Last week, Phil Jackson criticized the NBA for what he believes is the hypocrisy of the league taking a strong stance against gambling yet allowing teams to accept ad money from local casinos. Thing is, he could have cast a little wider net because basketball is far from the only guilty sport. In this post BLS contributor Nick Friedell looks at baseball's two-faced stance. 

If you watched a baseball game on television last year, it's likely you saw an in-park advertisement for a form of gambling. At Yankee Stadium, it was one for Mohegan Sun. In Los Angeles, an ad for Vegas was usually present behind home plate. If you suffered through a Pirates game, you'd have become familiar with Wheeling Casino

It didn't stop there, of course. The Marlins socked plenty of baseballs off the Miccosukee Gaming ads at Dolphin Stadium. I saw ads for Foxwoods Casino at the baseball cathedral known as Fenway Park (the Red Sox are on lotto tickets, too). The D'backs had several casino ads screen-printed around the dugouts at Chase Field. Every time the camera shined on Bob Melvin, I suddenly got the urge to play a little blackjack.

It doesn't make much sense to me. While baseball has taken its share of black eyes over PEDs and labor issues, it has remained relatively clean of gambling controversy ever since Pete Rose was banned from the game. While the NBA, NHL and NFL have all been involved in betting controversies/scandals in the last few years, the MLB has only had minor dustups like an Orioles scout being fired earlier this year after he was connected to a gambling probe by the league's investigative unit.

With that in mind, why in the world would baseball do anything to jeopardize the image that it is, by and large, a league free of gaming controversies? And why hasn't someone like Ozzie Guillen, pulled a Phil Jackson to call MLB out on the hypocrisy of all these ads?

MLB has gone through too many other controversies over the last decade to let the relationship between its teams and certain gambling enterprises become an ongoing problem. If a gambling controversy hits the game at some point in the near future, people will point to these casino ads and wonder why baseball could say one thing, while allowing something completely different.

Are these ads the end of the world? No, and the link between ads for a local slot/table shack and fixed games on the field is a hard one to prove. Still, for a sport that goes as far to post anti-gambling warnings in each clubhouse, it's curious that they would let any of their white linen be soiled in the slightest way. Somewhere Pete Rose has to be smirking.

(Well, Pete Rose is always smirking, but you get my point.)

What do you think? Should baseball ban casino advertisements in its ballparks?