The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board expects the state’s first online sportsbook to begin live testing sometime in the next two weeks. That means, before the end of May, either Pittsburgh’s PNC Park or Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park will become the first MLB stadium to host fans legally betting on baseball from their seats.
Mobile sports bets are already being accepted in New Jersey, Nevada, and West Virginia, but none of those states are home to major league franchises. Now, either the Phillies or Pirates are set to make history.
Major League Baseball is often held to a different standard than other sports because of its traditional image as national pastime. Fairly or not, the memories of the 1919 Black Sox scandal and Pete Rose’s fall from grace still linger. Former commissioner Bud Selig said in a 2012 deposition that gambling was “evil, creates doubt and destroys your sport.”
But MLB is entering this new era willingly. The league has had a partnership with daily fantasy sports operator DraftKings since 2013 and, most notably, MLB partnered with MGM Resorts on an official gaming partnership last November. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred addressed the advent of in-ballpark betting at SportTechie’s State of the Industry conference. He emphasized the league’s sports betting policies regulating commercial activities and insuring the integrity of games.
“Mobile is a reality,” Manfred said. “It is going to be the predominant vehicle by which people engage in sports betting. It’s kind of like analytics, you have to accept that reality. Then I think what you try to do is build in limitations around what the clubs can do so that mobile activity that is going to go on in the stadium doesn’t become all-pervasive. We’re a family entertainment product.”
While preparing for legalized sports betting, MLB executives conferred with industry counterparts in Europe and, according to Manfred, some of those overseas officials candidly conceded, “Maybe there’s too much sports betting surrounding their sport.”
“We’re going to recognize that the mobile is going on but build in rules around it,” Manfred said. “And in some ways, mobile helps you, right? If you have mobile betting available, it reduces the pressure you might otherwise get to have kiosks or betting parlors or whatever. If somebody’s doing it on their phone, you don’t know if they’re looking at their Facebook page or making a bet, and that may be a good thing.”
The impact of betting in a ballpark may be more symbolic than anything. Pennsylvania will extend the reach to MLB and the NBA, but New Jersey and Nevada are collectively home to two NFL franchises, two NHL teams, one MLS club, and one WNBA organization. There have been no reports of any issues arising as a result of legal mobile betting in those venues.
Veteran sports betting executives downplayed the impact. Richard Carter, CEO of SBTech, noted that the market size of game attendees compared to every other consumer is “relatively inconsequential.”
“The vast majority of it is done on the couch at home,” said Sportradar VP Neale Deeley. “We call it ‘mobile,’ but it’s actually static to where it’s being done.”
Carter said he usually places a bet when going to watch his beloved Liverpool in the English Premier League but noted that he enjoys the experience of going to a stadium kiosk with a group of friends to enjoy the social aspect of betting. There currently are no retail options for betting in the stadiums of major U.S. sports, however.
The prevalence of illegal offshore sportsbooks mean in-venue betting is not a truly novel experience. The change is perhaps more like that of a college student turning 21 and being able to buy drinks with a legal ID instead of a fake one.
“The reality is that mobile sports betting has been happening in MLB stadiums for some two decades at this point,” Chris Grove, managing director at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, wrote in an email. “I think where things really start to change is not with legalization itself, but when teams and leagues begin integrating betting into the fan experience through sponsorships, promotions, venue installations, and prize-based betting. Until then, professional sports will continue to be adjacent to betting rather than actually involved.”
How involved teams and clubs get remains to be seen. Kenny Gersh, MLB’s EVP for gaming and new business ventures, recently told SportTechie that the league is developing its own predictive contests, although they will not be betting products.
“We are actually working internally to create some free-to-play games,” Gersh said. “We’re not ready to totally publicly announce that we’re launching something, but probably next year at the latest, we’ll have a free-to-play game. We want to make casual, engaging games that our fans can play and have the potential to earn prizes without actually betting.
“Part of that for me, too, is helping drive the betting industry to make more engaging games. Right now, the way betting on baseball has been traditionally done has a fairly high learning curve for a casual fan to figure out how they would bet on baseball.”
Gersh hopes tapping into Baseball Advanced Media’s technology team, its official data sources, and deep baseball knowledge can help set a helpful course.
The possible red flag Gersh raised about legalized mobile betting in the stadium is whether anyone in attendance would have advance knowledge of outcomes on bets being calculated elsewhere—calculations which might be subject to delays caused by the lag of data transmission. MLB is lobbying for bookmakers to license the official data feed in part because the league has invested in making sure every ballpark is connected via a dedicated fiber optic connection.
“My concern is making sure that someone in the ballpark—because of the delay of information getting outside the ballpark—doesn’t have an unfair advantage or isn’t somehow gaming the system,” Gersh said. “That’s where I think the official data becomes really important. It isn’t that it’s ‘official’ versus ‘unofficial,’ it’s that our fast and reliable. We’re going to be able to tell people outside the ballpark what’s happening inside the ballpark.”
Efforts to thwart unofficial transmission of game statistics might have tricky legal issues to contend with, according to one sports law expert.
“Live wagering while at a sporting event is nothing new, but the issue will get more attention now given the pecuniary incentives at play following the Supreme Court case” Ryan Rodenberg, an associate professor at Florida State University, wrote in an email. “The big issue moving forward will be litigation focused on whether lessees using publicly funded stadiums can prevent select individuals from disseminating real-time data on-site.”
Those considerations could take years to settle in the court system. In the near term, fans attending Phillies and Pirates home games will have a new option for in-game entertainment.