Product (mis)placement

 I don't know if Shoeless Joe will come stomping out of the corn like an avenging angel tomorrow, when Major League Baseball appropriates the Field of Dreams for filthy lucre. But I do know he's gotta be damned confused these days.

A sportsbook right outside Wrigley Field? After what happened on the other side of town 102 autumns ago?

Oh, but this is rich irony indeed, and welcome to modern times. The Black Sox scandal, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis's biblical judgment of it, might have made consorting with gamblers baseball's cardinal sin. But that was before baseball discovered it could make a buck off it.

And so, yes, the Cubs have gotten permission to build a two-story sportsbook outside ivy-clad old Wrigley, a crime against not only esthetics but the game's own commandments.

Somewhere Pete Rose must be having himself a good, if bitter, laugh.

Somewhere more celestial, the Judge and Bart Giamatti must be stomping around, wondering if everyone in baseball has lost his or her moral compass.

"What the hell?"  the Judge is howling.

"What the hell?" Bart is echoing.

"What the HELL??" Shoeless Joe is chiming in, shouldering his way through the corn.

Now he's nudging Eddie Cicotte and Buck Weaver and that little creep Chick Gandil, and they're all saying the same thing.

Are you freaking KIDDING me? A gambling den right outside the ballpark? And baseball banished US for all eternity??

Meanwhile, Arnold Rothstein, the mobster who engineered the 1919 World Series fix, is lighting another cigar and nodding like he knew it all along.

Ah, I knew you mugs would come around eventually ...

And, yeah, I get it, this isn't about the players laying bets right outside Wrigley Field. But by whom do you think the 1919 fix was put in motion, and who was it designed to benefit? 

The gamblers. The very people who'll be stopping by the sportsbook to lay down some coin on the Cubbies.

Baseball has spent a century keeping those types at arm's length, because they almost ruined the game. Now it's in business with them -- or at least, some of its teams are.

Look. I get that the world has changed. I get that online sports wagering has removed a lot of the stigma that used to surround it. It's not just sleazy Arnold Rothstein types who lay bets down on our games now; it's Everyman Everywhere.

 And Everyman isn't going to try to rig the games to cash in, right? That could never happen, right?

So why not a sportsbook right outside Wrigley Field? Why not MLB implicitly encouraging, or at the very least not discouraging, fans to bet on the game?

"Geez, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "You sound like you just time-portaled in from 1950. It's 2021, dude. Don't be such a prude."

I hear ya, believe me. I know I sound like Peter Puritan, like Stephen Severe, like one of the Mather boys from Olde New England. But I'm a history nerd, and sometimes I'm too cursed with looking backward. Sometimes I'm too cursed with lessons learned that maybe don't apply anymore.

You know that bit about 1950?

It's relevant because I just finished reading Matthew Goodman's excellent chronicle of the 1950 CCNY basketball point-shaving scandal, "The City Game: Triumph, Scandal and a Legendary Basketball Team." Betting in New York was illegal at the time, but the police and politicians looked the other way and the top bookies were minor celebrities. And gaming the games naturally followed.

Now the top bookies advertise on TV, and no shadows attach to sports betting. It's as American as apple pie -- and baseball.

But the essential dynamic remains, it seems to me. And that's troubling.

I know. Peter Puritan strikes again.