I wrote two pieces for the Athletic this week, breaking down the MacKenzie Gore trade and the Freddy Peralta trade. My top 100 prospects ranking runs on Monday.
At AV Club, I reviewed the board game Gingham, a family-level game of area control that gets very tense as the game approaches its end.
I sent out an issue of my free email newsletter last weekend, but the next one won’t go out until at least Monday, for obvious reasons.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: My colleague Paul Tenorio wrote about the kidnapping of soccer coach Adrian Heath, as he was lured by the promise of a lucrative job with a Saudi club. The club exists, but the job didn’t, and Heath was lucky to survive the ordeal.
- The New Yorker exposes Bari Weiss’s “hostile takeover” at CBS News, which has been a ratings and credibility disaster.
- In Harper’s, Jasper Craven writes about the impending sports betting cataclysm, with the added perspective from a habitual sports bettor – himself.
- ICE officials claim their agents can enter homes without a warrant, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. And this story just sort of drifted by as Trump and his toadies continue to flood the zone with so many outrages that we can’t keep up.
- Black pepper and olive oil contain chemicals that may help our bodies absorb nutrients in other foods. I use both of those ingredients constantly, so I will live forever.
- Researchers at the Kiel Institute found that American taxpayers paid 96% of the added costs of Trump’s tariffs, calling it an “own goal.”
- A new European social network called W is coming, maybe, although I’m not sure what this offers that other alternatives to the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.
- The White House used AI to make a civil rights attorney appear to be crying when she was arrested when, in fact, she was quite stoic at the event. She was part of a group protesting at a church whose pastor is the acting director at a local ICE office in St. Paul.
- Cochise County (Arizona) Sheriff Mark Dannels, a Trump sycophant, has used his public office to promote a private drone company with a Trump crony on its board. The Phoenix New Times had previously reported on how Dannels may have gotten up to $250,000 in slush money from ICE.
- Cows can use tools, if we let them. I for one welcome our new bovine overlords!
- Allplay has a Kickstarter up for the Mountain Goats legacy game and the solo game Enchanted Ivy. I like Mountain Goats as a fun, quick-playing filler game.
That article by Jasper Craven was scary, esp the line about how alcoholics don’t think getting the perfect drunk is going to recoup their losses from their prior drinking.
That said, he only scratched the surface of the issue. Parlays are part of it & are a suckers bet, but, the real issue is all of the prop bets, especially “under” bets or bets on failure, bets on each play, etc. It perverts the interest in the game itself, leads to being able to bet way more often than is safe & leads to the Clase/Ortiz stuff & the indicted NBA players, too.
I won’t even get into the casino games, it’s just as bad. First of all, you lose the “social” aspect that can make gambling in a casino with friends such a fun experience. But, you can also play so many more hands/turns because you don’t have a dealer/croupier having to manually pay out, reshuffle, reset, etc after each turn/hand. With the odds in the casino’s favor, the more you play, the more likely you are to use.
Lastly, the credit limits on the gambling apps allow you to bet much more/get more behind. At the casino, you lose your cash, you get a cooling off period by having to go to the ATM to get more $$, not so with an app.
These are all really good points.
I’ve bet on sports probably since I was 16. I grew up around my dad and uncles always talking about having a Jackson on the Cowboys, or some other games, or the occasional teaser/parlay. Still do. I hate to be that hipster guy, but it really was better and more palatable when it wasn’t so out in the open. You would have never spoken about sports gambling among mixed company even 10-15 years ago. You had to know someone, or someone that knew how to do it, and then you hoped and prayed your wire transfer from Bermuda would finally show up…
The scariest part is how openly you hear sports betting being discussed around teenagers in a high school setting. I hear the words “parlay” and “PrizePicks” on a daily basis among 11th and 12th graders.
Mountains Goats isn’t what I expected — I was thinking No Children, but it actually looks pretty kid-friendly. Don’t think I’ll pick it up (not This Year, anyway).
I did get Gingham via Kickstarter thanks to your post; got Gazebo with it, and played that one (pretty fun, felt more abstract than a theme that comes alive). Haven’t played Gingham yet but it looks fun.
Gazebo is a retheme of Qin, also kind of abstract with a theme stuck on it. I like this theme better, at least.
While I don’t want to minimize the damage done by gambling addiction, I was skeptical of Craven’s bona fides based on his reported $18K wagering total over four years at FanDuel. If bet only on football, that amounts to about $200 per weekend, of which he’ll win (on basic bets, anyway), almost half the time. His losses likely amount to something in the $2K range, which, while not great, is not a terrible amount to spend on a time-consuming hobby over four years. You may look down on him for that, I don’t.
Then I saw he bet $1000 on the Raiders to win.
Agreed. Sports gambling is a serious problem, but after reading the article (skimming the second half), nis numbers are a bit suspect.
18000 over 4 years doesn’t sound to me like a good illustration of the devastating effects of sports gambling .
Also, and maybe I missed this during my skimming of the second half, but did he discuss in any way extent, if nay, to which this adversely affected his life? Did he say anything about his own finances? I mean, for people with a solid steady income, $200 a week amounts to a responsible hobby.
I take him at his word that he feels the potential addiction chasm. I flirted with it myself once upon a time — anyone honest with themselves knows it’s there.
I haven’t read the entirety of Craven’s article yet, but when I encountered his statement that “it was FanDuel that gave me a reason to watch football” my heart sunk because I have heard similar from someone close to me, long before FanDuel existed.
Craven wasn’t a football fan at all prior to discovering FanDuel and he isn’t one now. He’s amongst those who aren’t interested in football (baseball, basketball, or whatever) unless they have a wager.
These people are not sports fans, even though they maintain that they are. In reality, they are gambling fans.
I’m not sure I have a point to make here other than to say I enjoy most sports, and I have zero interest in placing a bet on any of them, so I don’t understand the psychology.
I stopped being a fan of individual teams a long time ago, and for me at least, it’s super relaxing and enjoyable to watch a game (generally chosen because there are certain players I want to see) without having an emotional investment in the outcome. It would be exhausted if I were both financially and emotionally invested on a weekly or more basis. I just do not get any dopamine out of that.
@ Salty Scientist –
Likewise.
Sports became much more enjoyable to watch once I separated myself from any emotional attachment to specific teams.
Maybe this was in part the result of growing up rooting the for Mets, Knicks, and Jets…. That’s a lot of combined seasons without a championship.
When I hear friends unaffiliated with a team saying things such as “we didn’t run the ball well today”, I have to bite my tongue to avoid some sort of snide remark about the use of “we”.
Watching sports with people who cannot stop talking about how individual players are performing for their fantasy team is also unbearable.
I also do not wager (on sports). I’ll stuck to wagering on events I have a part in the outcome. Poker, for example. That’s an overall net negative on society as well, but I think the compulsion and addictiveness is lower in poker than other casino tables games and much lower than online sports wagering.
Back to te topic at hand – sports betting – somethign should be done. I just don’t know what.
Sadly I still an individual team fan, in many ways However I would never place a bet based on fandom.
I used to dapple in office pool types of things for maybe $2 or $5 a week and it was kinda fun. But then it got really nasty and insutling so I just quit. I just want to enjoy the games because I like them, without telling other people how stupid they are, or hearing the same back at me.
Cows using tools seem far less harmful than some of the humans who are running things. I too would welcome them as overlords.
Phoenix new times is a gift!
Saw you read austerlitz, and didn’t like it. No write up? I’m half way through and not sure I get it.
Didn’t write that one up – I can’t remember why. It didn’t seem to go anywhere, like a lot of postmodern literature.