Tag Archives: Chris Antonetti

The microbet scandal: Don’t let it get to Congress

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Darren McGavin

Darren McGavin, in The Natural, as Gus Sands, the bookie who boasted a) of microbets decades before they turned into a real-life baseball scandal; and, b) claimed his glass eye (with its iris larger than his right eye) was his “Magic Eye” which saw all.

When freshly-resurrected slugger Roy Hobbs was introduced to jaded bookmaker Gus Sands, in the novel and film The Natural, some slightly awkward conversation turned to Hobbs’s sterling doubleheader performance: five hits in the opener, four in the nightcap. “That’ll cost me a pretty penny,” Sands said. “I was betting against you today, slugger.”

Hobbs thought it meant against his team, the New York Knights, but Sands corrected him, saying, “Just you.” This surprised Hobbs. “Didn’t know you bet on any special player,” he said.

“On anybody and anything,” Sands continued. “We bet on strikes, balls, hits, runs, innings, and full games. If a good team plays a lousy team we will bet on the spread of runs. We cover anything anyone wants to bet on.” Sands’s example was a World Series game during which he bet $100,000 on three pitched balls.

The film showed the late Robert Redford looking somewhere between bemused and befuddled. “How’d you make out on that?” he asked. “Didn’t,” Darren McGavin’s smug Sands replied with a fatalistic smile out of which he could and did shift on the proverbial dime.

“But the next week,” Sands perked up, “I ruined the guy in a different deal.” Pausing for a sigh somewhere between extravagant and feigned, Sands went on. “That’s the way it goes,” he began. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. Today I lost on you. Some other time, I’ll clean up double.”

How would he do that? Hobbs inquired. “When you’re not hitting so good.” How would he know when? “The Magic Eye,” Sands replied, pointing to the glass eye with the larger iris. “It sees all.”

From there, the novel had it, Hobbs and Sands wagered on a few small things that led to Hobbs performing some impromptu magic tricks that amused their restaurant show’s MC, befuddled the sports columnist who’d introduced his running mate Sands to Hobbs in the first place, and left Sands himself somewhere between embarrased and infuriated.

Bernard Malamud may have known the wherefores of sports bookmaking in and before his time, even whether a Gus Sands would describe his game-within-the-game bets as microbets. He couldn’t have predicted that betting on anybody and anything, including individual pitches, would ooze into the scandal now bedeviling a major league baseball team and the sport’s governors alike.

If only this could be resolved by yanking tablecloths out from under undisturbed table settings or tweaking a snide bookmaker’s nose to produce several silver coins (tricks  Malamud described Hobbs as pulling upon Sands before their evening ended).

MLB went into its marketing relationships with assorted legal gambling businesses certain enough that it was only to reach sporting fans. It didn’t necessarily believe that the relationship would lure players or other team personnel into cooperative gambling behaviours that might or might not have a direct effect upon a game itself.

The disabusement began externally if no less dismayingly, when there came to light over a few seasons various players receiving death threats over certain game outcomes. It wasn’t just frustrated fans pouring their grief out aboard social media, it was frustrated fan bettors ready to horsewhip or hacksaw this or that player for costing them assorted volumes of money.

That was serious enough. But we have had Tucupita Marcano, Padres infielder, banished for life last year for betting on major league games with or without his own team. We have had four other players (Michael Kelly, Jay Groome, José Rodríguez, Andrew Saalfrank) suspended for a year apiece for betting on major league games in which they weren’t involved.

And now we have Guardians pitchers Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase under scrutiny, fire, and arrest for pitch rigging the better to enrich gamblers betting Sands-like on particular pitches. Ortiz was arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn over a week ago; Clase surrendered for arraignment last Thursday. The Guardians are understandably not entirely certain how to proceed from there.

Both pitchers were lost to them last July when the pitch rigging came to light and they were placed on administrative leave. It’s not entirely untoward to suspect that one critical reason Guards manager Stephen Vogt earned a second straigth Manager of the Year award was that he succeeded in keeping his team on message and striking to snatch the American League Central title in spite of the pall created by losing two key pitchers for reasons not associated with the injured list.

“We arguably played our best baseball after they left,” said Guards general manager Chris Antonetti last week. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of our team for.” Which is understandable thinking and magnanimous praise from the man who also admitted, not long after Ortiz and Clase were drydocked, “In the GM manual that I read, they left these chapters blank.”

Ortiz and Clase are accused of enabling gamblers to bet on certain pitches for what totaled six-figure dollar amounts and of receiving kickbacks for their parts in the plots. Since their arraignments, MLB has arranged with a good number of its authorised sports book advertisers to restrict gamblers’ microbets to $200 per and bar making such bets parts of parlays.

It may not be enough. Not since Marcano. Not since Groome, Kelly, Rodríguez, and Saalfrank. Not since Ortiz and Clase.

