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WPCNR VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK By “BULL ALLEN” November 6, 2025:

Hello there everybody,  this is Bull Allen greeting you from the old Yankee Stadium in the shadow of late autumn.

Now that the World Series is over, this memory of the third game of the 1956 World Series is a fitting melancholy to another intriguing season fraught with change, in rules, in attitudes and vagaries.

As I look down from the Mel Allen Broadcast Booth in the old mezzanine I see fans departing in a few days Don Larsen will pitch a perfect game saved by Mantles over the head backhand catch to save a double in left center.

I am also saddened by the big white-lettered sign “NO BETTING” a reminder of the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919, when the Pale Hose contrived to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Eight players were thrown out of baseball for life when the scandal came to light by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first Commissioner.

it is 106 years this October since these 8 players threw a World Series.

How sad it is that the excitement of baseball players and pitchers and batters and fielders adjusting to the no shifts rule, the pitching clock, the batters’ 9 seconds be ready rule, have made baseball more exciting, and as I wrote October 2 that it has been overhadowed by baseball selling itself to the gambling industry.

Gambling commercials are in Yankee games. Baseball promotes gambling on broadcasts, even has relationships with them.

Baseball as the 1919 World Series proved is easy to fix. Nowadays bets are accepted on possible outcomes of at bats during games by gambling companies.

It was made even more startling when prominent NBA players were named as being involved in promoting fixed poker games.

If it can be done with NBA stars, it can be done with baseball stars.

More horrifying to me is how spots on gambling on baseball broadcasts and television broadcasts listened to by teens and children tells them gambling is good.

Gambling is a drug every bit as addictive as hard drugs and alcohol.

It may not kill you but you are betting your life if you develop a gambling habit.

It is a terrible thing to advertise on a baseball broadcast.

Baseball is now making so much money  from it that it will never give it up until of course another World Series is fixed.

Baseball used to be wholesome.

It is not any more with this gambling thing.

Here is Bart Giamatti’s farewell to the 2025 season…