Friday Four-Pack 6.28.24
Sox vs. Sox? An answer to a sportsbook account question. CAWs keep winning. Notes!
When you find ANOTHER grammatical error in this week’s Friday Four-Pack.
No super long open this week.
While you were pregaming the presidential debate, I was putting up one of the all-time terrible adult men’s basketball league stat lines.
0-6 FG 0-3 3PT. 4 TURNOVERS.
Airball. Missed layup. Missed bunny that hit the bottom of the backboard.
One of those “I never want to play basketball again” games.
My wife and I played pickleball for the first time this week. It was fun.
The basketball was not fun.
Our Team KMS has a playoff game in a few weeks. A win and we’ll play for a “Silver” title the following week. And that will likely be it for my competitive basketball playing career. I’m washed.
Thankfully, we have much to discuss, including the dilemma facing Red Sox fans. Plus, another reminder of how bad it has gotten for casual horseplayers trying to beat the computers. And some radio news in our weekly notes.
That plus so much more in today’s Four-Pack.
On trying to separate the Red Sox baseball product from the team’s mismanagement…
That’s probably not worded all that well, but bear with me.
The Red Sox 2024 on-field baseball product is pretty good. Certainly better than myself and a lot of other people expected.
Their pitching has been a huge surprise - you’d be lying if you said you predicted they’d have the 6th best ERA in baseball heading into the final weekend of June.
With 78 stolen bases they trail just the Rays for the most in the American League. They’re constantly in motion and it makes for an exciting brand of baseball.
As far as individual players, Jarren Duran has emerged as an All-Star in the outfield and has benefitted from the team’s aggressiveness on the basepaths (20 stolen bases). Connor Wong looks like a legit catcher. Rafael Devers keeps hitting home runs. The team’s 3.54 ERA is aided greatly by Tanner Houck looking like a legit front-end starting pitcher.
At 43-37, they find themselves in the AL Wild Card mix and solidly in third place in the AL East.
But for me - and many other fans - the approach of ownership and the front office continues to be the biggest talking point with this year’s team.
This. This right here. I’ve written it multiple times over the last year, but Stats crystallizes it in one post. But it’s not just how little they tried to improve the product this season.
It’s the search for a new team president where candidate after candidate declined to even interview for the job, clearly turned off by the idea of working for this ownership group and their vision.
It’s ending up with Craig Breslow, who seems hand-picked by Theo Epstein but had no real GM experience - he’s now the Chief Baseball Officer for a team coming off back-to-back last-place finishes.
It’s letting Alex Cora go into this season without an extension after doing nothing to help him and his team at the trade deadline the past two seasons. He’s gone at the end of the season and it doesn’t feel like team management is all that upset about it.
It’s promoting “The Fenway Experience” as your way of drawing fans into the ballpark. The result? Nights where the opposing team’s fanbase (Phillies most recently) invades Fenway and sounds louder than the home crowd. With a 19-21 record at Fenway, the Red Sox are the only team in baseball playing over .500 on the season but also show a losing record at home.
The only team.
It’s Cora begging the team to “get greedy” at the trade deadline, only to have Breslow pretend his manager was talking about something else when he was asked about it on WEEI.
“Greedy, meaning play really good baseball, continue to move our way up the standings, of course. I think that’s what everyone wants from this team.”
I mean, come on. I know he went to Yale, but does Breslow really think we’re that stupid?
Credit to Cora for calling out management for their lack of moves over the last two seasons.
“Honestly, we didn't get better," Cora said of the previous two trade deadlines. "We just stayed the same and the teams around us got better. I can walk you through the trading deadline the way I see it. There's three ways you can go: You buy, you sell, you stay put. When you stay put, there's going to be teams that, they added, and they're going to be better than you. It's not that your team was a bad team, but the other ones around you got better.”
And who can forget Tom Werner’s “full throttle” comment this past off-season - a masterclass in poor public relations.
Add it all up and you get a team worth watching and talking about on the field, but a fanbase that is rightfully annoyed about the approach of ownership and management.
They could change the narrative by going out and adding at the deadline and fortifying this team, but no one really thinks they’ll do that. There has been a lot of Sox talk this week on Boston Sports Radio and almost all of it is about this issue, not the team’s play on the field.
