March has been a shaky month for this little newsletter thing. It’s been a shaky month in general, honestly: I’m unemployed and my sleep schedule is incredibly fucked. I’m planning on getting it together in a big way this coming week, though. But anyway, my point is that I didn’t review an album this week and the Baseball section is kinda just a couple hundred words of complaining about Polymarket.
Everything is gambling now, huh. If I said what I think should happen to the folks behind Polymarket, I’d get put on some sort of list. But let me be clear: what I think should happen to them is NOT “they get to make a multi hundreds of millions of dollars deal with MLB.” I very much am not happy that this is happening.
I’m already not happy about how many ads for sports betting I get while watching a baseball broadcast. It feels like getting ads for heroin in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Like, the league really shouldn’t be encouraging this kind of thing. The Emmanuel Clase scandal happened not even one year ago: it should be obvious how these betting services create perverse incentives that harm the game.
But even if that weren’t the case, I think these apps are bad for people, and they’re bad for players. I don’t think it’s good that players are regularly getting death threats because they didn’t do the exact thing required to satisfy some angry dipshit’s parlay. And I don’t think it’s healthy to let every part of your life and leisure time get subsumed by gambling. Gambling should be a thing you have to go to a specific place to do. It should be a treat. Gambling on your cell phone is a really good way to destroy your dopamine receptors, wallet, and life, in roughly that order.
MLB as an organization is stupid and money hungry, though. Getting in bed with sports betting agencies and now Polymarket makes them a lot of money. Who cares about what it does to the game or its players or its fans? Rob Manfred sure doesn’t.
However, I’m still going to watch Baseball this year, because I am a big dummy who is willing to sit through one million of the most insipid gambling ads ever if it means I get to watch cool guy hit ball. I’m just going to be complaining so much, is all.
Now, this is a tangent, but remember back when governments regulated things? Imagine if it was still illegal to have an app that lets you gamble on sports. Imagine if any government was willing to go after like, Polymarket and Kalshi for literally turning war crimes into horse racing. That would be pretty cool, I think. This whole situation really underlines why a free market actually completely sucks. Left to its own devices, the market will orbit more and more around human beings’ worst, most destructive impulses. We need regulation to force people to make money off of stuff other than apps that make you crazy.
Anyway, it’s almost the start of the regular season, and that means it’s almost time for my “following two new teams every week” series. Get excited for that, and let’s all try to never think about Polymarket again.
I failed to settle on an album to review this week. Consider one of the two reviews from last week to be this week’s review. I listened to “Good Effort!” by Youniss a couple of times, and it was probably going to be the review album. I needed like, three more listens to start pinning it down though; it has a lot going on, and I mean that as a compliment of course. I certainly recommend it, though I do not have a review in me as of now.