Nearly a century after the 1919 World Series was marred by a match-fixing scandal and three decades after the all-time hit leader received a permanent ban for wagering money on the sport, Major League Baseball is now embracing sports betting. MLB announced on Tuesday that MGM Resorts would become its official gaming partner.
“There’s been a huge change in public opinion and the actual legal framework regarding sports gaming,” said MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, “and I think it has presented an opportunity for all sports and baseball, in particular.”
The shrouds of the 1919 Black Sox (in which eight White Sox players accepted money to throw the World Series) and Pete Rose (who bet on games he managed, although, he has always maintained, never for his own team to lose) have long hung over the sport. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in May to grant states the right to legalize sports betting has begun to changed long-held views.
MGM, meanwhile, has entered into its third official league partnership in the past few months, as the MLB deal follows a similar sports betting agreement with the NBA and another betting deal with the NHL. Each of the three contracts includes sponsorships and access to official data, including at least some advanced tracking—Statcast in MLB, Second Spectrum in the NBA, and the as-yet-unnamed optical system the NHL will launch next season.
What’s most notably different about the MLB partnership is that the league will make some enhanced statistics available to MGM on an exclusive basis. The protected data, Manfred said, will be “limited.” Specifics have yet to be finalized, but some elements of the Statcast feed will be used to create MGM-branded products.
“The vast majority of the data is open data—open to any operator and is not exclusive to MGM,” added MGM Resorts CEO Jim Murren. “This is a finite piece of data that we will be able to use.
“But as I’ve said in prior meetings, I’m a big believer in open-source data. I want to make sure that we increase fan engagement globally, and just like the Red Sox winning the World Series on the field, I want MGM to win the battle of market share on the field in a fair game.”
Manfred’s predecessor as commissioner, Bud Selig, once said in a deposition that gambling was “evil, creates doubt and destroys your sport.” The league now sees sports betting as an important vehicle of fan engagement. Last season, attendance fell below 70 million fans for the first time since 2003, although Forbes reported that TV ratings increased two percent over 2017, with MLB games the No. 1 cable primetime show in every U.S. market with a team except Miami.
Pace of play has long been a point of contention for the commissioner’s office, with Manfred harping on the point often and having discussed implementing a pitch clock as a potential initiative to hasten games. In the context of sports betting, however, those discrete breaks in action could have a benefit. Down time between pitches would enable sportsbooks to set new lines for in-play prop bets and give fans a chance to play a new wager.
“It is an area where the natural pace of our game, which we actually like on the whole, is an advantage in terms of in-play betting,” Manfred said.
Others in the league office have uttered similar refrains, with EVP of business Kenny Gersh saying this summer that baseball’s series of independent events made the sport “perfect” for sports betting.
“Baseball’s perfectly suited for this,” Murren said. “It will increase social networks. People will be talking about the next pitch, the next out, the next inning. It will extend the viewership of games throughout multiple innings regardless of the outcome or the score in that given period. We’ll talk about pitchers. We’ll talk about hitters. We’ll talk about exit velocity. We’ll talk about spin rates.
“We’ll be talking about a tremendous amount of data, and baseball fans are data fiends—loving data. That’s what I love about baseball.”
This premise remains theoretical in more than 80 percent of the country, as only seven state legislatures have sanctioned sports betting thus far. Of that group, only Pennsylvania is home to an MLB franchise—both the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates reside there. Mobile sports betting is not yet operational in Pennsylvania but, when it is, Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park and Pittsburgh’s PNC Park will be the only two venues where fans can bet from their seats.
MLB is revising and updating its policies with regard to players and clubs and devising clear guidelines for the commercial activity in which it will engage, Manfred said. Murren called “trust, accuracy, and integrity” a point of emphasis in the relationship.
“It’s more than just making a business deal,” Manfred said. “It’s having in place a set of policies for the industry that give us comfort on what is always our most important issue, and that is integrity.”