Controversy

A new five-dollar “Subway Series” instant scratch lotto ticket, decorated with both Mets and Yankees logos, will go on sale on May 3. The ticket will offer buyers 12 chances to win up to $1 million, as well as other baseball goodies including team jackets and opportunities to throw out a first pitch. This marks the first time New York Lottery has teamed with Major League Baseball to create a gaming product.

“We have a triple play for New York lotto this morning,” said Nancy Palumbo, director of the New York Lottery, in announcing the new scratch game. “We have embarked on a record-breaking partnership with Major League Baseball.”

Critics find this new partnership surprising, and suggest it appears to break the MLB ban against any form of betting in ballparks. Gambling is considered a disreputable taboo in baseball ever since the game-throwing scandals of 1919 involved the player “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. More recently baseball star Pete Rose was implicated in gambling on games in 1989.

“This is gambling of the worst kind,” State Sen. Frank Padavan (R-Queens) said in a phone interview from Albany. “They’re reaching into our national pastime and sucking money from the pockets of people who can’t afford it.”

Executives from New York Lottery and Scientific Games Corp., which owns the licenses to use team logos and prints the tickets for New York Lottery, insist that the tickets are not a form of gambling, but rather entertainment.

“The gambling argument is completely disingenuous,” said Lorne Weil, CEO of Scientific Games. “None of the money spent by the public is going to gambling bookies or gamblers. It’s going to the state for education.”

The New York Lottery gave $2 billion to state education programs last year, an eight percent increase from its contribution the year before. Palumbo expects the Subway Series ticket to bring in $75 million in revenue this year. She said more than 30 percent of sales proceeds will go to education. The tickets will be sold at both Shea and Yankee stadiums, in addition to 16,000 retail outlets in the state.

Scientific Games has similar sports-themed ticket deals with the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, in other states. The company recently signed a deal with the MLB and the Massachusetts State Lottery to use the Boston Red Sox logo on scratch lotto tickets in that state.

“We’ve had a number of partnerships in the past with sports teams,” Palumbo said. “We’ve worked with the Mets and Yankees on promotions during spring training. This ticket is a fun game.”

Padavan said that according to the New York State Council on Problem Gambling, lotteries are the most addictive form of gambling, and young people are particularly vulnerable.

“The New York State Lottery is shameless in its appeal to young people, creating new scratch off tickets around the holidays, with candy canes and stocking stuffers,” said Padavan. “Kids are going to think if they’re sold at the ballpark, they must be good.”

Steve Saferin, CEO of MDI Entertainment, who researched the deal with MLB, said sports fans, relative to the general public, buy a higher percentage of lottery tickets. That higher percentage could be anywhere from 10 to 70 percent, he said.

Some lottery ticket buyers say the new baseball theme might attract fans who would not otherwise buy a lotto ticket. But for avid buyers, another reason might draw them to this particular ticket.

“I’m a baseball fan, but I’ll buy the ticket because it’s new,” said Sondra Nixon, an E.M.T. on duty at Grand Central Terminal. “I’ll have better luck of winning when the ticket is just out.”

Palumbo acknowledges there is a spike in sales with every new ticket, but says the chance of winning is not better at the start of a new season. The odds of winning any prize on the Subway Series ticket are nearly one in five, but the chances of landing the million dollar prize are steep, at one in nearly 3 million.

Still, superstition wins the minds of buyers.

“New tickets are usually the luckiest,” said Brenda Andujar, a security guard at Grand Central Terminal. “And if it’s about baseball, then that might bring even more luck.”