Gambling & Baseball, Closer To Reality?

Joe Favorito delves into the ongoing discussion around gambling in baseball…

There was a time not too long ago; months even, where the mention of baseball and gambling or gaming would send people running for cover. After all, the reason why there is a commissioner of baseball is because of gambling; Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was brought in as an independent third party with the power to unilaterally rule in the best interests of the game following the famous 1919 Black Sox scandal where the players of the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the World Series.

The commissioner was there to save baseball from itself.

Now much has changed since the roaring ’20’s and most recently the office of the commissioner was occupied by a man who acted in the best interests of the game but was a former owner himself, Bud Selig, so the role was now as arbiter over all aspects but with the backing of the owners on most issues, gambling included. As a matter of fact, perhaps Selig’s most hard and fast stance was against gambling in the way that he steadfastly kept an admitted gambler albeit a first ballot Hall of Famer in Pete Rose away from the game for decades.

So it may have come to a surprise to some that on Friday at the MIT Sloan Analytics Conference – perhaps the largest event on the planet to discuss the rise of both technology and the use of statistics in contemporary sport – that the new MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, was admittedly candid and open minded about the possibility that some day baseball would consider and work with the government to allow wagering on the sport.

To be clear, this was not a glowing acceptance that would open the flood gates for widespread wagering on baseball or any sport in the United States, a country which is having a more and more open debate about the legality, the financial aspects and the morality of legal wagering on professional sport today that it has in almost 100 years. The debate was really started because of loopholes in the law which allow “pay fantasy” wagering on certain aspects of professional sport, as well as the ability for certain states to conduct other forms of pay wagering because they have been grandfathered into a federal law, which really only allows the State of Nevada to conduct widespread sports wagering like is done in betting parlors in and around the UK and other places on the globe.

The issue has been escalated in recent months by NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who told an audience in September that he would be in favor of a legalised wagering system, and further clarified his position as a lone wolf among the sports commissioners in the U.S. with an Op-Ed in the New York Times in November. Since that point most of the other sports, despite continuing to grow partnerships with legalised “pay fantasy” games, have been largely silent on the issue.

That is until Friday, when in a lengthy interview about the business of the game with MLB Network’s Brian Kenny, Manfred talked openly about the issue and admitted Major League Baseball could, and may soon, go down a further exploratory path with regard to wagering on the game by fans. 

“I think that enough has happened out there that it’s incumbent upon me and my staff to take to the owners the developments in this area, to have a conversation about some of the rules that go beyond the play of the game on the field that we’ve had traditionally in baseball and revisit those,” Manfred said during the interview. He also applauded Silver on taking a first step in addressing the issue, and conceded that baseball would also look to a Federal plan on overall sports wagering, that MLB would participate in, versus a state by state program that some have suggested.

The new commissioner also said that the gambling “landscape is changing very quickly,” and reiterated that if such a change would come into place, that personnel around baseball would not be involved in actual wagering on their sport, in order to keep the integrity of the game clean and avoid some of the issues that have come up in sports like cricket and tennis in recent years with regard to match fixing.

How much of an impact could this move have for professional sport in the United States? That too was debated throughout the two day conference, with ESPN Magazine editor Chad Millman saying that the sports betting market is in the area of $892 trillion US, with no American teams getting any percentage of that money to date. Therefore in order to find new streams of revenue, a formal legal gambling and gaming system, with participation from the professional leagues, would seem a natural, with most experts placing the timetable at 4-5 years before implementation, while the “pay fantasy” market continues to grow.

No one admits that even the admission of an inquiry by the MLB commissioner means that betting and baseball will become quick bedfellows and that adoption will be as seamless with America’s game as it is with football in places like the UK. The process will continue to be steady and slow, with the integrity of sport and a fickle public being first and foremost in consideration. However even the admission of inquiry was a landmark move for baseball; it makes good and common sense to take that step.

The next question remains, will the NHL and the NFL join in that conversation with their baseball and basketball leaders? It has not happened yet, but then again, with potentially billions of revue in the offing, it would be more shocking to hear a “nay” than it was to hear the new braintrust at MLB admit what was once taboo; that maybe there is a controlled, legalized place of agreement for a game and an industry that were once staunch enemies. Times change, as do commissioners, and the newest one for MLB seemed to be saying many of the right things.