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Full disclosure here, but I’m not big on the whole legal sports betting thing, at least not in the way that society has decided to implement it. I love a Las Vegas trip and all, I have an ongoing poker game in my life, and a local casino can be a great time, but those are locations designated specifically for this degenerate [complimentary] activity — being able to bet from anywhere at all times from the supercomputer in your pocket is terrible even for people without gambling issues.
Which meant that it always felt like another shoe was going to drop when it came to sports leagues fully embracing legal sports betting, just in terms of the all-encompassing pervasiveness of it all. This is not the same as suggesting that it’s MLB, the NBA, and so on having sponsorship agreements with DraftKings or FanDuel or whatever that has caused there to be players betting on sports or involved in sports betting, because my assumption is that the very existence of easily accessible legal sports betting at all is the cause. Maybe there was a hastening, but this was inevitable, the logical endpoint of the expansion of legal sports betting.
Which is all a preamble to say that it’s good that MLBPA executive director Tony Clark is, at least, speaking out against prop bets — legal sports betting as we know it today isn’t going anywhere, but if prop bets could be neutralized, it could solve, or at least soften, a couple of issues.
As Clark put it before Game 1 of the World Series (via the Athletic), as a response to the wave of arrests and investigations surrounding the NBA for both legal and illegal betting:
“We’re in support of removing any types of bets, props or otherwise, that can create issues for our guys on the field,” Clark said before Game 1 of the World Series at Rogers Centre, where an advertisement for a sportsbook and casino sits over the visitor’s bullpen. “We’ve heard a lot about prop bets of late and it is one of the things we were concerned about from day one as well.”
…
“Every time there’s a situation that arises related to gambling, the concern doesn’t lessen,” Clark said. “It gets greater.”
A prop bet can be completely unrelated to a game’s outcome, in terms of winner and loser. But since it’s stuff like, say, throwing a first-pitch ball to consecutive batters, a player themselves could make it happen, influencing the bets directly instead of by chance.
Clark’s issue is with player safety more than anything — the PA benefits financially from legal sports betting, as MLB makes out in deals with the platforms that allow for such a thing, and the PA gets their cut through the collective bargaining agreement. Which means that, should we continue to see players threatened by gamblers — like Lance McCullers and Liam Hendriks were in 2025 — then the PA might have to come down hard on prop bets, at least, during CBA talks.
And depending on how things go with the investigation into multiple Cleveland Guardians pitchers — Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, who have both been under investigation since midsummer due to sketchy prop bets made around their activities on the mound — MLB might be open to this kind of change, too. Their direct association with gambling can only exist if everyone believes what’s happening is real — if the integrity of it all is questioned, that’s where the real problems come in — fixing scandals rocked game shows last century, causing a complete revamp in both the shows themselves and their oversight, as well as federal regulations. People don’t like being lied to, once they’re aware of the lie. And this isn’t even the first such scandal in MLB since they welcomed legal sports betting in its entirety, in order to jointly profit off of it.
Rob Manfred, like Clark, spoke up on the subject in the past few days. As he told reporters before Game 2 of the World Series, “We didn’t ask to have legalized sports betting. It kind of came, and that’s the environment in which we operate. Now we don’t have a lot of choice about that, and if it’s going to change — broadly change — probably the only way it would happen is the federal government.
“Once you’re in that environment where sports betting is happening, the crucial issue is access to data. That means you have to have a relationship with the sportsbooks. Like most relationships, if you want something from them, you need to give something back to them. And that’s where those relationships come from.”
I’m sympathetic to the idea that this is a societal ill that MLB doesn’t have full control over, and it’s part of sports now, a mutation in its DNA that can’t be easily extricated. But the prop bets thing seems like a comparatively easy fix that would benefit players and the league, and would be worth whatever revenue loss comes from it.
One little note: it’s a huge week for the WNBA, with Friday’s deadline before the current collective bargaining agreement expires. Swish Appeal published a lengthy breakdown of just where the talks stand at the moment, and why they are so contentious and in danger of not hitting that deadline, yet again.
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