Coming off the Celtics’ title run, it should be a time when the Red Sox take center stage in Boston for the next few months. They play a fun brand of baseball and are squarely in the playoff hunt. Based on the TV and radio ratings I’ve seen - in addition to the influx of visiting fans at Fenway - Sox fans remain skeptical.
Thanks to management’s unwillingness to fully invest in this team, it feels like many fans have decided not to fully invest in the baseball product.
Comments are open below for your Sox takes.
On the latest terrible look for horse racing…
In February, I posted this video on X.com, which now has over 175k views.
It highlights one of the biggest issues facing horse racing in 2024 - the late money of Computer Assisted Wagering (CAW) players resulting in the odds of horses drastically going down right as a race starts. The impact on the weekend and casual players is significant, often lowering the price of a winning horse you bet on even before you knew the computers would come late and knock down the odds.
I’ve used this example before, but imagine betting the Patriots at even money. They win, but you find out that the odds changed to -150 after you bet and now you’re stuck with that price.
You’d be pissed.
You’d probably start looking for a different way to spend your wagering dollars.
On Wednesday at Deleware Park, we had one of the most egregious examples of this I have ever seen. In picture form this time, not video.
So they’re loading in for the third race and as you can see from the tote there on the left side of the screen, the #1 horse is 9-1 and the #2 horse is 3.5-1.
We get our first look at the odds around the first turn, roughly 20 seconds into the race. Inexplicably, the #1 is now 9/5 off that 9-1 last flash into the gate. The 6/5 favorite #4 is now 3.5-1. I wonder how he’ll do…
Ten seconds later we get the price on the #2 - he’s also 9/5 off his 3.5-1 into the gate. Let’s see if that late money was smart…lol.
Wow! Who could have imagined!? 🙄🙄🙄
The two horses that took ALL that late money after the last flash in the gate run 1-2. The favorite that floated up late, of course, he runs out of the exacta.
The CAWs didn’t just bet on the win end, they also hammered the exacta, as it paid just $8.90 for $1 with the “favorite” out of the top two.
For years, Pat Cummings of the National Thoroughbred Alliance has been the most informed voice on this topic. He feels like one of the few big voices in racing trying to explain how bad it’s gotten for the everyday player in a CAW world.
Late Thursday, Pat posted his own X.com thread where he talks about this same race, the impact of CAW play as well as ideas to fix it. You can read it here.
While it’s usually not that blatant, this happens daily in North American racing. And so far, very little has been done to combat it.
The New York Racing Association deserves credit for limiting CAW players in the win pools when you get to two minutes to post. They’re also kept out of the Late Pick 5. That helps. But the reality is many of these tracks need the CAW play to make up for the loss of handle from the average player.
In addition, many of the biggest voices in and around racing are employed by the tracks or one of the many horse betting sites. So those folks will privately complain about this issue to their friends and colleagues but publically say nothing.
They don’t want to risk that paycheck.
Saratoga at Belmont did HUGE numbers. Debry, too. But going into May, the amount of money bet on racing (handle) in the first four months of 2024 was down 6% from the same period in 2023. And in total 2023 was down about 5% from 2022.
Without an industry response that takes back some of the advantages the CAW players have, it’s hard to imagine a world even 20 years from now where betting on horses is worth the time or investment for someone like me - a fan of the game who plays Saratoga and other big days.
It’s beyond time the game makes a real effort to fix this.
On what happens to the money in your sportsbook account when you don’t use it…
We’re just over a year into legal sports betting in Massachusetts. If you’re doing it right and trying to maximize every bonus opportunity offered up when you open an account, you likely have multiple sportsbook accounts on your phone—some of which you don’t use regularly.
So what happens when you don’t use the funds in those accounts after a while?
A bettor in New Jersey found out that each state has their own rules for how they handle these situations when he received an email from his sportsbook. From SportsHandle -
“In compliance with the laws surrounding internet gambling within the state of New Jersey, any wagering account which has been inactive for a period of 1 year is considered dormant,” the email read. “Dormant accounts are closed and any funds remaining in this account have been forwarded to the Division [of Gaming Enforcement] for deposit in the State General Fund.”
Although Hartenstein didn’t have much money in this particular sportsbook account, he’d never heard of such a policy and thought it to be “bulls**t.”
The bettor in this story is not wrong. It’s bulls**t. Sure, the sportsbooks are regulated to reach out to let you know 60 days before sending your money to the state, but what if they don’t reach you? You log on after a year and the money is gone??? WTF.
So what are the rules in Massachusetts?
