fury.
Remember Liberty Nation Radio sponsorlibuit Nation dot com, where you
can access podcast, breaking news analysis, and a range of
biting and brilliant shows to wet your appetite for freedom
and your fondness for the great American Constitution, and you're
on Liberty Nation her coast to coast on the Radio
American Network. I'm your host, Mark Alidi's on today's special
(01:16):
baseball edition. We are joined by longtime host of this
here radio show, mister Tim Donner, also a big baseball fan,
Joe Shaefer, and economics guru Andrew Moran. Thanks for being here, guys.
Now I should preface that we are going to be
talking baseball today, and I should really really point this
out that on my side of the Atlantic, we essentially
(01:38):
just call that low cricket. So that's my level of
baseball knowledge. And now that I've insulted the entire panel,
what I'd really like to talk about, specifically concerning baseball
is that Joe Schaefer here just wrote a fantastic article
recently on the pages oflibit nation dot com regarding the
(01:58):
reaction to to gambling becoming so prevalent among Major League
Baseball teams and even the stadiums. So, Joe, do you
want to kick us off here and give us your
thoughts and do hold back on gambling in Major League Baseball?
Speaker 4 (02:19):
So you know, I've been a fan of baseball for
a long time. I actually got away from the game
for almost twenty years. I just stopped cheering for it,
came back to it, and it just seems that the
modern game, the way they treat the fans is it's
almost despicable. The story I wrote about it, it is
(02:41):
related to gambling, and it's we got to kind of
set the scene. I'll try to make it short pitcher
for the Houston Astros.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
His name is Lance mccullis Junior.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
He signed a eighty five million dollar conc five year,
eighty five million dollar contract in twenty twenty one. Began
in twenty twenty two. Promptly got injured, missed most of
the last three years, came back, got sheld in his
first game. So disappointing contract, disappointing performance. You know, he
(03:13):
allowed seven runs and only got one guy out. You're
gonna get booed for a situation like this. Some of
colors gets brewed, he gets goes out whatever. At the
after the game, he says something that his life and
his children, his wife, his children's lives had been threatened.
And the way he said it is I understand Astro.
(03:35):
We all love the Astros. People are asked he he
made it seem like Astros fans were threatening his family's
life because of a performance. And what he had to know,
what the Houston Astros have to know is this is
very common on social media. It happens every night, and
it is coming ninety nine point nine percent of time
(03:55):
from gamblers upset that they lost a bet. Yeah, you know,
some guy misses a free throw in basketball, a pitcher
gives up a home run. Kill yourself is one of
the more mild posting CNX. So they know this, and
yet for him to throw those fans under the bus.
His manager backed them up. He said, oh, all the
(04:16):
things Lance has done for Houston, how can they do
that again? A slur on the fans. The media didn't
question him at all over it. You know, it's common
that baseball, in pro professional sports is so in bed
with professional gambling. Now you can these teams have official
sportsbook sponsors. The Houston Astros bet MGM. They say, sign
(04:41):
up with MGM, make a bet in the game. You
can throw the first pitch at an Astros game. So
they want the Astros fans to go to the game.
They want them to bet, but they don't want them
to get upset at the players when they lose their bet.
And my point in the article is that this is exploitative.
This is exploitative of the fans who care about the game.
Baseball had a record twelve billion dollars in revenue last year,
(05:05):
and they're getting it from toxic means. You know, when
you're in you're encouraging gamblings that he can afford Lance
mccullor's eighty five million dollar salary. And then Lance mccullors
turns around and points a fan at Astros fans who
cheer for the team, when he has to know that
it's gamblers who make these wild, crazy threats. And you
(05:26):
know that happened May tenth, I believe was the day
June second, it came out what we all knew, what
I mean was without a doubt he's he He was
talking about a social media post by an overseas gambler
whatever that means, some guy in Europe who admitted he
was drunk and he was angry and he wrote something
(05:47):
stupid on the internet.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
So you know, lancemer closer is a.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Yeah, and he throws the whole fan base under under
It just seems to me that you know what, you're
not allowed to criticize the eighty five million dollar baseball
player anymore. This is very aristocrats and peasants stuff to me.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
You know, this is like, you know, yeah, we'll.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
Take your money, we'll do what we can, but you
you're not allowed to criticize us. It's exactly the way
it came across. And I think, you know, if you're
a Major League Baseball fan, you really, you know, should
you have to put up with.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
With your with these players treating you this way?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Well, what's your take on that?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Well, I suppose it's fair to say that sports does
not become immune to other societal trends. So threats on
social media have become almost the new or often they're
veiled threats, but sometimes they're direct. So I think Lansma
(06:52):
Colors is just feeling the same heat that everybody else
does when they say something controversial and told. I mean, look,
you have the former director of the FBI who went
on social media and showed a picture of a seashell
formation that he came upon on the beach, saying eighty
(07:15):
six forty seven. So you've got sort of a culture
of lawlessness going on, and sports certainly isn't immune from that.
