How Jeffrey Loria sort-of created MLB's gambling fixation and the European Super League idea
Plus, liking Rush Limbaugh got an NHL goalie uninvited from Team Germany; Conan O'Brien is calling it a day on late night, and Ontario's resentment government had a rough Monday, so there is that.
Two late-capitalist contagions that could wreck sports each track back to Jeffrey Loria. This is a story you can carry with you as you go about your day.
The first is the growing ties between sports and the gambling industry, and conflicts of interest created by major sports-news portals leaning in to dispensing betting advice.1 Have you no social consciences, madams and sirs? The second and more specific one is the European Super League in soccer, which is not happening for now, but whose seed merely lays dormant until the sun shines and people forget.
It all traces back to Loria and his machinations at the start of the 21st century. You likely know the bones of the swath Loria cut through the hearts of baseball diehards in Québec and South Florida. He traded up from an initial US$12-million investment in the Expos in late 1999 to a cashout in the billions when he sold the Miami Marlins in 2017 (and tried to claim he did not make a profit on the deal, which of course led to an obvious lawsuit that he had to settle for mid-seven figures in tip money) .
Loria bought his stake in the Expos only 10 years after Pete Rose’s ouster for betting on baseball while he managed Cincinnati. The institutional knowledge of baseball was stridently anti-gambling, going all the way back to when (there is that term again) public trust in the sport was threatened by the Black Sox World Series-fixing scandal in 1919.
The Expos’ obsolescence was obvious by 1990 to a young baseball fan who grew up a 3½-hour drive west of Montréal and a 2½-hour drive east of Toronto. That was when stories emerged the team’s original overseer, Charles Bronfman, could not find someone to take the team off of his hands. Take it from a fan of off-brand sports who lived in Ottawa for a decade: when there is constant speculation that a team is going to move or fold, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Loria, during his two years running the Expos, helped pry open the Pandora’s Box on MLB proscribing partnerships with gambling. This probably requires a trip into public archives … but the Expos were allowed to accept a sponsorship from Casino de Montréal during the two seasons Loria ran the team into the ground.
The stewards of the orphaned franchise in 2002 made sure to play up that the casino sponsorship was still in place after Loria’s exit. It was not necessarily the first such sponsorship that was allowed during the Bud Selig era. During Loria’s first year with the Expos, “the Sycuan Tribe, which runs a casino in San Diego County, paid more than $1.5 million to be the title sponsor of the San Diego Padres for the season.” (It’s become a long-time partnership for the Padres.) The Padres might have been first, but that is not as sensational or as sexy as dragging Jeffrey Loria.
Print the legend, people.
By 2003, Loria had acquired the Marlins in that shady three-team switcheroo. Loria used the money from selling the Expos to MLB and an interest-free loan from MLB to buy the Marlins from John W. Henry, who then bought the Boston Red Sox.
By midseason, there was a 240-foot-wide sign for Microsukee Resort and Gaming on the left-field wall of the Marlins’ home stadium in Miami. A certain ESPN writer named Darren Rovell noted in a story from that season, that “the team also came up with the largest outfield sign in all of baseball — the Miccosukee Tribe now practically owns left field.” Weirdly, Rovell, who has carved the ‘put a dollar value on everything’ beat at ESPN, did not let readers in on what business had bought this signage.2 The lid was off the jar. The Padres sponsorship might have started it, but the Marlins’ entire left-field wall effectively saying DURR GAMBLING IS GOOD.
Within a couple of years, both Loria’s Marlins and Henry’s Red Sox had won the World Series. The Expos were on the way to Washington with a managing partnership to be named later.3
Around that time, supporters of Manchester United over in Great Britain were sounding alarms over what the club’s new American management, the Glazer family, had planned for one of the ‘big six’ clubs in the English Premier League. Writing in The Guardian on 3 May, David Conn described how fans clearly saw this as “a leveraged buyout: the Glazers would not put a cent into United, but would want fortunes out.”
