EDITORIAL NOTE: As soon as I put this out, I was directed to a rumored reason for DeMarsico’s departure. My thoughts on the larger world of sports betting still stand.
I am heading to Las Vegas in a few weeks. It will be my first time in Sin City. Never have I pulled a slot machine lever, nor sat at a blackjack table. I have never been to a casino. Primarily because I rarely had any money to blow on risk. I still really don’t, but I’ve told myself that I can take a few hundred bucks out of my paltry savings account as a budget for the poker table.
This does not mean I never gambled. Back in 2019 I discovered that you could sign up for shady offshore sports betting websites. I started small. A dollar on an NBA game moneyline, two dollars on the Mets runline. If you don’t know what these terms mean, do your best to stay ignorant. You’ll be better off in the long run.
Naturally, like everyone else who starts gambling on sports, your wagers start increasing with your victories. You love that dopamine hit when Iona women’s basketball beats the spread for you. You like that a two-dollar bet made you interested in Iona women’s basketball. You see the money in your account increasing. You ask yourself, why am I pacing myself so slowly? I can do this faster if I bet more. One hundred dollars on University of Miami men’s basketball. The bet hits! Time to go faster! Three hundred dollars on the Houston Rockets!
The Rockets lost.
This is the fork in the road. Luckily, that three hundred dollars was not from my savings account. I managed to make that money from that Miami basketball bet. It was not rent or grocery money. I was not suddenly in a financial jam with no way out. That’s when I decided to chill.
I still do an occasional sports bet, but never anything more than three dollars. With the legalization of sports betting in New York, I have about a hundred bucks sitting in one of the many sportsbook providers that blast ads on TV, at the stadium, on billboards, on the radio, during podcasts, on the subway, and before YouTube videos, among other places. If I’m stuck waiting for someone at a bar, watching the great evil of American society–the NFL–I can keep myself occupied by throwing a buck on the 49ers.
I am not representative of the crushing story that undergirds all this fanatical gambling in our society. The person who bets their car payment on the Cleveland Browns with no contingency plan. The person making subsequent bets after they lose that three hundred dollars, trying to recoup the loss but only digging themselves further in the hole. We all know gambling is dangerous and addictive. In my life I saw society wake up to the ills of tobacco and alcohol, and respond with restrictions and messaging to curb the number of disastrous outcomes those vices foster.
Now it seems like we traded our restraint regarding those substances for a full embrace of gambling culture. Part of this feels inevitable. I think back to the dot com bubble, all those ads with the eTrade baby encouraging you to dip your toes in the stock market. What are stocks if not gambling on the economy? Now we have Polymarket and Kalshi–places where you can bet on the news. If you’re a Washington stooge you can cash in!
This is all lengthy window dressing to get at what’s really bothering me today: the departure of SNY’s John DeMarsico. DeMarsico directed the presentation of Mets games on TV with a cinematic eye, adding fun and clever flourishes whenever he could. Last year social media erupted in praise for DeMarsico, as the endless slew of “content creators” latched on to his demo reel showcasing his homages to some of cinema’s greatest moments.
In his farewell letter, DeMarsico cites a “different creative direction” for the SNY network as the impetus for his abdication. I don’t know what this new network mandate is, but if I were a betting man–sorry, I had to–I would say it is likely the push for more gambling related content in the broadcast.
The king of baseball play-by-play, Gary Cohen, refuses to do the ad reads for gambling apps. It only endears me to him more. It is not hard for me to imagine the suits at SNY wanting more of the oil running through the bedrock of America’s economy. Everything is about gambling now. This societal acceptance of wagering reveals a truth our leaders refuse to acknowledge: the American Dream is a lie.
If it ever had any semblance of truth, the fantastical American Dream is now dead and buried. There is no way to get ahead in this society. Prices will continue to go up, wages will remain stagnant. Forget any idea of working hard and getting ahead. Instead you are offered a different dream. It is by no means new. Las Vegas, Publisher’s Clearing House, and state lotteries started pushing the idea of the miraculous windfall quite awhile ago. You can add a new spoke on that wheel. Just bet your paycheck on the Dallas Stars. It’s not going to cover all the bills anyway, so why not take a chance? What do you have to lose? Wait, wait, don’t actually contemplate that question! Get your phone and start winning!
John DeMarsico might be moving on for reasons entirely separate from the invasion of sports betting. You might know those reasons by the time you’re reading this. That won’t change my annoyance with the creep of wagering into every aspect of our lives. Gambling can be fun, but it must be regulated. With those sketchy off-shore betting sites I was never comfortable putting more than a hundred dollars into one of the accounts. What if they just closed shop tomorrow? Now I get recommendations for bets to make while at a game.
Gambling should feel licentious and immoral. A lot of fun things, like booze, sex, and drugs, feel this way. The mild inaccessibility to vice makes it all the more thrilling. Our handlers decided that a Draft Kings account should be as common as a checking account. This decision ruins the fun while financially crippling thousands of ill-equipped people across the country. When gambling was illegal you had to make that extra effort, whether it was finding a bookie or some website ending in .eu. A lot of rubes would not go to the effort.
The vision of the future seems to be “you will be poor, and you will like it, but maybe you’ll get lucky!” If this is what drove DeMarsico away from broadcasting baseball, I don’t blame him one bit. Do I see a way out of this? Definitely not with our current leadership, and probably not with anyone the Democrats manage to get in the White House. We can’t put this genie back in the bottle, we’re just going to keep falling prey to its tricks.