But I find the incredible thing about this relationship between
Major League Baseball and gamblers. And by the way, it's
(07:36):
not limited to Baseball, NBA, NFL, but the MLB is
particularly pronounced with their open alliance with gamblers. I mean,
at National Park in Washington, you can go in and
it's like into the racetrack. You can go bet on
(07:58):
that particular properzy, which team is going to win or lose,
how many runs are going to be scored. Whatever. You
can do it right there at the ballpark, just like
you're betting on a horse race. And the ironic thing
about that is what nearly ruined the sport. Just over
one hundred years ago was a gambling scandal called the
(08:19):
Black Sox scandal, which led to the hiring of Kennefsaw
mount landis the first Major League commissioner, who immediately deep
sixth all of the members of the White Sox who
had been found guilty in court but they were found
found not guilty in court, but they were found guilty.
(08:43):
Behy the commissioner who booted them out for the rest
of their lives. So he would be to use the
sort of old time phrase, Kenne's mounts would be turning over,
spinning over in his grave, Well, that baseball not only
relaxed its standards about gambling, but was actually in bed
(09:08):
with gamblers. And we're talking about a sport where the
all time hits leader, men who had more hits than
the other twenty thousand, roughly members of the exclusive community
of Major League players, was kicked out of the game
and excluded from the Hall of Fame for gambling. And
(09:30):
yet here we are, just a couple of decades later,
and baseball is in bed with gamblers, and so, of
course what could go wrong, And a lot of it
has gone wrong, and we've even seen some players suspended
for betting on baseball, which they're strictly prohibited from doing.
(09:55):
That's the first thing that when the commissioner visits all
the spring train cans of all the teams in Florida
before the season begins, the first thing that they traditionally
have been told is you may not, under any circumstances
gamble on baseball, and you cannot be involved with gamblers.
(10:17):
And yet now the teams themselves are sponsored by gambling outfits,
and for example, in the New York Mets broadcasts, which
I watch up frequently, in the fifth inning, they come
on with here's the current odds, and here's what the
(10:38):
odds are for this particular parlay. And I still find
myself incredulous that they're not just allowing, but encouraging gambling.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
We're going to be back after this show break, continuing
the conversation don't go anywhere.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
For your freedom and your liberty. Liberty Nation with Mark
Edge Ladies.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
And you're back on Liberty Nation Radio or remain your host,
Mark Andony's We're continuing our baseball themed conversation with Tim Donner,
Joe Shaffer and Andrew around now. Earlier, Joe, you're explaining
about the article that you you've written on pagelibtenation dot
com about how death threats against players and then the
(11:31):
the fans just getting blamed for this kind of thing
even though it'squit are ubiquitous online talk online is very
very cheap. And then Tim, you ran this around with
it essentially a history essent on why baseball does not
allow gab or did not allow gambling. Andrew, as a
resident economist, is the is the money too much to
(11:56):
resist for the Major League Baseball teams?
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (12:00):
Of course, I mean in every avenue of our society.
You can bet poly markets on the biggest betting websites
in the world today, and you can bet on pretty
much everything. You can bet on whether a celebrity is
gonna trip during the award ceremony. You can bet on
who's gonna win an election. You can bet if Trump
is gonna not follow Elon Musk, you know, before July first.
There's all these different things that you can bet on.
