Boston Red Sox pitcher Lucas Giolito said this week he spoke to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred directly about sports betting-related athlete abuse and voiced fears that it could escalate to the point that a player gets physically attacked or even killed.
Speaking on the “Baseball Isn’t Boring” podcast, Giolito told host Rob Bradford that he pulled aside Manfred for a one-on-one chat about the severity of the issue. Giolito said the commissioner was “taken aback” when the athlete described to him the frequency and intensity of some of the betting-related abuse that players receive through social media.
“When it comes to gambling, it’s creating an uptick in insane people online. Well, not insane, just disgruntled, right? I’m getting messages after every game, even games where I pitch well, where they’re mad at me because I hit the strikeout over instead of being under or I was under instead of being over,” Gioloto said.
His girlfriend, too, receives abuse and threats when Giolito is held accountable by bettors for a wager missing.
“Prop bets, all these crazy things. People put hundreds of dollars on it, and they don’t have a lot of money, but they’re gambling it anyway because it’s a disease. And then they freak out.”
‘Worse by the day’
Giolito was speaking after some high-profile recent incidents, such as one he referred to directly in which Houston Astros pitcher Lance McCullers Jr. recruited security after his family received threats from bettors. Police found that intoxicated gamblers were behind the messages to McCullers.
That was in May of this year. In the same month, Giolito’s Boston teammate Liam Hendriks publicly called out people for sending death threats to him and his family.
Various studies have illustrated the scope of the problem.
Last October, the NCAA and data partner Signify revealed they had found more than 5,000 public social media posts directly abusing college athletes, coaches or officials over the space of a few months, a significant proportion of which were tied to wagering. And in December, a report asserted that around half of online abuse towards tennis players came from “angry gamblers.”
While a newer NCAAA-Signify report last month found that betting-related abuse across the men’s and women’s March Madness tournaments declined 23% year over year, Giolito believes things are getting worse.
“It’s getting worse by the year, by the week, by the day,” the pitcher said. “It’s astronomically more. Sports betting has always existed, but access to it has become easier and easier. People are just getting sucked in, and when they lose big, they get upset.”
He noted that while athletes can avoid reading interactions, block abusive accounts or make their own social media accounts private, “it only goes so far.” As for the idea that athletes just don’t use social media at all, Giolito was scornful. “The younger generation live on social media. I can’t go tell [22-year-old teammate] Marcelo Mayer, ‘hey, you should delete Instagram.’ What the hell are you talking about?”
Where’s the line in the sand?
Giolito said that he’s been threatened with physical violence on multiple occasions via “all sorts of nice messages describing in detail what this person would do to me if they’re standing in front of me.”
He added that while for him and certain other players, abusive messages don’t affect the ability to do the job, he worries for other players who may be scared or intimidated by such messages, such as younger entrants into the league.
“Maybe, at this point, they put it in the rookie orientation program,” he mused. “It definitely wasn’t there when I was there, that was a long time ago.” SBC Americas reached out to both MLB and the MLB Players’ Association seeking clarity on that point but did not hear back from either organization by the time of publishing.
His biggest concern is that things could turn even more serious.
“What is it going to take, a player getting assaulted in front of their apartment building by some disgruntled guy that lost a bet, for real action to be taken?” Giolito asked. “My worry is that a player gets assaulted or killed or something. Because I am well aware that gambling addiction ruins people’s lives, so you never know if someone’s in a drastic state, what they could get into.”