However tricky was the original idea of baseball taking ad revenues from legal sports books, we had the knowledge that it was strictly for the fans and that players, coaches, managers, front office personnel, clubhouse workers, and other team people were still governed by Rule 21. Governed by it, and wholly obedient to it.

“Why do we need the ability to bet on every pitch?” asked The Athletic‘s Jason Lloyd, who answered promptly. “The correct answer is because of how much revenue prop bets generate, but abolishing the concept of micro-bets in sports is the only true way to eliminate the uncertainty of whether a player is on the take.”

No argument from über-agent Scott Boras, who waxed affirmative on banning microbets when he wasn’t going Dr. Seuss discussing this or that man among his major league clientele at the general managers’ meetings in Las Vegas last week.

“You have to remove those prop bets to make sure the integrity of the players isn’t questioned,” he told Lloyd. “There’s going to be all forms of performance questions given now to pitchers when they throw certain pitches to the back of the screen or situationally, and really, we don’t want any part of it. We don’t want the players’ integrity to ever be questioned.”

He might have added that we don’t want players’ integrity being questioned when they offer at certain pitches, when they don’t, what type of pitches they’re hankering to hack, what type they’ll pass upon, that kind of thing.

Maybe it’s time at last for baseball to rethink the soundness of allowing even legal sports books to advertise around the ballpark or on the baseball air. Rethink it before Capitol Hill, so often interested more in perp walks than proper policymaking, goes from merely demanding MLB “demonstrate how it is meeting its responsibility to safeguard America’s pastime” to ordering MLB onto such a perp walk.

First published by Sports-Central.

Is Mickeygate Tribegate now?

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How much did the Indians really know about Mickey Callaway’s pursuits?

It’s going from worse to impossible for Mickey Callaway. But it’s going from bad enough to far worse for the Indians, too. Callaway hasn’t worked for the Indians since 2017, but it looks as though they can’t really be shocked anymore.

Team president Chris Antonetti told the press in early February he was “disturbed, distraught, and saddened” by allegations of Callaway’s sexually-oriented misconduct. That was after The Athletic exposed his inappropriateness with five media women while he managed the Mets. It may have been only the first hints.

Come Tuesday morning, Athletic reporters Brittany Ghiroli and Katie Strang published that Callaway’s kind of behaviour not only traced back to his Indians years but that several key organisation members—including Antonetti and manager Terry Francona—seemed aware enough then that Callaway’s taste for pursing women inappropriately wasn’t a one-time wild pitch.

“Since the publication of The Athletic’s first article,” Ghiroli and Strang wrote, “more women have come forward to say that Callaway made them uncomfortable by sending them inappropriate messages and/or photos, making unwanted advances and more while they worked for the Indians.”

Additionally, in 2017, an angry husband repeatedly called the team’s fan services department to complain that Callaway had sent “pornographic material” to his wife. Those calls were brought to the attention of Antonetti, manager Terry Francona and general manager Mike Chernoff; the Indians spoke with Callaway about the matter . . .

Over the past month, The Athletic has interviewed 22 people who interacted with Callaway during his years in the Indians organization, including 12 current and former employees. They say that Callaway’s sexual indiscretions permeated the workplace to such an extent that it would have been difficult for top officials to not be aware of his behavior, and they push back against any assertion that Callaway’s actions, when made public by The Athletic last month, caught team executives or MLB by surprise.

“I laughed out loud when I saw the quote (in The Athletic’s original report) that said it was the worst-kept secret in baseball, because it was,” said one Indians employee. “It was the worst-kept secret in the organization.”

After the Mets canned Callaway as manager following the 2019 season, the Angels hired him as pitching coach for incoming manager Joe Maddon. Following The Athletic‘s initial report, the Angels suspended Callaway, pending the outcome of a joint probe between the Angels and baseball’s government. Assorted reporting since has said the only reason it’s a suspension and not unemployment was Callaway’s insistence he’d done nothing truly wrong.

Ghiroli and Strang say Callaway’s reputation as a huntsman traced back to his days as a high school pitching hero (“He was a high school celebrity,” they quote “one woman he frequently pursued”) and ran into his years at the University of Mississippi, his drafting and development by the Rays (known then as the Devil Rays), and past his short, three-team pitching career, and his 2001 marriage.

““He does have a way of making you — you kind of always thought it’s just you,” Ghiroli and Strang quoted a woman from Callaway’s Memphis hometown. “Until one day you sit down with a bunch of girlfriends and a glass of wine and realize you’re not.”

Callaway had the gift of working the room profoundly enough that a career as a pitching coach all the way up from the lowest minors to the Show itself seemed almost a given. In baseball terms, Ghiroli and Strang observed, his forward-thinking and ability to present complex metrics in simpler forms made him “a key conduit” for the Indians’ pitching program overhaul.