(12:21):
So majorly baseball is taking advantage of that situation. The
interest has made it easier. The treasure trove of baseball data,
it can make it, you know, quite intriguing. You know,
you can. It's the fans' fault, though, for their behavior
toward betting. I can't. I can't really fault Rob Manfred
for embracing betting in baseball. Yes, it is odd to
(12:41):
see when you're watching Fox Baseball and you see all
the hosts saying, oh, yeah, there's a two to three
odds of you know, of this baseball player and hanging
a home run to right field. It is strange to
see that, but we have to acclimate to it. Now.
You can just ignore it or you can participate. You've
always you've been always able to gamble on on base.
Up here in Canada, we have pro line. You know,
(13:02):
you go to the store or you go to a
website now and you just bet on you know, whether
the Boss Red Sox will lose one run in extra
innings to the Tampa Bay Rays with the New York
Yankees as they've always been doing lately. But anyway, you know,
so so I really, I really don't have much of
an issue. I just blame more of the fans. I mean,
also the Internet. I mean, I don't know if you
(13:23):
guys are you guys are on this. Of course, in
two thousand and three, the NLCS Florida Marlins Chicago Cubs,
there was a fan in the stands and he caught
a ball that was supposed to be caught by a
bray you and out of the Chicago fan base went
at Apple plectic. You know, this was before, of course,
the prevalence of of of of the internet. So people
went on sports talk radio and s are bashing that
(13:44):
fan and saying, oh, how dare you do this? He
has to watch out, he has to watch his skin,
all these different things. So the Internet overall has just
made everything a lot easier to do, and of course
it expands the pie for a lot of companies and
gambling and base balls brands.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
So I mean, it's it's yes, it's quite common, though,
isn't that that if if a behavior is incentivized, because
that what they're asking for when they're putting, When when
they're putting betting locations within a a Major League Baseball stadium,
that they're encouraging a behavior and the behavior has come
with other things. And Joe you pointed out in your
(14:20):
article they put a ten cent beer night on and
we're then surprised when people over indulged in beer and
a riot broke out. It's you kind of could have
figured something would happen, And they don't seem to be
making any I mean, it's just my opinion. They don't
seem to be looking at.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
What's the way to.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Mitigate the the inherent dangers that come with gambling.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
And that that is the central theme of what I
was trying to get across in the article that Yeah,
I'm actually agreeing with Andrew.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
I love betting. Back in the day when I was
younger and more.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Reckless, I enjoy I enjoyed I enjoyed gambling on sports responsibly.
But what I see today with sports is, and I'll
use it again, a toxic approach to revenue streams. It's
almost an adversarial relationship with the fans where it's not
their game anymore. When you know, when I was a kid,
(15:20):
I grew up with eighties baseball, and you felt like
you were a part of the team. He really did.
He felt like you were part of a game. Now
it seems like a one hundred transactional exchange, a consumerist relationship.
You know, half these sports and tim tim those baseball
is the worst. They're more like clothing lines and professional leagues.
(15:42):
They've got a new uniform every day because they want
to sell it for three hundred dollars a pop at
the store. And yeah, okay, it's on the fans if
they want to be stupid there, you know, buy all
that stuff over and over again with many of them do.
But with gambling, it's even more dangerous because you're taking
people who are fans game don't have eighty five million
(16:03):
dollar contracts, and you're encouraging behavior that often they cannot afford.
As someone who bet probably a little too much when
I was younger, I understand this situation, how it feels
when you bet more than you can afford to lose.
That just happens all the time. And you know, how
much money do you need a seven hundred million dollar
contract for a tani? Can we knock that down to
(16:24):
six hundred million dollars and not ruin people's lives with
this gambling? For the gambling, but the aggressive marketing is
the problem, and the fact that it seems like they
just want the revenue stream.
Speaker 5 (16:36):
They don't really care about the fans.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
So Major Season Baseball is to say, I feel a
market based response coming from Andrew.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
As opposed to morality.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
We have to we have to realize something. We tend
to forget this. I forget this too when I watching it.
When you know, we'll focus on the Red Sox. Baseball
is a business. It is entertainment's the goal for the commissioners,
for the baseball owners is to maximize revenue. And you're
completing about six hundred million dollars contracts. That is the
market approach to these contracts. You know, Uh, Tim Dawner's
(17:08):
boy Cohen the New York Mets. He has a limited
pocket if he wants to bid eight hundred million dollars
for Juan Soto and the next big biggest baseball owner.
