Question of the Day - 28 July 2024

That's correct. Major League Baseball largely ignored the situation when Del Webb, a co-owner of the New York Yankees, was also involved in the casino business.

Webb, a prominent real estate developer and co-owner of the Yankees from 1945 to 1964, also had significant interests in the gambling industry, particularly in Las Vegas. His construction company finished the Flamingo for Ben Siegel in the late 1940s, then agreed to take a 20% share of the Sahara in exchange, in part, for building it in the early '50s. In 1960, Del Webb Corp. went public; a year later, Webb bought out the other partners in the Sahara, which became the first casino in Las Vegas to be owned by a corporation.

Along the way, he also acquired an interest in the Mint downtown and the Hacienda at the far south end of the Strip. 

All that time, he co-owned the Yankees.

Webb and his partner paid $2.8 million for the team. With it came the Yankee farm teams (a total of 450 players), plus stadiums in New York, Newark, and Kansas City. Very quickly, they sold off excess real estate for $2 million. The Yankees won 15 pennants and 10 World Series when the partners owned them; they finally sold the team in 1964 for $14 million. 

To get to the question, the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, where eight players from the Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally losing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from gamblers, severely damaged the integrity of the sport and led to the appointment of the first MLB Commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was tasked with restoring the sport's credibility and enforcing strict anti-gambling policies.

The league's anti-gambling stance held up for 25 years while Landis was commissioner -- and then beyond. In 1947, Leo Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was suspended by Landis' replacement, Happy Chandler, for associating with gamblers. (It's perhaps ironic that Happy's son Dan became a VIP host at Caesars Palace and the Las Vegas Hilton.) But Happy was replaced in 1951 by Ford Frick.

According to The New York Times, Frick was "a reluctant leader." He didn't view his job as policing the league. Instead, he regarded the team owners as "honest men capable of making their own rules and that he was there only to administer them." He stayed out of the limelight and rarely took forceful action. And one of his hands-off policies was over gambling. 

Also at that time, the league's governance and oversight mechanisms weren't as stringent or formalized as they'd been in the past and are today. The commissioner of baseball had broad discretionary power, but Frick opted not to take any action against Webb. He wasn't a gambler, he wasn't making sports bets, he wasn't booking sports bets, he wasn't offering perks to his players to be collected at his properties -- in short, there was essentially no interchange between the two businesses.

Gambling didn't become a hot-button issue again until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle from baseball for taking jobs as greeters at Atlantic City casinos. The bans were lifted by Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, who served from 1984 to 1989.

MLB, of course, was next rocked by the Pete Rose gambling scandal, the same year that Ueberroth stepped down as commissioner. But Mays, Mantle, and Rose were much later than Del Webb, who managed to emerge from Major League Baseball unscathed by his concurrent involvement in gambling.