“I don’t care.”
Those were the stunning words of longtime ESPN personality Michael Wilbon on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption on Monday when it came to addressing the Major League Baseball gambling scandal. Over the weekend, Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted and charged by federal prosecutors with fraud, bribery, and and conspiracy charges. The pair are alleged to have intentionally thrown balls on specific pitches to win prop bets for themselves and others.
The two Guardians pitchers could face up to a maximum of 60 years in prison based on all of the charges.
“If guilty and there’s punishment, so be it,” Wilbon said. “I don’t care. At the highest levels of the pyramid in this country, in this culture, everybody’s betting now.”
It’s the second major gambling related scandal to result in arrests in the professional sports world in as many months. In October, Terry Rozier of the Miami Heat was indicted on money laundering in wire fraud when he conspired to exit a game early in order that his under prop bets would be successful. Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups was arrested in a separate scheme involving an illegal poker game.
But here’s where the two cases vastly differ: one received wall-to-wall breaking news coverage while the other was merely a blip on the radar of the sports world.
Take PTI for instance. On the day the gambling investigation broke, it was the lead story on the program. When discussing the MLB gambling scandal, it was part of the “mail time” segment much later in the show. For the NBA, Wilbon himself nodded along as Tony Kornheiser talked about the seriousness of the issue and said that Rozier should be banned from the NBA for life. He agreed with Kornheiser that there was “no doubt” that the NBA had to protect its integrity.
So what changed in just two weeks? How could Michael Wilbon go from talking about the heaviness of a gambling scandal to saying that he flatly doesn’t care?
It wasn’t just PTI that downplayed the MLB scandal compared to their NBA coverage. As a network, ESPN’s talk shows barely mentioned the Clase and Ortiz arrests. It received one mention on Sunday Night’s SportsCenter with SVP, one mention from Mike Greenberg on Get Up and no coverage on First Take or The Pat McAfee Show. After the PTI segment, the scandal was not mentioned again until 12:45 a.m. ET on Tuesday morning after the network had dedicated pregame, game, and postgame coverage to Monday Night Football. Compare that to October when the NBA gambling scandal received all day coverage on pretty much every major show.
So what gives? And what could cause the dissonance?
Political impact
For starters, the federal government made a much bigger show of the NBA arrests. There was an obvious press and PR component to the timing of it happening on a Thursday morning. For the MLB arrests, it was unsealed on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of NFL action. There was no Kash Patel press conference this time around.
Similarly, the political reaction towards Major League Baseball has been noticeably absent compared to what is facing the NBA. The Republican-led Congress has demanded answers from Adam Silver on the NBA side of things. There have yet to be similar calls for accountability from Rob Manfred.
Was that intentional? Stephen A. Smith made it clear that he believed Donald Trump and his administration was coming for the NBA in the wake of the controversy. Given the NBA’s outspokenness on cultural issues that would run counter to the conservative agenda, like its support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and the difference in how each case has been played by the federal government, perhaps there is something to that line of thinking.
Did ESPN learn a lesson?
ESPN pulled its own betting promo mid-broadcast as Mike Greenberg discussed FBI arrests of Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups.
Photo Credit: Get Up
ESPN was widely criticized for their coverage of the NBA gambling scandal. Its personalities were largely left out on a limb trying to break it down in real time and the network leaned on their star opinion-givers instead of shifting into hard news coverage. The results left a lot to be desired.
Given the MLB indictment news broke on a Sunday, ESPN had plenty of time to chart a course for coverage on Monday. Instead, the network largely stuck to the playbook of non-stop football talk, only giving brief news updates as it related to the case.
ESPN’s relationship with the gambling industry has been under the microscope in recent weeks after the NBA gambling scandal broke. They pulled the plug on ESPN Bet with Penn Entertainment and are now shifting into a partnership with DraftKings.
Whether it’s because the network had second thoughts about their NBA coverage, didn’t want to highlight the gambling industry in spite of recent events, or just didn’t think it was sexy enough, ESPN decided to pass on highlighting the MLB scandal in any in-depth fashion.
MLB vs. NBA
There has been a debate for years now which sport comes second behind the NFL in terms of popularity, whether it be baseball or basketball. The truth is that it’s really college football, but we’ll put that aside for now.
Major League Baseball has been enjoying soaring ratings and rising attendance in recent years. Meanwhile, there has been constant debate around the NBA’s ratings with (again) mostly conservative critics praying for the league’s downfall.
Baseball fans also have another feather in the cap for how big the gap was between viewership for the recent World Series Game 7 was in comparison to the NBA Finals Game 7 earlier this summer.
But in spite of that, the average NBA star is still much more recognizable than their MLB counterparts. Several years ago, Mike Trout infamously had the same Q rating as NBA journeyman Kenneth Faried. It speaks volumes that Terry Rozier, who was never an All-Star in ten years in the league, could get so much more attention than Emmanuel Clase, who is a three-time All-Star and two-time AL Reliever of the Year.
But it’s also the realities of the daily sports talk conversation in this country. At a national level, nothing outside the NFL sells quite like NBA drama. And for as much as the sport has grown, MLB rarely breaks through in the same way. That was one of the main complaints from Rob Manfred when ESPN and MLB tore apart their rights deal earlier this year.
On top of that, the NBA scandal had more sizzle. Poker games, x-ray glasses, Italian mob connections. Clase and Ortiz were caught throwing away the odd pitch here or there in what was a relatively rudimentary and unsophisticated scheme. Furthermore, the case against the Guardians pitchers were pretty much visible from the outset whereas the NBA allegations against Billups specifically were a shock to the masses.
All of these factors could play a role in the different levels of coverage. But when you line up the two side-by-side, it is curious how one could draw such levels of coverage and analysis while another could pass by without much fanfare at all. At the very least, both are cheating the game, both are cheating fans, and both are certainly worth caring about in at least some capacity.