“Charlie Hustle” died this week – 35 years after being banned for life from Major League Baseball and from enshrinement into its Hall of Fame. I don’t need to regurgitate Pete Rose’s stats; anyone who saw him play knows how he earned his nickname and deserves to be formally recognized as one of professional baseball’s greatest players.
Rose’s death got me thinking again about how gambling laws and attitudes toward such laws have changed over the years. Webster defines hypocrisy as “the practice of claiming to have moral standard or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not confirm” or a “pretense.” I think this word aptly applies – especially when, also this week, New York enacted a law requiring “all advertisements for gambling and sports betting to include warnings about potential harmful and addictive effects of gambling.” NY S1550/A1118.
Morality has traditionally been the impetus for gambling legislation. In the 1830s Evangelical reformers began denouncing lotteries on moral grounds, leading to 10 state constitutions expressing banning lotteries by 1890, and all states outlawing private commercial lotteries. Courts took up the charge upholding the criminalization of games of chance that “cultivate a gambling spirit and tend to a hatred of honest labor and to a desire to obtain riches or money without the necessary expenditure of industrious energy.” People v. Gibson, 109 N.Y. 389, 404 (1888).
Following the acquittal of eight Chicago White Sox players charged with accepting bribes to throw the 1919 World Series, Major League Baseball established the Office of the Commissioner for the purpose of overseeing the integrity of the game and tasked Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis with ending all betting on the sport. Landis banned for life all eight White Sox players, including the great Shoeless Joe Jackson – who had a record 12 hits in the 1919 World Series and batted a both-team high .375.
Landis was appointed with the explicit concern of baseball games being rigged, saying upon his appointment: “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever again play professional baseball.”
In 1989, MLB Commissioner A. Barlett Giamatti banned for life Pete Rose – who had more career hits and games played than any other major leaguer – for alleged sports betting. In his statement imposing “baseball’s ultimate sanction, lifetime ineligibility”, Giamatti stated: “I believe baseball is an important, enduring American institution [which] must assert and aspire to the highest principles – of integrity, of professionalism in performance, of fair play within its rules” while recognizing that it is an “institution composed of human beings [which] will not always fulfill its highest aspirations.” Statement of Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, August 24, 1989.
In 1992 Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) to outlaw sports betting nationwide, exempting four existing states, with the overt purpose to “keep sports gambling from spreading” under the fear that it would “threaten to change the nature of sporting events from wholesome entertainment for all ages to devices for gambling.” S. Rep. No. 102-248, pp., 4-6 (1991). The State of New Jersey led the fight to overturn PASPA after passing a 2012 law allowing for sports gambling at licensed locations, based on a 2010 referendum showing overwhelming public support to legalize sports gambling.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in Murphy v. NCAA, ruled PASPA unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment for commandeering power from the states. In concluding its decision, the Court wrote, “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own.” 584 U.S. 453, 486 (2018).
Since that time, Congress has not acted to regulate sports gambling directly, and 38 states, plus D.C., have enacted legislation approving some form of sports gambling.
As of January 2024, regulated sportsbooks had taken over $300 billion from sports betting while paying local and state governments over $2 billion. Add that to the $95.6 billion in state lottery sales nationwide and you can see how legalized gambling is a lucrative business for states who are ostensibly concerned with the supposed immorality of gambling.