According to Unclaimed Property Specialists, it is similar to New Jersey but it’s three years of inactivity, not one.
Legal sports betting in Massachusetts began in March 2023. The state’s Gaming Commission developed related regulations, which became effective as of June 7, 2023. Among the noteworthy unclaimed property particulars are:
Funds in any account without activity for three years after the balance in that account became payable or deliverable to the patron are considered abandoned.
“Activity” includes sports wagers, customer-generated deposits or customer-generated withdrawals.
Sports wagering operators must conduct “reasonable due diligence to locate the patron” at least 60 days before reporting an account as unclaimed property to the Treasurer.
If this happens, you’ll have to go the Find Mass Money route to track down your money.
If there’s an account you don’t think you’ll use much, it might be worth withdrawing now. Or making a small wager to restart the three-year clock.
Something to consider heading into the summer, and something we’ll circle back to as we get closer to that three-year mark in 2026.
On your Friday MutStack Notes…
Chad Finn talked with Celtics radio voice Sean Grande for an hour this week, as Grande denied his season-ending sign-off was some sort of goodbye to the C’s fanbase.
“That sign-off was a thank you to listeners for the effort people put into listening to us,” he said, noting that it isn’t as easy as it used to be to sync the radio and television broadcasts. “Max and I have been engulfed in this extraordinary love which comes from love of the team and love of the moment and relief and all of it. And I swear to God, the last thing I thought about during the game is it being potentially the last game or anything like that. It got more attention than other sign-offs in the years, but it wasn’t a lot different from other ones.”
Finn noted that Grande’s name has been linked to a NY Knicks radio job and that’s the one rumor I’ve heard from a few people. That might be news to the current Knicks radio voice, Ed Cohen.
Grande did not comment on (or Finn didn’t ask about) the announcer’s suggestion that he turned down the Celtics’ TV job that went to Drew Carter. That one allegedly bothered folks in the team’s upper management.
But Grande says he’s not going anywhere. I guess we’ll know in a few months.Bally Bet was scheduled to launch in Massachusetts on Thursday, but thanks to an “outstanding issue,” that launch has been pushed back to Monday, July 1. Or close to it, according to Bally’s. Let’s hope for a good sign-up bonus.
Bookies.com Bill Speros has the details of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission targeting August 1st to discuss the next roundtable to examine the practice of sportsbooks limiting winning players. The sports betting world is watching Massachusetts very closely on this one and I’ll have more on this before that August 1st meeting.
We’ll have the full June Boston Radio monthly ratings report in two weeks, but June Week 2 was another tough one for WEEI. Gresh and Fauria earned a 1.0 share (18th) and Jones & Mego clocked in at 1.2 (also 18th). This was a weekly with no NBA games, thanks to that big gap between the conference finals and the NBA Finals. As I first mentioned months ago, this book has the chance to be the most lopsided ever in WEEI vs. The Hub.
Since being promoted as a weekly co-host on The Rich Shertenlieb Show, Charlotte Wilder has not appeared on the show since its first week. Was hoping for an eventual Susan Pease update. Emerson Lotzia of NESN and Draftkings’ fame has seemingly taken her spot in the show’s co-host rotation.
We’ve for sure said it all.
Should be a great night at The Brook Casino in Seabrook, NH as Patriots and NFL Hall of Fame member Ty Law sits down to talk football with the fans. Looking forward to it.
Good luck with all your bets. And thanks for reading.
Good weekend.
The red sox are surprisingly good, but once I start to get faith, you have performances like last night and poor Bello. Houck is so good and ever since that play where Duran just stood in center field as Verdugo ran a mile to get the ball, he has become a completely different person. He bulked up and still flies like the wind. If the red sox fucking trade him......
Devers is good, but every time I look at his numbers, I do not see $300 million, I don't, that money could have easily gone to Mookie, but whatever man, that is not Devers fault, he's good but he makes the same as other 3rd basemen who are far superior fielders.
Radio sucks nowadays, maybe I will actually figure out podcasts.
I love ya man but I just cannot get into the horse racing, but Gardner and a couple towns just had a meeting about racetracks again. Something you might wanna look into.
Take care and thanks for the mutstack, holding us together LOL
Retiring?!?!??! You're a front-runner for comeback player of the year next season? Maybe if you win the Silver Tournament Championship, then I can understand wanting to go out on a win, but not like this Mut, not like this!