As sports gambling has become more and more prevalent, some San Francisco Giants players are speaking out against the increasingly hostile ways fans react to a lost bet.
Two players with the San Francisco Giants claimed they had to safeguard their Venmo accounts due to their encounters with gamblers in an article by USA Today’s Bob Nightengale that was published on Sunday. The report involved a survey of various MLB players regarding the effects of betting.
Tyler Rogers told USA Today, “I had to make my Venmo private because I’d blow a game or something, and people would find me on Venmo, and they’d send me requests.” “Hey, I paid $1,500 for you. You ought to reimburse me. People are clearly far more irate about it than they used to be.
Matt Chapman said, “Fans used to just say normal things like, ‘You’re a bum.’ Now, that they have all that money on us, fans will talk a lot of [expletive] to us. I’ll even have fans Venmo requesting me for money. I had to change my Venmo.”
Giants star pitcher Logan Webb said he’s seen the vitriol from fans increase since he made his MLB debut in 2019. He told USA Today he’s received some “messed up stuff, a lot of nasty DMs” related to betting.
“People are really passionate about teams, and now that you add money to it, it’s bigger than ever,” Webb said. “My first year, there wasn’t that much gambling going on. It was just, ‘Oh, you suck. You shouldn’t be on the team.’ Just things like that.
“Now, you’re getting, ‘You just cost me money.’ They say some [messed] up [expletive]. I get a lot of that with strikeouts. ‘Hey, I got money on you for strikeouts. Are you going to hit it?’ I always look up and say, ‘Probably not.’ There are times it gets pretty serious.”
As Nightengale explained, the MLB Players Association has had concerns about this very thing since the Supreme Court paved the way for gambling to be legalized across the United States in 2018. In the last round of collective bargaining negotiations in 2022, the league and union office implemented several measures aimed at protecting players, including prohibiting the display of “betting lines on Player-specific performance” in MLB stadiums and setting up a hotline so that participants can report threats made against them or their families.
Social media, however, exposes users to criticism of all kinds, even from people who take pleasure in the exhilaration of a successful wager.Tommy Pham, an outfielder for the White Sox and former Giants player, recognized the impact of gambling on baseball. He mentioned that he enjoys playing cards during the offseason.
“It’s getting really out of control,” Pham stated to USA Today. “As a Blackjack player, I firmly believe that you should never wager more than you can afford to lose. However, this isn’t always the case, which is what motivates these online combatants. It is becoming increasingly worse.
