New Pennsylvania Sportsbooks Ban Spring Training Betting

• Major League Baseball has asked sportsbook operators to ban wagering on Spring Training games
• PA has honored the league’s request and has banned Spring Training betting at all six in-state sportsbooks
• The move is less about “integrity” and more about fees

PITTSBURGH – Just days after the Nevada Gaming Control Board told Major League Baseball to go pound sand over the league’s request to disallow Spring Training wagers, the new sportsbooks in Pennsylvania have acquiesced to the same. There will be no Spring Training baseball betting in the Keystone State this season.

The MLB’s rationale is curious at best. Bryan Seeley, the league’s deputy general counsel, seemingly pulled his “integrity risk” analysis out of thin air.

“Spring training games provide greater opportunity for the misuse of inside information,” said Seeley. “The outcome of games sometimes depends heavily on non-public managerial decisions that are made in advance and are independent of club or player performance.”

That’s as may be, but it doesn’t actually explain why the MLB is taking this tack. After all, there is no sport on the planet where managerial decisions are routinely made public before a game, whether it’s the preseason, regular season, or postseason.

Much of sport is strategy, and teams are not in the habit of publishing their competitive secrets. Bettors know this. Fans know this. Everyone knows this.

Not Playing To Win?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Gary Rotstein, who first reported the state’s compliance with the MLB’s request, seems to buy into the overarching idea that Spring Training is not good for betting.

This, Rotstein says, is “due to the unusual nature of the contests,” where “minor leaguers share time with well-known players getting a couple of innings…or at-bats for purposes of tuning up more than winning.”

This characterization is fundamentally wrong. Spring Training baseball is hardly “unusual”. On the contrary, it is long-established, with traditions going back over 100 years. The pacing, play-types, and purposes of Spring Training are all well-established, and informed bettors take these unique variables into account.

Will Pennsylvania sportsbooks take wagers off the board for teams out of the postseason picture who call up prospects for “garbage time” reps? Will the MLB ask books to cancel wagers on teams that already made the playoffs and are resting starters? If a player doesn’t hustle to first base, will the MLB implore books to annul props for that athlete?

Of course not. The impetus is thus not about limiting wagers to situations that guarantee all-out effort by players and teams to win games. So what’s the real motivation here?

MLB Publicity Stunt For “Integrity Fees”

The MLB has made this same Spring Training request to all states with legal sports betting. While Nevada was having none of it, states with new sports wagering industries want to show good faith to the league, and so they’re more likely to honor the ask. But they’re being misled.

The real reason for the MLB’s request is that the league is trying to paint a picture to the public of the “integrity” issues it claims are inherent with legalized sports betting (but that somehow didn’t exist for underground sports betting). Before the federal sports betting ban was even overturned in May 2018, the MLB was already on a PR trip hitting each state’s legislatures with fire-and-brimstone prognostications of the diminished “integrity of the game.”

To protect that integrity, the league argues it needs a cut of the handle at every sportsbook that offers MLB betting. This seems to be nothing more than a strategy to drum up public support for the idea.

If successful in achieving their end-game of a congressionally-mandated “integrity fee”, Major League Baseball could net tens of millions of dollars per year from sportsbooks everywhere, eating into their bottom lines and thus devaluing wagers for bettors all across America.