TORONTO — In the wake of the NBA’s betting scandal, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred defended his league’s business arrangements with gambling companies as a necessary tool to catch wrongdoers.
MLB, like all major sports leagues, has both profited from and helped to popularize sports betting since a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision made wagers legal throughout most of the country. But prior to Game 2 of the World Series on Saturday night at Rogers Centre, Manfred positioned MLB as a league that has adapted to what was foisted upon it, as opposed to a force that has helped to shape the landscape.
“Once you’re in that environment where sports betting is happening, the crucial issue is access to data,” Manfred said. “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.
“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 (through) the federal government.”
When Manfred refers to data, he means the ability for legalized betting companies to track the wagering of every person on their sites, and to see when there are unusual betting spikes around certain moments in games. With illegal bookmakers, both of those are a black box. MLB barred one player for life and suspended several others in the past few years after their legal wagers came to light; MLB is currently investigating Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz after unusual betting activity was reported during their outings.
Sports leagues aren’t the only beneficiaries of the rise of sports betting. The Athletic has a partnership with the sportsbook BetMGM.
Tony Clark, the head of the baseball players’ union, said a day earlier he’s in favor of eliminating prop bets. Manfred, however, declined to give his position on those wagers, saying only that MLB is talking about prop bets “with a variety of people” and that he wouldn’t disclose them.
Prop bets are tied to specific outcomes in a given event and have been at the heart of several recent scandals. Whether a baseball player will tally four hits on a given night is one example of a prop bet, and because they pertain to a small subset of events inside a game, they’re easier targets for someone interested in fixing an outcome.
“We are and have been really vigilant on the issues surrounding legalized sports betting,” Manfred said generally. “Obviously, our No. 1 priority is to protect the integrity of the game. We think we have great systems in place that allow us to do that. In addition, we’ve worked really hard to provide resources to players to make sure that they are comfortable and have an outlet when they have a problem with respect to issues related to sports betting.”
Congress sent a letter to NBA commissioner Adam Silver on Friday requesting a briefing on the NBA’s scandal, which spans two different investigations and has included the arrests of Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones.
Meanwhile, Manfred said Saturday he had no expectations regarding when MLB’s own ongoing gambling scandal — the investigation into Clase and Ortiz, now in its fourth month — would end. An Ohio sportsbook helped flag what an Ohio gaming commission called “suspicious wagering activity on Cleveland Guardians wagering events.”
“Aberrations are one thing,” Manfred said when asked about Clase on Saturday. “You then have to have an investigation to figure out exactly what happened, and we’re in the process of trying to do that.”
Clase, a star reliever, is struggling to find a place to pitch this winter while the investigation continues. The Dominican Winter League decided not to allow him to play this year, and the Guardians will not grant Clase permission to play in Venezuela, where he was eyeing an alternative arrangement.
“Obviously, you want to get it right,” Manfred said of the Clase and Ortiz investigation. “You want to be thorough, make sure that you know exactly what happened on the one hand. On the other hand, I do understand I got people in limbo as a result of the investigation, and we’re going as fast as we can.”
Legalization has given MLB insights into suspicious betting activity it never had before, but it has also helped to greatly increase betting activity overall — and likely, along with it, the number of attempts to fix outcomes.
“The most important thing that we can do is make sure that we have systems in place that give us access to data, which puts you in a position to determine if there’s something aberrational going on,” Manfred said. “When you get that, you need to conduct a thorough investigation, make sure that you understand exactly what caused that aberration, and then you need to discipline.”
