Newsletter 135: Sports Betting Is Bad for the Soul

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one is from December 2017, about how sports betting ruins most of the fun of sports. I am sure I will get used to things like teams submitting their lineups to the MGM Grand 15 minutes before they release it to the world so gamblers don’t have inside information … but it’s going to take a while.

Every year, I make one sports bet. If I’m in Las Vegas, I make it myself, and if not, I have my Dad — who usually makes at least one trip out there a year — make it for me. I put $100 on the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series. That’s it. I put the betting slip under a magnet on the side of the fridge, and I don’t think about it again until the baseball season is over. If the Cardinals win the World Series, I go out there and collect. If they don’t, I throw it away. In 2011, it actually paid off, and I won, at +2050 odds, about two thousand dollars, which came in handy considering I became a father about a month later. Winning that year allows me to go another decade and a half without a Cardinals title and still break even.

Otherwise, though: I don’t gamble on sports. I might just like sports too much to gamble on them. I know intellectually that money runs sports, just like money runs everything…