BAD BEATS? SCOTT VAN PELT IS THE EVANGELISTIC SLIME OF SPORTS MEDIA
His dumb wagering follies ignore reality — six percent of Americans are problem gamblers — and make money for a company that wants everything in sports to be Van Pelt-nice for its league relationships
What’s the number now? The National Council on Problem Gambling says six percent of Americans have reached an excessive phase, destroying finances and families and ultimately their emotional health. That’s a pile of heroin carried each night when Scott Van Pelt delivers wagering picks for games, then another pile when he breaks hearts and flaunts “Bad Beats.”
ESPN doesn’t care. The network is branding a sportsbook, a despicable way of paying $17 million a year for a talk host, Pat McAfee, who wears a black tank-top to work EVERY FRICKING DAY and might get his armpit hair on camera lenses. Glorifying betting allows Disney Company to make money in the industry’s cable-to-streaming transformation. It’s such a villainous method to stay in business.
So why would the chairman, Jimmy Pitaro, ever discourage Van Pelt from using gambling moments for normal sports coverage? Every time he touts a game, how many problem gamblers are grabbing smartphones? How many might use cross-channel betting in the future? How much money will ESPN make in the crossfire? Never mind the practice is a death watch. The least the network can do is run a problem helpline on the TV screen: 1-800-GAMBLER. Nah. Van Pelt is too busy laughing with his butt buddy, Stanford Steve.
In today’s realm of sports media — and the critical role it plays in protecting good people and separating frauds — no one is more atrocious in his profession than Van Pelt. Basically, he’s positioned after games to ask mushy questions to athletes and pump up the network as an official outlet for the sports business. He does this gig called “One Big Thing,” and if every now and then he had a remark about something that polarizes the world — Taylor Swift at NFL games, Deion Sanders and the transfer portal, James Harden’s latest salary ploy, an American caddie dissing Rory McIlroy at the Ryder Cup — I’d try to take him seriously.
Instead, everything is lovely, which is awesome when you’re an ESPN anchor and the boss wants you to kiss everyone’s ass at all times. Wednesday, Van Pelt did a piece on why baseball’s pitch clock has been effective. That was obvious in April, as most of us commented then, but maybe because the network is so thick on the NFL and colleges and, of course, Swift and Travis Kelce, he saw a chance to prop up MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. That’s nice, as ESPN has a contract to cover major-league games through 2028 and needs ratings as football blows out the postseason. There’s no better way to praise Manfred than with a beautiful oration from the night anchor, which also ran on the website.
All of which makes it challenging for the rest of us to deal with this monetizing mockery, this infantility of American life. I’m just trying to lay out the news each day, good and bad, as all media should in this land. But there’s Van Pelt, a Sunday morning evangelist, doing the dirty work for the company and the company only. That includes his pieces on gambling, which really should end immediately before someone blows his head off.
You kidding? He’s making money for himself, for McAfee, for Pitaro, for those who didn’t lose their jobs via layoffs. It’s a scam, and soon enough, he’ll be there with Stanford Steve, with more college picks and a spoon to cook the drugs.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.