Number of innings of Major League Baseball I have watched this season: zero.
Amount of money I have wagered on Major League Baseball daily fantasy contests this season: gobs.
For the record, until the Knicks’ playoff run when I bandwagoned like I was Kylie Jenner, I watched the sum total of zero minutes of NBA action last season, and yet there I was, firing away on DFS.
The NFL is a little bit different. I’ll actually sit and watch the games, assuming there’s nothing better to do. But I’m not riding and dying.
But back in the day? It was my entire life as a kid. I lived and breathed sports from 1979-1987 or so, before I discovered (and endeavored to overfill my metaphorical cup with) beer, weed, and women.
I was wildly successful in pursuing two of those three objectives.
As for sports? Meh. I stayed connected to the NFL via my long-running home fantasy football league, but by 1995 or so I couldn’t name five NBA players and would have been hard-pressed to name a dozen MLB stars.
Then I discovered (and endeavored to overfill my metaphorical cup with) DFS in 2014, and now my days are filled with late-breaking injury reports and learning whether Kike Hernandez is in the lineup against a lefty.
Gambling — or whatever you want to call it — is easily 99.5% responsible for any interest in sports I have today.
And I’m starting to wonder if I’m not alone.
So many choices
Would sports command this much of our attention without fantasy and gambling? With more movies and television shows than anyone could possibly watch, plus video games, TikTok, and whatever else we can conjure up without getting off the couch, would we really be this interested in a random Tuesday baseball game without a little action?
I wouldn’t. Asked and answered.
Andrew C. Billings, the Ronald Reagan Chair of Broadcasting at the University of Alabama, gives the games themselves a little more credit.
“I still think sports would do well without fantasy or without sports betting, but obviously that has dramatically increased the number of hours that people who participate spend consuming sports media,” he said.
Billings has studied fantasy sports for years, along with the larger question of what happens when everybody has something different to watch.
“Everyone’s watching a different sitcom, a different drama, a different movie, listening to a different algorithm-based music playlist, but the big game is still the big game,” he said. “The last water cooler left is sports.”
And fantasy and gambling have given us a lot more to discuss than whether our hometown team won. There are people (present company included) with very strong feelings about the fourth quarter of a game their favorite team isn’t playing in. A terrible game, even. A game they freely acknowledge is terrible while also asking you, at the same time, to please shut up because they need another Wan’Dale Robinson reception.
“To me, the biggest thing is we’ve now moved into a place where the premise that people consume sports media almost exclusively just to see who wins is just not accurate anymore,” Billings said. “Some people care about that, but others care about who scores or who wins by how much, what the point spread is.”
I’m trying to think of another business that gets this kind of assistance from another business. Sports gives gambling something to bet on, gambling gives sports an audience with a financial interest in paying attention, and both get to make money off the deal.
The stock market and financial media come to mind, although Billings wasn’t buying a straight comparison.
“We have far more people, for instance, who invest themselves in the stock market as opposed to using a financial advisor or stockbroker, but they aren’t sitting around watching CNBC all day trying to get tips on what to do there,” he said.
Although I suppose you could invite your buddies over for an earnings call and wings. Let me know how that goes.
But put us in a fantasy league and we’ve got something to do together for months. We don’t have to be in the same room, or the same state. We can maintain perfectly good friendships by telling each other how great our teams are.
Socially speaking
“Fantasy football has a social component, keeping friends and family together through the engagement of not just watching one team that’s your favorite team, but also watching across the entire league,” said Brendan Dwyer, a professor and associate director of the Center for Sport Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Dwyer has spent years researching fantasy sports, and he’s enthusiastic about that particular benefit.
“They talk so much about male loneliness. I think there needs to be more fantasy football,” he said.
My home league kept me connected to football through years when I had largely lost interest in the other sports. DFS brought me back, too. Somewhere along the way I became a person who knows what’s happening in baseball without watching baseball. I’m not sure 10-year-old Jeff would understand this in the least bit, but I’m also pretty sure he’d want to see my lineup.
Dwyer described the appeal of having something of your own riding on the games.
“You want to be active,” he said. “You really have the opportunity now, where it started with fantasy sports and now it’s just graduated to sports betting.”
A sportsbook would presumably prefer that I express this desire with a same-game parlay. My fantasy league manages it with a draft. Either way, I have a reason to follow sports I would otherwise have no reason to follow.
To big to fail?
Neither Dwyer nor Billings wanted to put a number on how much smaller sports would be without gambling, and Dwyer was quick to point to college football, where he’s confident the tradition and pageantry would keep interest high without gambling. People do, of course, enjoy watching sports for the sake of watching sports. I remember doing it myself.
But as an accelerant? Fantasy and gambling have been very, very good to the leagues (who, it should be noted, fought it all at every turn).
“Whether it’s a bet on the game or a fantasy league with your family and friends, that’s giving you the reason to tune in, and especially to tune in to games you wouldn’t otherwise care about,” Billings said.
