Caliente de Durango

95

In 2017 Durango got a new team in the Mexican League called los Generales. It was, in my opinion, a debatable move. The owner of the new team was a man named Carlos José Lazo Reyes, and he made his money because of a sports gambling company he owned. Yes, the owner of a sports gambling company owned a baseball team. There's no potential for shenanigans there, right? And from what I have managed to gather (I admit I don't fully understand all this, because I'm relying a fair amount on Google translations of articles that were in Spanish), this wasn't a sports gambling company in the sense that they took bets the way that companies like Draft Kings do. No, this was apparently a company that placed bets. That makes the idea that they owned a baseball team (and a couple of sports teams in other leagues as well) even more problematic.

I've never heard of any evidence of shenanigans, but things still went off the tracks almost immediately. The league nearly suspended them in 2018 due to financial issues. And then a few years later the sports betting company went bankrupt. In the wake of that bankruptcy, Lazo was charged with fraud. The Mexican League responded to this by suspending Lazo, meaning he couldn't own a team in the Mexican League. In short, this time the Mexican League suspended los Generales for real.

But that would create a couple of problems. First, the team would have an odd number of teams, which is something baseball leagues always try to avoid given the way scheduling works. Second, there would be the question of what to do with the players who played for los Generales. So the league awarded a franchise to another ownership group who on paper would be a completely separate team with a new name, but which for all practical purposes would be a rebranded Generales with all of the old team's players and the old team's manager.

Of course, after the black eye they received from letting the owner of a sports betting company who was subsequently charged with fraud own a team, the league needed to be careful about who they let own the new team. They needed someone who wouldn't remind fans of the potential problems that come from mixing sports gambling and sports team ownership. So the new ownership group — you've already guessed this, haven't you? — is also a sports gambling company. At least this time, it's a company that takes bets, not a company that places them.

And they're not trying to hide it. The name of the sports gambling company is Grupo Caliente, and the new team is named Caliente de Durango (every reference I've seen uses no definite article before the name). Grupo Caliente's logo is the word Caliente with the top of the C turning into a horse's head (the company started out as a race track in Tijuana that hosted horse races and greyhound races), and the C in Caliente de Durango's logo is identical to the C in Grupo Caliente's logo. The new team's colors were the same colors that Grupo Caliente uses. Apparently fans weren't crazy about the blatant use of the parent company's branding. And I agree that it's a bit unseemly (I feel the same way about Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls), but frankly, I don't see how that's the main problem here. The main problem, as I said, is the mixture of sports team ownership and sports gambling.

But regardless, here we are. The team is still owned by people who made their money from gambling. We can only hope this team doesn't end the same way los Generales did.

Final Score: 95 points.
Penalties: Singular, 15 pts; Obvious, 17 pts; Letter, 24 pts; Irrelevance, 39 pts.
Bonuses: None.