The Gambling Effect
I’m a bit late in getting this out again, and so this article will be pretty short. My apologies in advance.
If you haven’t seen it yet, there are allegations that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recent recommended getting rid of the NBA Draft in part due to pressure coming from gambling companies.
Naturally, I’m not in a position to know whether this is true or false. However, there are a couple of implications here that are pretty interesting if you’re a fan of baseball history:
A scandal like this would put the Black Sox scandal to shame. The Black Sox scandal has its own sketchy history and all sorts of unanswered questions. In particular, the relationship between how the scandal unfolded and the attempts to unseat Ban Johnson as the head of baseball is something that really needs to be closely examined. However, I’m not aware of any time in the history of sports in which the head of the league wound up being significantly pressured to act by gambling interests.
Removing the draft would likely cause certain teams to be awful forever. The few proponents of this idea claim that good players would willingly go to awful teams so they could be the best player around. However, if you’re familiar with the history of any sport, you know that athletes tend to not enjoy playing for awful teams for a long time. You’d likely see a situation similar to what we had with the New York Yankees between the 1930s and late 1950s, when older declining players were basically pushed out to other teams to open up room for new and young talent.
It might not be about setting the line. Articles like this one insinuate that sports books are upset about the impact that deliberate tanking might have on setting accurate lines. Of course, if you’re setting the lines and doing your job as the house correctly, it’s not going to be a huge problem: you merely adjust the line according to how betting is going. It seems more likely to me that the sports books are concerned that bettors are deliberately avoiding teams suspected of deliberate tanking because of how unpredictable they can be.
It might not be about gambling after all. Deliberate tanking has been a problem in the NBA for decades. This is largely because basketball is a sport in which a dominant player or two can make a tremendous difference - something that you really don’t see in sports like baseball. It’s extremely difficult to think of an equitable way to ensure that talent is evenly distributed among NBA teams without resorting to some sort of draft lottery.
Anyway, I know this isn’t strictly related to baseball, though there are a few interesting implications. Basketball has historically had more problems with gambling scandals than baseball. However, that doesn’t mean that Major League Baseball might not face a similar scandal in the future.
I almost never play the Evil card, but I've long thought gambling was Evil — a shameful vice. I detest its rise in baseball. It seems antithetical to the spirit of the game.
Hadn't seen anything about Silver supporting ending the draft -- just saw it on a laundry list of tanking solutions in The Athletic. The favorites there seemed to be expanding the tams drawing for first choice and eliminating the team that got it the year before, or eliminating all protected picks except #1. As you noted, tanking was a fan complaint long before the official gambling alliances began, and the only reason it would affect gambling houses is because it'd decrease the betting handle; they get their share of the take regardless of the odds.