Let's say John Henry, the Boston Red Sox. He can't
match that. That is the market at Best Pictures, they
get a premium no matter how much the risk, no
matter how risky that position is, you're gonna bid up
(17:30):
the price because of how demand they are and how
limited there are of these, of these left handed pitcher
who can throw ninety five cutter, a foreseam fastball, you know,
to to you know, in the put in in a
World Series game. That's what you're paying for. So this
is a business. Major League Baseball is a company. It's
not a charity. It's not a non profit organization. It's
(17:50):
not even the business of morality. You know, I don't
know why we have to we have to look to
corporate America to determine our morality.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Well, you know that trends are in Major League ballparks
are to provide various forms of entertainment and amusement at games.
It used to be you just go to the park
and you watch the baseball game. Now I've got a
place like the Arizona Diamondbacks have a hot tub and
a pool just over the right field fence. You have
(18:19):
all kinds of distractions for kids with slides and batting
machines and stuff. And so it's all about trying to
draw in the more disinterested elements of society. You might
come to baseball if they're going to have a really
good time and don't just have to watch the game
(18:40):
the whole time. So it's all about increasing the brand
by offering more and more to the consumer, and that
includes the opportunity to gamble.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
I want to continue that theme after this short break.
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
No, that's what was free.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Of enterprise, and freedom is special and ate.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
This is Liberty Nation with Mark Angelides, a production of
Libertynation dot com, going after what the politicians really mean
and making it all clear for your freedom and your liberty.
Liberty Nation with Markangeledi.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Andrew back on Limity Nation Radio Head Coast Coast and
Radio American Network. Remain your host, Mark Angelide's and we
continue our conversation on betting and sports with our Major
League Baseball panel of fans, Tim Donner, Andrew Moran, and
Joe Schaeffer. Now, Tim, you brought up something that I
just started pinging in my mind. In the last segment,
(19:50):
you were talking about how it's become more of an
all encompassing way to all of these distractions that they have,
the hot tubs, the batting cages. It's to bring in
people who are not necessarily there for just the pure baseball.
And the first thing that popped into my mind was
was women's basketball. It seems that that has everything going
(20:12):
for it except the game itself. It's like, I mean,
that's insulting.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
But it's well, I will say much about sports in general,
but comparatively, if you want to watch.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Good basketball, it's it's the men's basketball, right, I mean,
Kaitlyn Clark.
Speaker 6 (20:30):
That's the only reason why WB is that's the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I mean, Caitlyn Clark, who was a college sensation, has
really enhanced the value of women's professional basketball simply by
her presence. But yes, I mean, you have to do
things to attract fans that may not otherwise go. Another
example is at ballparks. Now, it used to be you
(20:55):
go to the ballpark, you get a beer and a
hot talk and maybe a hamburger in some fries. These days,
they have incredibly sophisticated cuisine available at ballparks far and wide,
and you can get any number of different cocktails, mixed drinks, sprintzers,
(21:16):
whatever it is you want. It's almost like going to
a restaurant now when you go to the game. Yeah,
so's it's all about trying to cast the widest swath
possible in attracting fans. And let's face it, gambling is
(21:36):
attractive to people who are prone to want to have
more on the line in watching something than just whether
a team wins or loses because you're a fan. But
you could also say, look, I mean this is inevitable
horse racing. Where would horse racing be without the ability
(22:00):
need to bet at the racetrack. I mean, in other words,
you go to the racetrack. If you can't bet on
those races, you probably are going to go And I
think that and it's what has sustained horse racing over
the years. So I suppose it to inevitable in this
online world where it's easy to bet that baseball would
(22:22):
be infected with the same virus if you want to
call it that that other sports have been for a
long time.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
So I just want to come in on this. There's
The idea that gambling and sports is a new thing
is of course not not not real. I mean, the
people used to bet on charioteers.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
It was. It was one of the.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Main functions of chariot racing that you know, you go
there and you bet on it. But I wonder if.
Speaker 7 (22:52):
The the cooperation between the the major league teams, because
this is new, the cooperation between the teams and the
people who are putting the who are offering the best,
that's a newer dynamic, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Well, I think yeah. The danger that you've got in
the electro and Andrew take it from there. The danger
that you've got is with these billions and billions of
dollars on the line, are we not invariably headed to
a scandal similar to the Black Sox scandal over a
(23:32):
century ago, where a player is being paid not to
try as hard, not to pitch as well, et cetera.
It seems inevitable that we'd be headed in that direction
with all this gambling money flowing back and forth.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yep, you want to tell you that.
Speaker 5 (23:49):
I just think at some point we have to stop
talking about.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
I've always acknowledged that sports is a business, going back
to the nineteen twenties and early baseball football, all of it.
It's about increasing revenues constantly. But again, and you know,
if you if you really want to read up about
a great commissioner, Pete Roselle, the National Football League commissioner
during the glory days of professional football, when it surpassed
(24:15):
America as America's game in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.
He always understood one crucial business business point integrity, the
integrity of the game and the idea that you are
are presenting a product of, you know, pure sport for
(24:37):
the fans.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
I feel like that's gone today. It's gone.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
It's a consumerist experience these when you've got these players,
When an NFL quarterback is making fifty million dollars a
year and some of them are making more of that,
to me, it's inevitable that the integrity of the game
is going to suffer at some point. It's happened a
long time ago. Take this in so many fascinating directions.
(25:04):
One of the most compelling things about sports is of
the ideas it's a meritocracy. You can either hit one
hundred mile prior fastball or you can't and that's it.
But you know that's not even true anymore because these
kids today, from the age of eight nine years old,
they're in travel leagues hockey and baseball or especially So
(25:25):
you've got to have money from the get go just
to start this stick. So you know, you've got kids
who are poor and young, but they never even get
that opportunity, and you weed it out by the time
you're ten eleven years old. So sports is not a
meritocracy anymore. It's rampant with nepartism. NFL football coaches are
all the kids of you know, kids and grandkids of
(25:47):
another coach or a player. And you know, Gonzaga NCA basketball.
I always I just can't get this out of the
met John Stocked in the Hall of Fame guard played
for the Utah Jazz. He was a lum of Gonzaga University.
He got his untalented kid to be a star starter
on their final four team for I think two three seasons,
(26:10):
actually finagled him to play in the NBA for a
couple of games. He should not have been starting on
a Division two basketball team. So it's not a meritocracy anymore.
It's an aristocracy now. And it's the money doing this,
and it really does feel like woods served for the
peasants watching these perfumed dandies while I put in that article,
you know, and some playing Croqueta and sub Court and Versailles,
(26:33):
and we're not even allowed to boo them because Lance
mc cullers will say you're threatening to murderer his kids,
saying it's all gone called business. What made it fun
to be a fan in the game, to me is
just all this bigness is just destroying that.
Speaker 5 (26:50):
And Andrew, what do you think of that?
Speaker 6 (26:52):
What I'm so curious in baseball right now? What how
has meritocracy been diminished in any game?
Speaker 4 (27:00):
If you're eight years old, If you're eight years old
and you don't have money, you don't get on that
travel league team.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
And that travel league team leads to.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
You becoming a prospect on a premier high school team.
And that hot premier high school team gets you drafted
or get you into the club. It's a pipeline. Wayne
Gretzky commented on this in Hockey fifteen odd years ago.
He said, someday it's happening. Right now, the NHL is
just for Canadian kids and American kids. It's just going
to be a sport for rich kids. And if you
(27:30):
see the backgrounds of these NHL players today, that's exactly
how it's turned out. You're weed it out before you're
ten years old if you actually come from this money.
So it's not a meritocracy and the way it used
to be.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Well, but I think it's fair to say that, like
the same thing is in the job market. Generally, you
can get a job in sports, you can make it
on a team through nepotism, but you're not to last
because you have to perform. I mean, it's a performative
(28:05):
form of entertainment like most everything else. If you can't act,
maybe you could get hired to go to Broadway, but
you're not going to You're not going to last if
you can, you know, if you can find your way
onto a major league team somehow, if you go, oh
for twenty, you're finished. You're not going to be sustained.
(28:29):
So I agree to some extent that there's this nepotism,
but sports is still all about performance and if nothing else,
if you can't perform, you're going to get booed off
the field, and that by itself will be a humiliating
experience in addition to being you know, basically sent to
(28:51):
the minors, are removed from the team because you're not
good enough.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Again, it's not a pure clean sport anymore. And to me,
it's inevitable when the money gets this big. You know,
I'm not being naive about it. I am expressing I
guess some surprise that fans are prepared to be treated
this shabbily by players and Lams. McCullers, to me, is
the perfect example where because he didn't enjoy being booed
(29:19):
for his poor performance, he accused you soon Astros fans
of potentially murdering his children. I think that's what we're
at today. They do not want the average fans to
give them any guff. Give us your money, bet on
the game. Fine, don't criticize us. Were we're on this, We're.
