In the time that Giancarlo Stanton has been a Yankee, Americans have spent $220 billion gambling on sports through legal books — and that doesn’t cover California, where betting is still technically illegal — after a 2018 Supreme Court decision gave the power of legalization back to individual states. The firehose of gambling money has led to an ad every nine minutes, push notifications to my phone when I don’t even have a gambling app, and overall an air of disconnect from what’s happening on the field.
This disconnect has been growing for a while. Humans are actually kind of bad at focusing on multiple things at once, if you’re waiting on the results of a five-way parlay, you’re probably not focusing on Michael King’s 2.