This Is What Universal Online Betting Hath Wrought:
It was just days ago that Fox Rothschild LLP, a law firm, shone light on a rather unsettling MLB reality. A survey of 100 MLB players conducted found that as many as 81% had to face online wrath from angry bettors. This statistic makes all the more sense after the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Game 3 loss against the Milwaukee Brewers.
After the 6-2 loss, the Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell and his wife received the same painful messages.
“Tell me you lost a sports bet without telling me you lost a sports bet,” wrote Blake Snell’s wife, Haeley Snell, after a fan sent a threat.
A few hours after the Dodgers’ 6-2 loss, Haeley Snell shared an Instagram Story that showed a message that said, “It’s simple: tell that son of a b*h to back off before October 20th. Otherwise, I’ll cut off your fingers, one by one. I don’t care about spending 40k to track you down, you b*h. He has until October 20th. Consider yourself warned.”
However, the abuse directed at Haeley Snell is not an isolated case involving a Dodgers family.
In June, reliever Tanner Scott’s wife, Maddie, shared threatening messages after his blown save against the Phillies. Scott had entered with a 3-1 lead before allowing a single and a two-run homer in a 4-3 defeat.
Former Mets pitcher Ryne Stanek has also described receiving threats from angry bettors who lost parlays earlier this month.
One message he recalled said, “You cost me your parlay, I hope your family dies.”
From Snell to Scott to Stanek, the pattern is clear: Bettors’ rage doesn’t stop at the ballpark.
And several surveys bring this issue to light. For instance, a survey from The Athletic in 2025 reported that 78% of 133 players said betting changed how fans treated them or their teammates. These numbers show that abuse linked to gambling has become a serious concern across baseball.
MLB and other major leagues have already called for stronger action against bettors who threaten athletes and families.
In September 2026, five leagues and their players’ associations urged regulators to permanently ban verified offenders from legal betting. However, MLB must also examine how its commercial relationships with betting platforms affect players’ safety.
Ronald Acuña Jr.’s partnership with Kalshi does not establish his personal position on harassment, but it raises questions.
Such partnerships create a conflict of interest when players face gambling-related threats. Stronger enforcement, better reporting systems, and greater distance from betting promotions could help protect players and their families.
Too late. The horses have escaped the barn. Every sports property relies on online gambling as a major source of advertising revenue. They are to blame.
Is The Problem Too Few Police? Read, and respond:
American police departments, compared with their counterparts around the developed world, are tiny. Phoenix has 2,500 police officers. Munich—which has a population of roughly the same size—has nearly two and a half times as many. Dallas has 3,100 officers. The Brussels metro area, comparable to Dallas in population, has 6,700.
OK, fine. But, so what?:
Aurora, Colorado, sits half an hour east of Denver, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It’s the third-largest city in the state, with more than 400,000 residents, and is more diverse, economically and culturally, than its larger neighbor. It’s a very typical modern American city, and for close to a decade its police chief was Daniel Oates, a longtime veteran of the New York City Police Department. Oates is part of the most recent generation of law-enforcement leadership: better educated than his predecessors, more comfortable with data and analytics, and more aware of the importance of the police department’s relationship to the public.
I called him and asked a simple question. Aurora is the same size as Zurich, but Zurich has 1,700 police officers and Aurora had 650 when Oates was running the police department. What would have happened, I asked, if I could have given you another 650 officers, putting you in the same range as Zurich? He burst out laughing at the thought. “It would’ve been glorious,” Oates replied.
Police departments keep careful records of exactly how long it takes a squad car to respond to a radio call, so Oates could identify exactly when and why response times got unacceptably long. Suppose you noticed that week in, week out, people in a certain part of the city were waiting 45 minutes for an officer to arrive between 10 p.m. and midnight. In Aurora, Oates had lots of those holes in the schedule—so many, in fact, that he was hundreds of officers short of a fully staffed patrol team. With more officers, he could have plugged those holes.