The trouble was, his reputation for hunting women aggressively paralleled the growth of his reputation as a thinking person’s pitching coach. One of his former minor league pitching charges told Ghiroli and Strang Callaway was given to too-frequent sexualising of women in his comments and often asked players regarding women, “Where’s the beef?”

The beef to which Callaway didn’t refer is now with him, with the Indians who may actually have known what Antonetti professed to be shocked to have learned, and with anyone in baseball who’d caught onto his predatory ways without moving to stop them. The same former pitching charge told the two Athletic reporters, ““It gets kind of awkward when he’s checking out players’ girlfriends” in the stands near the dugout.

Becoming the Indians’ pitching coach didn’t send him any message about maturity, either. He’d gaze, gawk, leer, and send messages to assorted women’s social media accounts. Ghiroli and Strang also said several Indians players’ wives noted him having an extramarital affair or two.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a Cleveland issue but a baseball issue,” one who worked for the Indians told the reporters. “As women, we feel like if we report something, we’ll be looked at like a tattletale or that if we talked, (the team) will figure out who reported it.”

Ghiroli and Strang didn’t have to hunt hard to find those women. When their first report emerged, and Antonetti said the organisation received no complaints about Callaway, those women sought the two reporters out themselves. The team was even willing to have Francona talk to the husband of a Callaway paramour who’d been calling the team incessantly for accountability.

All that was before Callaway was hired to manage the Mets, who’ve since been very public about their need to investigate prospective hires more deeply than in the past. What the Jared Porter sext scrum began, the revelation of Callaway’s sexually oriented misconduct exacerbated for them.

The aforesaid husband is thought to have contacted the Mets about Callaway’s sending his wife “pornographic” material, but the then-manager-to-be assured the Mets it tied to an extramarital affair that “dissolved,” and he was working things out with his wife.

It was bad enough the Mets and the Angels were forced to reckon with the possible full depth of Callaway’s misbehaviours. It looks worse that the Indians knew more than they let on when The Athletic first exposed them. Callaway isn’t helping himself, either, if a reply to a Ghiroli and Strang query the day before they published afresh is any indication:

While much of the reporting around my behavior has been inaccurate, the truth is that on multiple occasions I have been unfaithful to my wife, and for that I am deeply sorry. What I have never done is use my position to harass or pressure a woman. I am confident that I have never engaged in anything that was non-consensual. I feel truly blessed that my wife and children have stuck with me as the most personal and embarrassing details of my infidelities have been revealed. I will continue to work as hard as I can to repair the rift of trust that I have caused inside of my family.

How about the rift of trust he’s caused inside baseball, which has much more work to do when it comes to making women feel comfortable around the arterials of the game? How about the rift of trust he’s caused among those who knew but feared reporting it?

“Some who lived through Callaway’s time in Cleveland and were subjected to his aggressive advances,” Ghiroli and Strang wrote Tuesday morning, “questioned how the men who once supervised Callaway can be trusted to fix the culture that allowed him to operate so brazenly.”

How about even the further rift Callaway’s caused between a father and son already having a somewhat difficult relationship?

“This isn’t easy,” tweeted Nick Francona—son of Terry Francona, a son once fired by the Dodgers as player development assistant, after he sought an assessment by a Boston-based group helping combat veterans such as himself deal with the lingering effects, but who also refused to help cover up sexual misconduct among Dodger minor leaguers—“but it needs to be said.” “It” was a formal statement in which he said he couldn’t “say I am surprised” about Callaway’s behaviour, for openers:

When the news . . . first came out earlier this year, I confonted my father, Chris Antonetti, and others within the Cleveland Indians. I wanted to know why they didn’t say anything to me when the Mets hired Mickey Callaway and they gave him a strong endorsement. My father lied to me and said he didn’t know. Additionally, I think he and his colleagues fail to understand what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t.

The younger Francona said he “confronted my father” again Tuesday morning and believes further that the elder Francona “simply doesn’t get it,” while admitting father and son are not particularly close “largely as a result of disagreements about his conduct.” Terry Francona has declined comment so far.

After writing that standing up for what he believes right means acknowledging his father and the Indians are wrong, the younger Francona called their behaviour unacceptable, leaving it “hard to have faith” that they can improve when they seem more concerned about covering up.

I don’t think this is a problem that is unique to the Cleveland Indians and I think there needs to be a reckoning across Major League Baseball . . . Until a truly independent outside party is brought in and there is transparency and accountability, these problems will continue to plague the sport.

We love to see women enjoy baseball as much as men enjoy it. What’s wrong with asking that women be made as comfortable working in or around the game as men? What’s wrong with asking a firm, enforceable line be drawn between a man interested in a woman personally and a man believing he has the right to hunt her down sexually? What’s wrong with asking accountability when a man (or a woman, for that matter, and yes that happens, too) crosses that line?

The proper answer to all three questions should be absolutely nothing with any of those.