Speaker 5 (29:39):
In elite, you know, you don't criticize us.
Speaker 6 (29:40):
And why cheer for that?
Speaker 5 (29:42):
Why be a fan of that? Is what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
We're going to be back after this shall break to
find out the future of fandom in Major League Baseball.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Don't go anywhere.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
For your freedom and your liberty. Liberty Nation with Mark
edge Alitis.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
And you're back on limbtin Nation Radio or Remaina host
Mark Antoni's we'll continue our talk with Joe Schaefer, Andrew
Moran and Tim Donner on Major League Baseball. It's a
bit of a special.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Edition for you.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Now for our last segment here, I guess the question
I want to ask is we've talked about how from
some aspects, money has been bringing down the respect for
the game that many people had. But is it a
better game now than it was twenty thirty forty years ago?
Because I'm not a big football fan. By football here,
(30:36):
I mean soccer. But if you take a player from
the nineteen sixty six World Cup, Britain's last glory day
in terms of international football, and you take the players,
the key players from that team, you put them against
middling players today, I think it would be night and day.
I think the middling players would they're so much faster
(30:58):
and more aggressive in their plays, and that their skills
are especially a lot of South American players that the
skills because they both learned to play in very tight quarters,
which means they can manipulate a ball rather than just
passing and kicking over distance. That there's a very different sport,
but away from soccer for now, and let's get that
(31:20):
question to baseball. Is it a different game? Is it
better for the fans the actual gameplay? Tim What don't
you kick us off on us?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, all you have to do is look at an
old tape of a game from the nineteen fifties or sixties,
looking to build the builds up the players, the muscular builds,
the scale at all, outline of the players, and you
can see that it's an entirely different game. Now balls
(31:50):
can be hit much further, Pitches can be thrown much faster.
I mean, it used to be when somebody threw the
ball one hundred miles an hour or twenty years ago,
it was a headline in the baseball among baseball enthusiasts, Wow,
we hit one hundred miles an hour. Now you've got
(32:11):
probably four or five pitchers on every pitching stat that
can throw the ball more than one hundred miles an hour,
and nobody pays much attention. The athletes are clearly superior
to those of the old days because they have so
much more available to them to keep themselves fit. Another
(32:32):
big thing is that it used to be that baseball
had such paltry salaries and most players had to hold
down another job in the off season. But now with
an average salary and the average salary of four million
dollars for major league players, they turned baseball into a
(32:54):
year round endeavor and they're working out through the entirety
of the offseason, through the laid full in winter to
get ready for the next season. So the quality of
the game is no comparison now to thirty or forty
years ago. Does that mean that the product is better? Well,
(33:14):
that's open to the eye of the beholder. But there's
no question that the athletes in baseball are faster, stronger,
pitch better, run, faster, and just all the elements that
make a baseball player. It's clearly a superior product. But
(33:38):
as I said, and I'm sure Joe Away and this
if not Andrew, whether the fact that the players are
so much more advanced is separate from the issue of
whether the product that's put on the field is better
than when we were all growing up.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
What do you say, Joe, Is it a game that
you enjoy more as an adult or as a kid,
And is part of that a nostalgia issue.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
It's not just nostalgia, although that is a big part
of it, and I would think Tim would agree with me.
Everything he said was unassailable. But the big difference between
the game that I grew up watching, that he grew
up watching and today is fundamentals that these players do
not have fundamentals, And a lot of it is the
game today is based on home runs and power pitching
(34:27):
to get these guys to throw one hundred miles per hour,
but they can only go five innings because they're throwing
maximum every pitch. You know, Nolan Ryan, who threw one
hundred miles per hour thirty years ago when he was
forty years old, could throw one hundred and forty pitches
and go eight nine innings. So are these pitchers better.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
Than that today because of that? I don't know.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
The big difference to me with baseball is bat on
ball contact hitting. Where are the three hundred hitters? And
I understand it's harder to hit you now, these guys
throw one hundred miles with the ball moving and all.
