Gambling is a numbers game, so here are a few: The pitcher Emmanuel Clase's 2025 salary from Major League Baseball's Cleveland Guardians is $4.5 million dollars. This weekend, prosecutors unveiled charges that he had made just $12,000 from two recent rigged pitches. And he could face as many as 65 years in prison (though such a stiff sentence seems unlikely). Clase and the fellow Guardians hurler Luis Ortiz were indicted last week for their involvement in the scheme, which allegedly netted bettors hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Attorneys for Clase and Ortiz have denied the allegations.) The scheme outlined in the indictment is the latest instance of legalized gambling's corrosive influence on professional sports. Major leagues have welcomed the industry with open arms and greedy palms, signing contracts with betting companies and bringing casinos into stadiums and arenas, but they act astonished when gambling starts to corrupt their own players. Traditional sports fandom involves rooting for your team to win; traditional sports gambling involves putting money on the game results too. The most notorious baseball-gambling episode was the 1919 'Black Sox' scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox (including 'Shoeless Joe' Jackson) were accused of intentionally losing the World Series as part of a mob betting scheme and banned from the sport....
Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, competes with its own deep mythology. So many of its highlights are in black and white, and so many of its GOATs are ghosts, that the former national pastime is easily dismissed as past its prime. It isn't. The 2025 postseason, which ended when the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the 11th inning of the seventh game of an ulcer-inducing World Series, stands with any in baseball history. The early rounds of the postseason were enlivened by extraordinary feats from the game's two biggest stars, but that was just baseball clearing its throat for the World Series, which earned its title'in English, Spanish, and Japanese; in the United States and Canada'as a genuine Fall Classic. Major League Baseball is 149 years old. The National League was founded a month before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. And the game somehow still delivers the unexpected and the unforeseeable. Game 3 of the World Series was a stone-cold thriller, with peaks of high drama and longueurs of exquisitely tense tedium. It started at 5:11 p.m. in Los Angeles and ended shortly before midnight, when the Dodgers' first baseman Freddie Freeman finally hit a solo home run to the black void of the batter's eye in center field. The home team earned a 6'5 win, a two-games-to-one series lead, and the chance for both teams to briefly rest the record 19 pitchers they collectively employed....
Sportswriters have been penning baseball's obituary for decades, claiming that America's pastime is past its time. The game is too slow, too stodgy, too old, too boring, they said. The kids don't care. A thrilling World Series, set to resume tonight with Game 6 in Toronto, will bring to a conclusion another blockbuster Major League Baseball season. The Blue Jays are one victory away from their first title in 32 years but must win against the game's best team and best player. A couple weeks ago, the Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani delivered arguably the single greatest individual performance in the 122 years of the World Series era by hitting three home runs and pitching six shutout innings. And then, 10 days later, he nearly outdid himself by reaching base nine times in one game. The rule changes implemented three years ago have all worked'most notably the pitch clock, which has cut the average game length down from 3 hours and 10 minutes in 2021 to 2 hours and 38 minutes this past year. Fans have responded to the quicker pace of play; attendance has surged, growing for the third straight year to an all-time high of 71.4 million. TV ratings are up again (more than 32 million people globally watched Game 1 of the World Series). Record revenues are flowing into the coffers of Major League Baseball. And after years of worry about the game's graying audience, the fan base is getting younger. Ohtani is the biggest star, but Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, and Bryce Harper have all broken through. Juan Soto signed the biggest contract in American sports. And, hey, even my Red Sox finally made the playoffs again....
The detention facility was located in the middle of the desert, about 225 miles northeast of Los Angeles. As I describe in my book 'When Can We Go Back to America' Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II,' barbed wire surrounded the perimeter and armed soldiers peered down from guard towers. The toilets and showers lacked partitions, and Nagano was forced to stand in long lines for hours in mess halls that served canned food. Her bed was a metal cot. She was directed to stuff straw into a bag for a makeshift mattress. She didn't know whether she and her family would ever be able to return to their Los Angeles home. One day, the teenager decided to pick up a glove and play softball. Her son, Dan Kwong, told me in an interview that Nagano ended up playing catcher for The Gremlins, one of the camp's many women's softball teams. 'In one game, a batter connected with the ball and then threw the bat, clocking my mom in the nose, breaking it,' he said. 'But despite her injury, she still enjoyed playing, even though she didn't think her team was very good.'...
