Baseball and Gambling: A New Angle

With so much talk about US sports gambling, a unique perspective from the July 28 Kansas City Royals-Boston Red Sox game. In the sixth inning, Red Sox batter Jackie Bradley Jr unleashed a vicious line drive straight at Royals pitcher Jason Vargas that drew audible gasps from the crowd. Vargas knocked down the drive with his glove, coolly picked up the ball and nonchalantly threw it to first for the out, as if he hadn’t just cheated fate.

“No emotion,” Royals broadcaster Ryan Lefebvre (yes, Jim Lefebvre’s son) declared. “What happens in Vargas stays in Vargas.”

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.