Fixing Things
Politics is America's favorite sport
Major League Baseball is bending to pressure from the Trump Administration to normalize institutional deviance in America by reinstating Pete Rose, Joe Jackson, and others who were “banned for life” from the league and its affiliated Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Their crime (literally) was betting on and fixing the outcomes of baseball games, some of which they were playing or managing. There is much concern over the outcomes of sporting events—that the game be a “pure” test and that the inequality the participants and observers wish to see will be legitimately determined.
Players in Jackson’s era were literally seasonal employees, with less than a handful earning enough playing the game to live the other half of the year, without holding another job. Massive migration prior to the Great War produced a swollen manufacturing labor pool in Northeastern and Rust Belt cities. Ethnic gangs—unregulated business enterprises that provided services and moved resources for social class segregated populations—were prominent in large cities like Chicago, where Jackson’s White Sox were based.
Chicago gang members ran sports books and other wagering opportunities. The way a legitimate sports book works is by calculating the money coming in on both sides of a competition and setting odds such that the wagers on each balance out. A commission—usually 10%—is built into the odds, and goes to the house. As long as the dollars line up, the house gets paid. However, on occasion, the bettors put so much money onto the “favorite” that odds-makers inflate the underdog’s odds, just to get money onto that side of the wager.
This was the case with the 1919 World Series, where the Chicago White Sox were prohibitive favorites to beat the Cincinnati Reds, at the start of the series, at 5 - 1. A $5 wager on Chicago to win would pay $1, and a $1 wager on Cincinnati to win would pay $5. Long before the internet, people engaged in marginalized behaviors such as gambling, still had strong social networks, and rumors spread about a World Series fix being made in the Reds’ favor, such that the odds were flipped to 8 - 5, in favor of the Reds by the time the series started.
Those who bet on the Reds at 5 - 1 odds stood to quintuple their bets, while those who came in last would only see a 60% return, should the Reds win.
Fixing the outcome of a team sporting event is a daunting task, if there is not a general agreement among players to not win. Professional sports are a highly-competitive occupation, where one’s performance is measured against opponents and teammates alike. A player needs to focus on keeping their role on their own team, before focusing on beating another team. The most intense daily competition a player faces dresses in the same locker room, not the opposing team’s.
If I have to earn my place on my team, and in my league, and the sole measure of my worthiness is my on-field performance, doing less than I am capable of so that someone else may beat me or my team will spell a demotion—being benched—or worse, no longer being a player in the league at all.
A professional coach would never get away with making a secret plan with their team, to throw a game. As Hall of Fame MLB manager Billy Martin once noted, his job was to keep the five guys who don’t like him away from the five guys who have not made up their minds.
No matter the team, there will be players who will not agree to throw a game, and who would make such a request known to upper management, ownership, or the press.
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The way to fix a present-day, major professional sporting event is to corrupt the person making in-game decisions, such that they will take the team out of opportunities to win. Like this:
November 27, 2023
Down by 3, 1st and 10 on the Giants’ 22 yard line with two timeouts. 1:11 to play.How Belichick would have done it with Tom Brady:
1st play: Burn 30 seconds from the clock and try a pass anywhere on the field—short and over the middle, to the sidelines, or take a shot at the end zone.
2nd play: (assuming a 2-yard gain): Burn 30 seconds from the clock and try a pass anywhere on the field.
3rd play (assuming an incomplete pass). Try a pass that would get a first down if completed, use one timeout if needed.Instead, there was no attempt to score a touchdown at all. He did not play to win the game but to tie it, knowing his team would be at a disadvantage in an overtime.
Score a TD and make the point after, and the Giants would have had to score their own TD to beat you. That is why he would have gone for the TD, if he was coaching to win the game.
You don’t tank by asking players to fail. You tank by taking them out of positions to win.
The New England Patriots lost that game, and Bill Belichick was fired at the end of the season. The team’s ownership recognized what had happened.
The curious case of David Hogg offers us another example of fixing outcomes. Hogg came into the public eye for being a natural spokesperson, after he was in the same building complex where a school shooting took place, in Parkland, Florida. In a harmonic cultural convergence, his school had a curricular offering on public speaking and one of the topics they debated was gun control in the U.S. So when the unregulated militia unleashed a killing machine on suburban teens, Hogg was fully prepared to step into the role of victim advocate.
He would matriculate to Harvard University, graduating a few years ago. After the 2024 elections showed the Democratic party to be as dysfunctional as the Republicans were when Trump took over, it appeared to those on the outside that major changes would be upcoming. Instead, there was not much. Alexandria Occasio-Cortez tried for a party leadership role, but was rejected in favor of a 70-something rep undergoing cancer treatments, because he had not had the chance to be the minority party’s lead on a committee. It was “Her Turn” again, only with a guy instead of ‘Her.’
There was a hint of looking toward the future with Hogg’s election to Vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. Just in his mid-20’s, with national recognition for his work in favor of gun control (once a leading Democratic party advocacy, it disappeared during the Obama administration, while gun sales skyrocketed), and a Harvard pedigree, David Hogg had what looked like a promising political career in the party.
Then he did the one thing no Democrat with career wishes can ever do—he threatened incumbents with having to demonstrate their competency through primary challenges.
The DNC machine hates putting their candidates to public tests, because they will be outflanked to the Left (see The Squad). It is imperative to the Democratic party that they monopolize what is being offered to Americans as ‘progressive’ options in the voting booth. This is why the party twice conspired to keep Bernie Sanders off the presidential ticket, why they did not hold real primaries in 2024, and why they kicked David Hogg to the curb earlier this week.
David Hogg is the most recent case, but there will be others. Anything more than performative resistance (i.e., Corey Booker) is frowned upon, since both corporate political parties do not seek to change how elections are sponsored and won. Democrats, like Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, have taken to publicly reject using the term “oligarchy,” as it may alienate their campaign financiers.
Much like with professional sports, when it comes time to throwing an election, you do not ask the candidates to fail. Every career elected official has built a record of success and they are in closer competition with members of their own party than they are with members of other parties. If you want the party to lose, you take the members out of a position to win. You don’t test them, you guarantee them their positions on the field, and refuse to let others get any repetitions in practice.
When you get down to it, the Democratic party can function just fine in Fascistic national politics, and right now the leadership is strategizing how to take over the federal government for themselves. They are not looking to become stronger, find more appealing candidates, or—god forbid—actually help working people. They are not interested in fixing anything but their own primaries.