Major League Baseball has its short-, mid- and long-term goals clear.
Could they be intertwined with the explosive world of sports betting?
“I see that at some point coming as an alternate digital product. You’re always going to have that clean broadcast,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said on the “Marchand and Ourand Podcast” with The Post’s Andrew Marchand and Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand. “If we get there to betting off the screen, it’s going to be a separate digital feed that the true gambler can opt-in to.”
Sports betting became legalized in 2019 when PASPA was overturned. Since then, every major sports league has made partnership deals with online sportsbooks like FanDuel, MGM and Caesars.
Marchand asked Manfred about the place that sports betting has in America’s Pastime and how it has worked out thus far.
MLB announced its first-ever betting partnership with DraftKings in 2021 and added FanDuel to its official sports betting partner list in 2023.
“From Day 1, we had two thoughts with respect to sports betting,” Manfred said. “No. 1, we thought the principal benefit of sports betting for us was going to be fan engagement. Deeper, more consistent fan engagement.”
“Secondly, we are a family product. … We have tried to be cautious about the concept of ‘over-gamblification’ — too much gambling in too many places in the sport. We think we have struck a balance there where we are getting some of the engagement boost without creating the potential of alienating the family audience.”
Could on-screen gambling become a fixture in baseball programming?
Marchand was keen to recognize that DAZN offered on-screen live betting with its “Inside Pitch” show that incorporated betting within the game.
“I think our goal overall is to get as close as we can to allowing our fans to watch on whatever platforms they want to watch on,” Manfred said.
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We have seen other leagues, namely the UFC and NFL, talk about gambling directly on shows and even in social media posts.
But no sport is set up quite like baseball is to allow gambling directly on screen.
Pauses between pitches and at-bats to allow bettors the intimate betting capabilities that they crave.
However, baseball has lambasted gamblers in the past, including Pete Rose, who was banned for life from the game and has not been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Manfred previously said these gambling partnerships would not save Rose, who “violated rule No. 1.”