Baseball has a troubled history with gambling. The most famous – or infamous – incident is the “Black Sox Scandal.”
During the 1919 World Series, the heavily-favored Chicago White Sox were stunned 5-3 in a best-of-9 series by the Cincinnati Reds. However, a year later, eight White Sox players were accused of conspiring with gamblers to lose the Fall Classic on purpose.
They were all acquitted in a 1921 trial but were banned for life from professional baseball by then-commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Another involved MLB’s all-time hits leader Pete Rose, who received a lifetime ban from the sport in 1989 for betting on Cincinnati Reds games while he was a player/manager for the team.
Rose, whose ban makes him ineligible for election to baseball’s hall of fame, admitted in his 2004 autobiography he bet on baseball while Reds manager and, three years later, told ESPN Radio he bet on the Reds to win every night.
In 2023, Americans gambled a record $119.84 billion on sports, a 27.5% increase from the previous year, according to the American Gaming Association’s Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker.
