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But August is a different story, as the Chiefs are playing meaningless tune-up games for the NFL season and the Cards are in the thick of their campaign.

Both played in prime time last Saturday, with the Cardinals entertaining their archrival Chicago Cubs and the Chiefs playing their first of three exhibition contests. Both games were shown on over-the-air TV, and baseball won this time. Viewership-tracking firm Nielsen says 6.2% of the market watched the Redbirds get routed by the Cubs 9-1, on KTVI (Channel 2), and 4.5% saw the Chiefs lose 20-17 to Arizona in a game in which KC starting quarterback Patrick Mahomes played just one series.

Don’t expect similar results when the NFL regular season begins. All Chiefs games last year that weren’t exclusively streamed were televised in 911±¬ÁÏÍø, and the lowest rating any of those generated was 11.7.

Porter patter

If you watch a sporting event — on television, via streaming or even in person — you’re bound to be subjected to an avalanche of advertising for betting.

Sports gambling has moved out of the shadows of local illegal bookies or take-a-trip-to-Nevada for legitimate action to becoming widely accepted. That’s since the Supreme Court in 2018 overturned prohibitions on it in most of the nation and left it up to states to decide individually if they wound permit the activity. Teams, including locally, have sponsorships from sports-betting companies and even the regional sports network carrying Cardinals and Blues games has sold its name to a major national bookmaking operation. The inundation only figures to grow once legal sports betting begins in Missouri this December.

But the downside of the explosion of this business is that some are lured into the trap of trying to make a quick buck, with players across multiple sports accused of performing poorly to influence the outcome of bets they or associates might have placed on the athlete’s statistical output.

This has hit close to home, as former Missouri basketball player Jontay Porter admitted in court last year to pulling himself from two NBA games, thus allowing associates to win bets that Porter would fall short of reaching designated thresholds on his statistical output (such as number of points scored, rebounds, etc.). He was banned from the NBA.

His brother Michael, who also played at Mizzou and now is with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets after being traded from Denver last month, has a dim view of sports betting as he expressed this week as part of a lengthy appearance on the (which includes coarse language) and talked about how tempting it can be for players who “come from nothing� to be lured into doing something to turn a quick buck but could end their careers.

“Think about it, if you could get all your homies rich by telling them, ‘Yo, bet $10,000 on my under this one game. I’m going to act like I’ve got an injury, and I’m going sit out. I’m going to come out after three minutes,’� Porter said. “And they all get a little bag (of money) because you did it one game.

“That is so not OK, but some people probably think like that. They come from nothing, and all their homies have nothing.�

He has a dim view of sports betting overall, indicating players get death threats from losing bettors.

“The enjoyment of the game isn’t for the game anymore,� Porter said. “It’s so that people can make money. In reality, way more people are losing money than making money.�

He’s not optimistic about the possibility of the situation improving.

“The whole sports gambling entity ... it’s bad and it’s only going to get worse,� he said.

Prep parade

Matrix Midwest, an over-the-air station that has been trying to become a significant force in the local sports-TV landscape, reaches its one-year anniversary late this month and has had a couple high-profile teams in its ever-expanding lineup.

But the Cardinals and Blues games it has shown — on Channel 36 (Channel 6 on Charter’s Spectrum cable) — have fared extremely poorly in attracting viewers according to ratings-tracking firm Nielsen. It’s been so bad that just one of the teams’ 11 combined games has attracted even 1% of the market.

But it’s onward for Matrix, which is planning to show four CBC high school football games over-the-air this season as well as streaming the team’s entire schedule. The telecasts are to be produced by the school’s Cadet Student Network and are to be shown without interruption other than commercials at halftime.

Veteran broadcaster and Mizzou public address announcer Randy Moehlman is set to do the play-by-play. The schedule starts at 7 p.m. Aug. 29 with a streamed-only production when CBC plays at Sacred Heart-Griffin (Springfield, Ill.). The team’s first game to also be shown over the air is on Sept. 5, at 6 p.m. against Cardinal Ritter.

• Also on the high school football front, KQDZ (101.7 FM) is set to broadcast all games played by Orchard Farm, which is in a rapidly growing area of eastern St. Charles County between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The area is booming so much that a new high school with a state-of-the-art campus opened in January 2024 and the addition of the broadcasts is being billed as making the school the only one in the county with live radio coverage.

Veteran 911±¬ÁÏÍø broadcaster Paul Brown is to do the play-by-play, with the Eagles’ season kicking off on Aug. 29. That’s when they entertain Fort Zumwalt East at 7 p.m.