The Patriot News

Baseball season is quickly approaching. Teams have switched from offseason to preseason mode and have already begun Spring Training. Fans nationwide wait for the beginning of the 162 game season to decide the World Series champion. For the Mets, expectations are higher than any other year in recent history. Last year, New York was the surprise of the MLB, making it all the way to the World Series only to lose to Kansas City in 5 games. Fortunately, the Mets core of stars are all returning for another season. This includes the best pitching staff in baseball featuring Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, and Bartolo Colón. The Mets also get back Zack Wheeler, a promising young starting pitcher who had missed all of last year due to an elbow injury. With his addition to the already dominant pitching staff, the Mets look to be the strongest pitching team for the second year straight. The big difference between last year’s team and this year’s is that the Mets’ offense...

By Alexander U. If an individual watches any sort of professional sport on television, he or she cannot have missed the daily fantasy advertisements. At one point, daily fantasy companies aired an advertisement on national television every ninety seconds. Daily fantasy can be addictive due to the small chance of winning the jackpot. However, the argument of chance has raised the question: is daily fantasy gambling? Before daily fantasy existed, the only option for entertainment were the original fantasy sports. Fantasy sports are a season-long game in which you put around twenty dollars into a pot, and you and your friends pick imaginary teams of players and compete to see who will emerge victorious, winning all the money. Daily fantasy, however, allows a person to go online, pay an entry fee ranging from from twenty-five cents to thousands of dollars, and compete against complete strangers for a week or a day. As a result, DraftKings and FanDuel have evolved into multi-billion dollar ...