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Sources: Padres' Marcano faces ban for betting (espn.com)

The potential ban of Marcano comes in the wake of the NBA handing down a ban to Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter for disclosing confidential information to bettors, limiting his participation in at least one game and betting on NBA games while playing in the G League.

Lifetime Ban.

It was only a matter of time, in this current environment where in-game announcers report on current odds for games, until we heard those words again.

Lifetime Ban for betting on baseball.

This story is both shocking and unsurprising.

It will be important to keep track of this and other stories relating to athletes gambling on their sports because I think MLB and the sports media industry will do everything in their power to downplay them. Indeed, ESPN kind of checked its swing in its reporting, so far, on the story about Tucupita Marcano – the linked article doesn't link to the original report from the Wall Street Journal about Marcano and, perhaps more interestingly, links to the ESPN team page for the Toronto Raptors in the text above about the NBA ban for Jontay Porter instead of linking to an ESPN story about that ban. At least it doesn't link to a page showing the current odds on Thursday's opening game in the NBA Finals.

Despite their efforts to downplay it, fans – and gamblers – can't ignore it.

I think we can at least rely on ESPN to announce the presence of sports betting every time it takes the field. Completely ignoring a story like this would destory any bit of news credibility the network has left. It still fashions itself as a news outlet on some level. Make no mistake, though, ESPN will not give us detailed, in-depth reporting as individual gambling stories appear in the coming years. That would be actual journalism, something the entertainment network abandoned a long time ago.

And if there's any doubt about that, consider this – SportsCenter ran a segment on the Marcano story below the fold this morning. Think about that. SportsCenter, the flagship current news program on the leading sports media network made a programming decision to push a report on a potential lifetime ban in Major League Baseball, something that hasn't been an issue in decades, to the back half of the show the day after the story broke. And this when the NBA and NHL playoffs, the two major sports events in the United States right now, are paused for a few days before the respective finals get underway later this week. There's literally nothing happening in either playoffs right now.

Journalists would pursue the Marcano story vigorously and give it the proper spotlight on the front page and as a lead story on SportsCenter. ESPN, of course, views it differently. After all, it operates ESPN Bet, its "official sportsbook." The network clearly stands to benefit from starving this story, and any story about problems arising from sports gambling, of oxygen. The problem for us, as news-hungry sports fans, is that the network, as the 800-pound gorilla of sports news, has its hand tightly gripped on the valve controlling flow.

Maybe we'll get a 30 for 30 documentary on the whole thing in a few years.

Surely that will save face.

tags: sports journalism espn mlb nba gambling

posted by matt in Tuesday, June 4, 2024

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