As Conn puts it:
So it is sad that the league, riven now by the “big six” and calling for the government to introduce legislation, did not listen to fans’ views a little bit more over the years, and instead ruthlessly fought the FA and progressive ideas for independent regulation.Many supporters have always believed the throwing of our clubs to the corporate takeover market was wrong for football culture, and have come to covet the German model, by which supporters’ associations have a 50%+1, controlling vote over clubs’ crucial decisions.
That does not directly connect to Jeffrey Loria. However, his co-colluder, John W. Henry, owns another ‘big six’ club, Liverpool FC. This is a straight-line reading, but owning the Red Sox instead of the Marlins surely helped Henry raise his clout and the capital to buy Liverpool FC. Henry was also an initiator with the Super League push, and had to apologize for it.
So all of that comes back to Loria. He was a pirate of the first order, and his effect on baseball and sports might be even more corrosive than generally contemplated.
Greiss gets a hard ‘nein’ off the Limbaugh post?
The greatest right wing in hockey history wore number nine for the Detroit Red Wings. Celebrating the death of a right-winger who mostly grated on decency and good taste led to Detroit goalie Thomas Greiss hearing ‘nein’ from Germany’s hockey federation.
A quick news search does not turn up any pickups of this story in North America, where the world men’s hockey championship is of secondary interest. But apparently Germany’s hockey federation has disinvited Greiss from playing in the worlds after “made a post on his Instagram page with a photo of conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh with the caption ‘#RIP’ following his death from lung cancer.”
The kneejerk reaction will be either “but free speech!” or “no one cares who plays goalie for Germany at the worlds anyway.”
So it’s a terrible injustice that Greiss might face consequences for liking a “toxic entertainer” who mainstreamed authoritarianism (and was an early adopter with propping up that guy who used to have a Twitter account). But at the same time, see, no one cares? Got it; I am sure the Germans have a good word for cognitive dissonance.
“As long as the current sporting management is in charge, Thomas Greiss will not be invited,” said sporting director Christian Künast in response to a renewed request from Ice Hockey NEWS. “We cannot be 100 percent sure of his attitude to our values, which are in the statutes. A nomination is therefore currently not an issue.”
Greiss has also liked Instagram posts in the past that have compared former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler. (markerzone.com, 3 May)
Greiss has had a credible season on a crummy team. He just recently had two shutouts in a row, and the Red Wings even won one of those games.
Germany, as you know, is much more aggressive than Canada or the loose republic south of Canada when it comes to legislators enacting “necessary curbs on free expression.” (That’s from a Reuters article where Chancellor Angela Merkel was concerned that dealing with that one guy’s Twitter account should not have been left up to a private company.) It is like they know from bitter experience about what can happen without checks and balances. The famous joke is, “what do you call one Nazi sitting at a table with 10 people? Eleven Nazis.”
Any way, good on the German hockey federation for high-roading it with Greiss.
A lot of Ls in Mulroney and Lecce
Chaos and wanting what is the worst for the most possible people are features, not a bug, with Ontario’s government for the property developers. Monday, at least, offered some hope about the resistance to a resentment government.
Over at the National Observer, Emma McIntosh published a long story about how the federal Liberals have ripped the environmental assessment for the dumb-on-arrival Highway 413 project in Southern Ontario away from the province. (Long story short: a bunch of developers with connections to the Progressive Conservatives own the land that would be used to build a highway that will not shorten travel times, to say nothing of getting commuters out of cars.)
The 413 — which has come under increased scrutiny over its environmental impact in recent months — will now be subject to a longer and more rigorous review. Many believe this effectively spells the end of the project. The planned highway, the subject of a National Observer/Torstar investigation published last month, would run through the protected Greenbelt. (National Observer, 3 May)
That file had been under the purview of transportation minister Caroline Mulroney. For those scoring at home, one, they have the internet on computers now and that is two huge policy failures for Mulroney since she took up that cabinet post.
