I moved across the country in 2019, packing a VW Jetta with pretty much everything I owned and coming to Vancouver. One of the first groups of people I met and made friends with were the core of my Sunday wood bat league team, and through them I started technically sports gambling. We didn’t just play together on the field, most of us formed the backbone of a fantasy league, $50 buy-in, pretty standard Yahoo roto league sort of thing. My best finish is third, and this year I decided not to play.

I’m a little wary of the “I decided to stop doing this thing and you all need to know about it” type of thing that’s kept certain of the Substack class in business, but this isn’t Substack and you can go read a prospect report one byline below mine on this same blog. And I do think my reasons are real, and reflect a growing problem; the gambling’s gotta go.

Some folks out there are in the thrall of the “predictions markets” (read: betting in a quarter-zip Patagonia) in the same way they were in the thrall of the NFT movement after being in the thrall of the 3D TV movement after being in the thrall of the Netbook movement, and I really wouldn’t care about this newest attempt to separate you from your money if not for two things. First, this idea that you can purchase a contract (make a bet) on anything from the pitch you’re about to throw in an MLB game to the death of a country’s leader should just sit with you in an uncomfortable way, and second, baseball’s highest level is signing off on that concept as an Official Partner.

Yes, MLB and Polymarket are now bedfellows, and that the announcement came the same week the league confirmed that Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were moved from paid suspension to unpaid leave as the investigation into their pitch-rigging scandal seems to move to another level is either ironic or perfectly fitting. Rob Manfred wants to promote every possible way to suck another dollar fifty out of a fan while arguably the best relief pitcher in the sport will likely never appear in professional baseball again, all centered around the same service!

It’s not an original thought on my part, but maybe we actually got Las Vegas correct as a species. An oasis in a desert where anything goes, and you always leave feeling a little sick to your stomach. Maybe that was the ideal for something like sports betting, a place you could go but it would take real friction — you had to take a plane or a road trip, you needed a hotel, you needed to worry about food. Even the casino in my city takes some kind of friction, a 25 minute subway ride that mandates I leave the home.

As that friction has worn down, see McKay Coppins’ illustrative example, the inversely correlated pervasiveness of the vice has ratcheted up:

If there’s one thing that I’ll forever be grateful to Michael Kay for, it’s the brusqueness with which he handles the YES Network-mandated parlay of the day on every broadcast. I wish the YES Network was uninterested in taking gambling money whatsoever — would be a choice time for the “Yankee excellence” branding that keeps the Stadium from being named something like Amazon Field, but alas. If nothing else it seems the voice of the Yankees is at best unenthusiastic about the locustlike avenues to give your money to an app.

I don’t know what the answer is in an era of absentee landlord legislatures and a financial climate where beating analyst expectations is now expectations. The joy of a late-inning, Ben Rice go-ahead single has become overshadowed by a busted parlay that needed him to hit a double. A player with Hall of Fame talent was able to bet against himself in real time, and like most infections, there’s never just one case. Someone on Opening Day is using these “prediction markets” or DraftKings or FanDuel or MGM or some other app that I haven’t even heard of yet to undermine both the integrity and wonder that baseball can still stir.

Maybe me leaving a 12-team roto league won’t fix that, but I have to start somewhere. Maybe when sports betting looks more like this again, I’ll come back.