Wait. Player has:
player 86 0 0u CHR 4,65 48 /dev/ttyS1
player 86 0 1u CHR 4,65 48 /dev/ttyS1
player 86 0 2u CHR 4,65 48 /dev/ttyS1

but this is orthogonal to the exec code. (Well, it "matters" because the pgrp is now different and wasn't before)

So fixing the exec code to use /dev/null instead of /dev/console isn't helpful.