In December 2019, Mulroney came to Hamilton (where I live) to announce that the aforementioned resentment government was killing the funding for a light-rail transit system that the congested city had been planning for 12 years. There was no heads-up to local government in Hamilton, of course. It was obvious politicking and an attempt to smear the former Ontario Liberal transportation minister, Steven Del Duca, who is now that party’s leader.
(Highlighted phrase from a well-reported story from CBC Hamilton’s Samantha Craggs: “She alleged the Liberals and former transportation minister Steven Del Duca ‘were not upfront’ about the LRT.”)
Jumping to a conclusion, a project that Hamilton needs died for no good reason.
Meantime, the Toronto Star had a long exposé on how Ontario’s ministry of education, under minister Stephen Lecce, did sweet eff-all to lower class sizes when schools reopened in September 2020. Their response to a teacher named James Griffith at Frontenac Secondary School in Kingston, Ont.,4 tweeting a photo of desks crammed into a socially undistanced and poorly ventilated classroom involved doing damage control. Quelle surprise.
Attitudes reflect leadership, of course. Lecce, whose patently obvious mission is destabilizing education in order to bring in privatization, has been insisting all along that crowded classrooms during COVID-19 were safe. It eventually took public health units stepping in April to close schools and impose online learning.
(One hour after this was posted, Lecce made a non-announcement announcement that virtual learning will be an option in the 2021-22 school year. It has always been an option, in fact.)
These would be new lows for most governments, but it is more of a new middle in 2021 Ontario. The purpose-driven ineptitude goes far beyond pandemic mismanagement.
What is the over/under on Ontario cabinet ministers who do not run for reelection in 2022? Asking for Major League Baseball, of course.
Lastly, but not least of all
Conan O’Brien will air the last episode of his late-night show on June 24. Since O’Brien wrote for The Simpsons, he would probably take “but Conan, why now? Why not five years ago?” referential ribbing in gentle good humour.
O’Brien, back in the ’90s, was the right person to follow David Letterman into the Late Night timeslot on a major broadcast network. The needy tryhard affect he put into every joke and sketch had an obvious appeal to a mostly young male audience who was — project much Sags? — up at that hour watching TV by themselves. It probably wore thin as he attained success; OK, you’re still this overgrown ginger teenage boy even though you’re a multi-millionaire. It just did not translate well more recent times.
Still, we will always have mascots that should not be dunking.I seem to be the only fan of sports and comedy who has not seen a complete episode of Jason Sudeikis’s Apple TV+ series, Ted Lasso. The character is becoming quite an avatar for politicians, though. It seems reasonable to be concerned.
At least two Ontario Hockey League teams have sued insurers who denied their claims “that COVID19 is tantamount to structural damage.” The legalistic rigmarole is above my pay grade, but it is hard to see under-20 professionalized hockey (let’s lose the term major junior) ever going back to what is was before March 2020. But try telling anything to an actuary.
That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing these words on your screen, please stay safe, and be kind.
Full disclosure: I have had a freelance writing gig writing sports information articles since 2015. The company is upfront about what it is selling; it does not weave it into wider coverage of sports. The moral justification is that readers can decide for themselves whether to follow the trends and tips or decide that the writer is full of excrement, or a little from Column A and a little from Column BM.
Take Monday. In my stunned-arsehole stupor, I thought the Leafs were likely to beat the Canadiens, but the Habs’ Cole Caufield was “worthy of consideration in anytime scorer props.” Caufield, indeed, scored two goals in a 3-2 Canadiens win.
Or how much Chico’s Bail Bonds bid, obviously.
This was actually the second time that Washington, D.C., got a baseball team without an investment group in place. In 1961, the American League placed an expansion team there after the Washington Senators moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul. One expansion application that actually had investment behind it came from Jack Kent Cooke in Toronto.
Alma mater of SportsLit executive producer Neil Acharya.