Ex-Baseball Pro: NBA Gambling Scandal Represents “A Moment To Reset”

by Thomas Breen The New Haven independent

“It was the biggest warning because of the Black Sox in 1919 throwing a World Series,” Glanville said. “That was always taboo.”

Glanville, a former professional outfielder for the Phillies, Cubs, and Rangers, is now a baseball analyst for ESPN.

On Monday, Glanville stopped by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven’s offices on the fifth floor of 70 Audubon St. to participate in a press conference about the Secretary of the State’s new “Power of Civics” online course. Glanville was on the speaking lineup at Monday’s presser to talk through his own crash course in Connecticut civics — starting in 2014 when he was shoveling snow in the driveway of his Hartford home and was racially profiled by a West Hartford police officer, and going through his working with state legislators to pass a law that clarified police department jurisdictions.

After Monday’s presser, this reporter pulled Glanville aside to talk about a different story of the moment, one that has rocked a different professional sports world: that is, the FBI’s arrests of a NBA head coach, a current professional basketball player, and several dozen others on illegal gambling charges. The FBI’s director, Kash Patel, has called this the NBA’s “insider trading saga.”

What does Glanville make of this latest sports-betting scandal?

Glanville reflected on his own time as a professional baseball player in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and seeing those anti-gambling signs in locker rooms.

The Black Sox scandal of 1919 was a defining moment in baseball’s struggles with gambling, he said. So too were the Pete Rose betting revelations of the 1980s. Two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, meanwhile, were recently placed on paid leave in the sport’s latest betting investigation.

“You can’t just assume the sign [in the locker room] does the job,” Glanville said on Tuesday. “You have to reinforce why this is important,” especially as sports betting has taken off in popularity in recent years.

Fans wants to feel like the sports and sports teams they love are “honest,” Glanville said. “That’s just fundamental,” that sense of “meritocracy in sports, fairness,” playing by the same rules. “We had the same questions with steroids in baseball. There’s always something.”

This is a “moment to reset,” Glanville concluded. “This is that moment.” Vigilance has to be high.” ” Vigilance has to always be high. “Fans have to speak out and say, ‘Hey, this is what I want my sport to be.’”

How do legal sports betting and professional sports coexist “in the healthiest way that maintains the integrity of the game? That’s going to be an ever-present challenge, but they have to keep working on it.”