Just a complete lack of three hundred hitters. And the
idea which is prevalent with this analytics driven thing in baseball,
the idea that a bas hit can be a bad
(35:11):
thing that you can hit a single, and it's like, well,
statistically a guy who strikes out, you know, four or
five times and then hits one home run is better
than a guy who's hitting three thirty and they're all singles.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
I've never bought that.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
I've never accepted that Rod Carew, you know, is a
great player. Rod Kru would be a great player today.
I don't know if teams would even want Rod crew
and the team today because.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
He didn't hit enough home runs.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
But for me, that style of baseball was better. It's
not nostalgia. As a fan, I enjoy watching the ball
getting in the gaps, getting the field that the fielders
having to make a play, the base runner is running,
and to me, that has been so it's not gone,
but it's been reduced, and I'm kind of hoping it
(35:56):
comes back. You're seeing some really good hitters coming up
into the game nowadays. I'd like to see a return
to the three hundred hitter and just fundamentally sound sports.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Well you reckon Andrew mbg A make baseball great again.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
Well, I'm in a bit of both camps. I'm with both
Tim and Joe. I mean, but I mean, you have
to give credit to Rob Manfred. He's the commission of MLB,
and despite his ridiculous handy handling of the astros cheating scandal,
he's made some positive moves to you know, appease all
size the argument. You know, one of the things he
did was introduce the pitchclock. Now I was hesitant because
I'm a purist. I love, you know, when when pitcher
(36:33):
step out of the box and try to do the
mounted excuse me, and they try to do head games
with the opposing players, YadA, YadA, YadA. But overall, that
pitch count has made the game a lot more joyable,
especially if you're if you're a forty year old person
who has to work the next day and doesn't want
to stay up till midnight watching a game between the
Tampa Bay Raids and the Cincinnati Reds. You know you
don't want to do those. Sorry, Joe, I'm just kidding.
(36:54):
Thanks to me. But over I and also other things
that I mean, they banned the shift, and they made
the base is bigger to encourage more base running stealing.
So all these things they're trying to do a balancing
act by by by Major League Baseball. But I think
but you know one thing you'll learn, Mark, is that
one thing that baseball fans love is statistics. And you
(37:15):
go back, you look at some of the greatest hitters
in in MLB history, and they will not be able
to stack up with some of today's pictures. You know,
you see the movement on these nine eight mile power
or you know, curveballs or sweepers or cutters. It's just
absolutely phenomenal what these pictures are doing. Uh with with
with with with you know, high speed. Of course, they
break their arms and they have to have Tommy surgery
(37:36):
a couple of times, but that's so much who's if
you watch the product, it's it's just.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
So No, I don't think so, I think it. It
is consistent with a bigger, more spectacular product, where things
are bigger, faster, stronger. But like Joe said, short, you
(38:02):
now have some teams that are no longer willing, like
the New York Mets, to spend massive amounts of money
on starting pitchers because they all break down, and a
starting pitcher only pitches five or six out of every
forty five innings, it's not worth the investment. So it's
harder to calculate where we're headed because of the breakdown
(38:25):
of starting pitching, where they're told to just go as long,
throw the ball as hard as they can for as
long as they can, and wait for their arm to
blow out inevitably. And this is the thing with gambler,
is that you're sort of it's a different angle on
this question, but you're sort of gambling against the inevitable
(38:48):
injuries that players are getting to an incredible degree that
Los Angeles Dodgers have fifteen pitchers on the injured list now,
especially for people that are betting long term, like who's
going to win the pen, and who's going to win
the World Series, or even who's going to win a
given series between a couple of teams. There's so many
(39:12):
variables now that you know, I think gambling it is
following a base for more than it is leading it.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Joe Shaefer, Andrew Moran, Tim Donner, thanks for being here,
and that's all we have time for on this week's
edition of Libutination Radio Head Coast to Coast on the
Radio American Network. Count in your host, Mark As. Thank
you to our guest today Andrew Moran, Joe Shaefer, and
Tim Donner. You are appreciated and thank you the listeners
at home for tuning in each and every week. Please
remember Libertination does not endorse candidates, campaigns, nor legislation, and
(39:46):
this presentation is no endorsement
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