Beyond the Black Sox: Baseball Fan Gambling in the Stands in Chicago

Although the most infamous instance of gambling on baseball games took place in Chicago at the 1919 World Series, many more fans made small, casual wagers than gambled based on inside information. For the majority of fans, ballpark gambling was a way to add excitement to the game. Baseball team owners and executives were in the business of providing a positive experience for fans, but while some fans saw gambling as a fun part of the ballpark experience, others opposed it on moral grounds. That conflict complicated owners’ and executives’ decisions about when and how much to crack down on gambling. In this paper, I argue that in the wake of events like the Black Sox Scandal, owners and executives cracked down, but did not have the ability to completely eliminate gambling and, because they would have lost fans who wanted to gamble, did not have incentives to do so either.

In the second half of the twentieth century, ballpark gambling declined at most Major League ballparks, but not at Wrigley Field. In the bleachers there, gambling continued in the face of half-hearted efforts to eliminate it. I argue that gambling continued at Wrigley because while other teams moved into new parks in the 1960s and 1970s, the Cubs continued to play at an older park where most fans arrived via mass transportation or on foot. In other words, the Cubs’ bleacher bums were not isolated in automobiles on their way to the park, nor once they were in the park the same way fans going to and watching games in more modern stadiums were. Importantly, the Cubs’ all-day game schedule limited their potential audience, allowing fans to get to know each other well enough to feel comfortable gambling together.