The NCAA Tournament, aka March Madness, is one of my favorite times of the year. But did you know one of the teams in the men’s tournament is being investigated for point shaving and possibly throwing games as we speak? That team is the Temple Owls, and some very shady results came to light the last week of the regular season. Most notably, their 28-point loss to the University of Alabama-Birmingham, which very coincidentally (or is it) became the team they beat to earn an automatic berth to the tournament less than two weeks later…
This is the danger of sports now aligning themselves with legal gambling sites across the country. By putting a green light on sports gambling, the players are much more likely to get involved, and not in a good way. Historically, when gambling has been open to the masses there have been a lot more cases of cheating and fixed matches…
As a student of 1910’s-era baseball, I know for a fact that a lot more games were manipulated by gamblers than just the famous 1919 World Series with the Chicago “Black Sox.” There are loud noises questioning other World Series around that time, especially the 1918 edition between the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, and plenty of regular season games going back for at least a decade before that still don’t smell right. In fact, it was the investigation of players throwing regular season games in late 1920 that broke the 1919 scandal wide open to the public, not an initial specific investigation into the series itself. The White Sox were close to repeating as American League Champions and making a second straight World Series when the scandal broke in September of 1920, and only then were the “8 Men Out” removed from the playing field. When the White Sox lost those players, the Cleveland Indians were just able to stay ahead of them and win the pennant (and eventually the series) …
The most notorious player who almost certainly helped fix games was actually one of the best players of the era, a San Jose native named Hal Chase. Chase has mostly been pushed to the sidelines of history now because of his gambling, but none other than Babe Ruth called him the best defensive first baseman he ever saw, and Ruth was teammates with Lou Gehrig for a decade. That’s how good Hal Chase was- when he was good. But he liked spending his money faster than he could earn it, and that made him a target, and, well, you can figure out the rest. There are lots of other pretty good players who got waylaid by an easy dollar, like Heinie Zimmerman, an outstanding shortstop who reportedly never collected a paycheck, but always asked the club treasurer for money until he was told he could have no more until the next payday…
Game odds weren’t the only gambling stats printed in the daily newspapers. All sorts of in-game wagers- what are known now as “prop bets”- were regular daily reading in the sports pages. When the pennant was out of reach late in the season, pitchers were sometimes asked if they would try all the way till the end and some are known to have responded that they bet on themselves to win 20 games, so they had reason to keep going hard…
And what are players supposed to do? They think they are getting rewarded, and the rug gets pulled out from under them by owners who see a way to avoid paying them. The freshest example is the San Francisco Giants and J.D. Davis. When the Giants signed Matt Chapman, Davis became expendable as a third baseman that isn’t quite as good as Chappy. So even though Davis won his arbitration case against the Giants and was awarded a $6.9 million contract, the Giants (and President of Baseball Ops Farhan Zaidi) took advantage of a rule that says arbitration-rewarded contracts aren’t fully guaranteed and cut Davis. The Giants were only required to pay him 30-days worth of the contract, meaning their payout to him was $1.1 million, not the $6.9 he was awarded…
It’s simply management taking advantage of a loophole to avoid paying somebody their full contract (happens all the time, as you are well aware). So Davis signed a $2.5 million deal with the A’s, and in his first public comments says “What players will want to go to an organization that appears so cold and callous?”
I have two big thoughts on this matter: one is yes, he kind of has a point, but the second is that he’s really only noticing this because it just happened to him. Let us leave no doubt, every team has cut a guy because he got injured and they bought out his contract to avoid keeping him on the roster, which is about as cold and callous as it gets. And every team has cut a guy who sucks. And every team has gotten rid of a guy for no other reason than they got a guy who’s more expensive than him and plays the same position but does it better…
If you want the most recent notable example there, it was a big deal that the Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani this off-season. That made Ohtani their designated hitter. So, who was the Dodgers main DH last year and where is he now? Why, it was J.D. Martinez, who hit 33 homers last year and is still unsigned as of this writing. You don’t hear that J.D. complaining about the Dodgers being “cold and callous” because they got somebody better than him…
Hmm, maybe it’s just a J.D. thing…
Let us also not let Davis off the hook here, far from it. The Giants offered him a $6.4 million contract, and even though he says he would have settled at $6.5, he went to arbitration. So, in other words, for a $100,000 difference he decided to fight for more. If he had taken the $6.4 million it would have been guaranteed. Instead, he won his hearing and got the $6.9 but it wasn’t guaranteed, so by winning he ultimately gave the Giants an out by paying the $1.1 million...
I get betting on yourself. I do. And I’m going to applaud any player getting all they can from a billion-dollar ballclub. But he had to have known the Giants wanted to sign Chapman. Heck, we all knew they did. How does his agent not know that arbitration opened him up for this exact scenario? Why didn’t his agent tell him to take the Giants offer and get the guaranteed $6.4 instead of taking this stand that ultimately ended up costing him some $4 million? His agency deserves plenty of blame here. Davis is trying, successfully in the public eye it seems like, to shift that blame to Giants management…
And finally, in my opinion it’s really hard to call another team “cheap” when you just signed with the A’s…
But the worst personnel move the Giants have made in years came today- the only full-time public address announcer that Oracle Park has ever heard, Renel Brooks-Moon, has been kicked out because of that old saw, money. For a team that is fighting the cheapness label (despite spending the 2nd most amount of money this free-agency season), this is a horrible look…
If they are going to get rid of an iconic voice now, Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper and Jon Miller and Dave Flemming, their radio and teevee broadcast teams, better be prepared when their contracts come up…
You can bet on it…
Spending $64 million on a pitcher with more mediocre seasons than Cy Young Awards (well, the fact Snell has two awards is impressive) and saving, perhaps, tens of thousands of dollars by letting go a beloved, iconic voice of the team and a key ingredient in the fan experience makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Baseball is rich in tradition and Renel Brooks-Moon became an institution at Oracle Park and for the team. Pay her whatever she asks. But, one has to wonder if her vocal support for Black Lives Matter in 2020 and a primary owner who financially supports the far right 1776 Project and donated $3.77M to right wing political candidates in 2021 and 2022 are connected...
While the Giants are far from a good look in the JD Davis situation, thanks for offering that Davis had the ability to manage the situation to his favor. He can spin, but he had a chance to earn more. If Chapman rediscovers his offensive prowess and Wade Jr. continues to generate a solid OBP and timely hits, fans will, for the most part (well, he is playing across the bay), forget about Davis' leading RBI total from 2023.
Anyone who thinks that Temple is the only gambling/ fixing problem that college basketball has is living in a fantasy world.