Then he began to talk about what he would do with the other 300 new officers. He had a long list. At the top was a greatly beefed‑up community-policing division.
A police department relies on the goodwill of the population it is serving in order to be effective. And Oates’s point was that if your force is composed mostly of a small number of overworked officers rushing from one crime scene to the next, you never get the chance to build that goodwill. With more officers, the department could do that.
As Oates was talking about his experiences in Aurora, I was reminded of something the criminologist Jens Ludwig said about what he learned from riding around at night with Chicago police officers: Once you realize that most murder is expressive, you understand the value of having lots of police officers. An officer cannot easily disrupt a carefully planned act of instrumental violence. But they can interrupt the kind of argument that builds into a lethal encounter.
The overwhelming majority of female murder victims are killed by someone they know, and this had all the hallmarks of something that could spiral into exactly that situation. Who knows what trivial matter had set the man off? But he was angry. Ludwig continued:
And she’s just, like, cowering, pushed all the way up against the fence, nowhere to go. So the cop pulls [the] car over and says, “What’s going on here?” And the guy says, “Everything’s fine.” And the sergeant says, “Buddy, I think you should go take a walk.” And the guy says, “I think everything’s fine.” And the cop says, “Go take a fucking walk.”
And then the guy, like, very grudgingly walks away, and we then wind up giving the lady and her kid a drive home.
The gigantic guy didn’t commit a crime. And the officer didn’t make an arrest. What the officer did do, however, was change the chemistry of the situation—interrupt the kind of encounter that could lead to an act of real violence.
When I told Daniel Oates that story, he agreed completely. He said that for every arrest an officer makes, he does 10 or 15 or even 20 of those spontaneous interruptions. And if Oates had had twice as many officers, they could have interrupted twice as many of those arguments, and defused them before they turned into something far worse.
This is what is happening in Western European countries. They have much bigger police departments because they understand exactly what all those extra police officers can do. They believe in police. And that is the other thing that would have baffled any visitor from Europe who happened upon graduation at the LAPD academy. You Americans write best-selling novels about cops. You glorify them in movies and television shows. So why don’t you believe in them?
Well. Clearly, this is a counter-intuitive argument. I would (and will ) raise the question: What qualities do these non-American cities seek in their police? Because it’s not merely the number of police, it’s the motivation and experience of the police.
Anyway, it’s an interesting contrarian piece. And it’s Sunday morning.
Beautiful Political Art From Kashmir. I’m no expert, but I know what I like. I like this:
From the age of 12, Nilima Sheikh regularly traveled with her parents and sister several hundred miles north from their home in New Delhi to the mountains of Kashmir. She was asthmatic. Her parents, who were both doctors, carried medicine in case it was needed because they insisted she should not forgo the hikes. In her memory, the verdant Kashmir Valley shimmers as an earthly paradise, as it has over the centuries for emperors, poets and countless visitors.
“I had in my mind that I wanted to do large works on the theme of Kashmir, but I felt I hadn’t enough knowledge,” Sheikh said in an interview. Trained as a historian, she plunged into the subject in 2003, producing, over the next 11 years, a suite of 10-foot-tall, double-sided scroll paintings she titled, “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams.”
Five of these paintings star in her marvelous first solo New York show “Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies,” in a 26-foot-high lobby gallery at the Museum of Modern Art. Modern Kashmir’s beauty is represented alongside the violence between Hindus and Muslims that has convulsed the region since Indian partition and independence in 1947.
In “Son et Lumiere,” center, Sheikh depicts a group of picnickers alongside a decapitated man from whose neck blood is spurting, and the flowers and other offerings that have been placed on a grave garden. Credit…Yuvraj Khanna for The New York Times
Sheikh’s style descends from Indian and Persian miniature painting and includes allusions to Italian primitives, Chinese landscape artists, 19th-century Kashmir map shawls and the demons depicted in late-14th- and early 15th-century Turkey.Credit…Yuvraj Khanna for The New York Times
I know it’s obvious, but you come up with an alternative to this:
