SOURCE: NY SUN

While I don't know which senator is the biggest baseball fan, I'm fairly sure I know which one baseball likes best. It's Arizona's junior senator, Jon Kyl.

This saddens me. I love baseball and would, along with millions of other Americans, throw rotten fruit at Mr. Kyl if I had a clear shot. For years he has been the most prominent senator speaking out against the supposed scourge of Internet gambling, which ranks with Trans fats and iPods on the list of things no one in government should ever care about.

This is actually a pretty bloodless way of putting it. Another way would be to point out that for eight years; Mr. Kyl has been unable to speak about online gambling without comparing it to crack. Last year, he led a press release with this line: "A Harvard professor once appropriately likened Internet gambling to crack cocaine use." His longstanding and mysterious advocacy of legislation aimed at the menace of the online card room culminated in last year's passage of Title VII of the Safe Port Act, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which effectively banned online gambling in America by making it illegal for American financial institutions to transfer funds to gaming operations. Furious, rotating noise was heard from the vicinity of Senator Goldwater's coffin.

The foolish, and probably illegal, nature of this legislation is well outside the scope of this column. For our purposes, the important point is that Major League Baseball loves the fact that you can't play online poker in the same way Jose Reyes loves reggaeton: with unnatural intensity.

Why this should be so isn't immediately obvious, but consider this: MLB spent a good part of last year trying to corner the fantasy baseball market, unsuccessfully arguing in court that player names and statistics are not public events, and raising the licensing fees for officially endorsed fantasy baseball games such as those run by ESPN well into the millions of dollars. This was part of a basic strategy to centralize the huge fantasy market around MLB's Web site, thus giving baseball a finger in every fantasy pie.

Though that strategy was dealt a blow by the August decision that MLB could not stop small companies from running fantasy games using baseball statistics, fantasy games remain a large and growing revenue stream for MLB (there are seven officially licensed fantasy games, with each licensee paying a reported $2.5 million) and an extremely valuable platform for the promotion of the sport. When you make an estimated $12 billion worth of annual gambling illegal, that frees up a lot of time and money for people to spend on the few legal games left standing.

Happily for baseball, Mr. Kyl's ban on online gambling includes a carve-out for fantasy sports. Five card stud might be crack, but apparently the crystal meth that is fantasy baseball is fine with the good senator, who obligingly cleared out a whole gang of rival dealers so that MLB and the other major team sports could sling their product on the corner. Head over to MLB.com and you'll be pointed to clean destinations where you can wager on baseball through fantasy sports leagues — a good, legal way to spend some of that cash you otherwise would have burned in your virtual crackpipe.

Not surprisingly, MLB expressed its love the way all good dealers express it, with green cash. Mr. Kyl, according to records accessed through the Center for Responsive Politics, raked in $41,398 from MLB executives and the game's political action committee last year.

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