If you have been concerned that there are not enough ways in 2026 to gamble on Major League Baseball, then I have good news for you. MLB entered into a partnership with prediction market Polymarket, first reported by Ben Horney of Front Office Sports and then later announced by both organizations. Polymarket gains the right to use official logos and marks, while MLB is reported to receive somewhere between $150 million and $300 million a year from the prediction markets.
Prediction markets, which are a relatively new product but rapidly increasing in popularity and visibility, allow users to bet on a whole host of things, from who will win the Kansas City Royals home opener to whether Jesus Christ return before 2027? These bets happen against other users through the buying and selling of contracts, similar to how a stock exchange works, instead of betting against the house as you do in a casino. This difference currently allows the markets to be regulated at the federal level by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission instead of at the state level, where traditional gambling is regulated. Theoretically, this makes these markets legal nationwide, although that is currently being challenged in court.
Unsurprisingly, Evan Drellich of the Athletic wrote an excellent article about the partnership. His treatise included quotes from Ari Borod, Polymarket president of sports business, that I think are both very revealing and very frustrating to someone like me who is ready to go full Temperance Movement on legalized gambling.
Borod, as does MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, frames this partnership as a way to protect the integrity of the game and help catch bad actors. Borod explained this to Drellich, stating:
“We will work collaboratively with MLB to identify what types of markets pose unreasonable integrity risks for the game of baseball, and try to get those out of the market, with the goal being, how do you protect customers?
The phrase that really stood out to me is unreasonable integrity risk. I think this begs the question, what is a “reasonable” integrity risk? Integrity in the game of baseball is a fundamentally necessary component, at least for me, to continue investing my time and money into the Royals and other MLB teams. I don’t want there to be “reasonable” integrity risks that are not just tolerated, but actively in partnership with the league. I want the leaders of the sport to guard the integrity of the game of baseball like you would guard a nuclear power plant. You don’t want even reasonable risks to be involved where nuclear fallout could be the result of said risks going awry. I want the most reasonable risks and seemingly tolerable to be taken seriously and accounted for when the results of failure could be as spectacular and long-lasting for MLB as Chernobyl was for Ukraine.
Last season, prop bets, which are bets on micro events instead of the game at large, were considered reasonable enough to be legal, even encouraged, by MLB teams and their gambling partners. Then word leaked that Cleveland Guardians relievers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were being investigated and then indicted for allegedly rigging pitchers for financial gain. Clase and Ortiz have both said they are not guilty. Prosecutors for the case allege that Clase began this practice back in 2023, but Clase was not placed under investigation until 2025.
After the indictment, MLB and its gambling partners announced a $200 cap on prop bets, as well as forbidding the prop bets from being included in parlays. Parlays, which are a series of bets made at once that bring increased payouts if successful but fail if just one part of the bet doesn’t hit, are critically important to sports gambling companies’ bottom line. I think these steps are just a partial step towards what we need to do as a society, but I’m sure many people find them reasonable.
On one hand, I understand why MLB is attempting to get ahead of this and try to curb what contracts are allowed to be purchased. Pablo Torre recently aired an episode of his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, about prediction markets titled “The Prop-Betification of Everything,” where he and author James Surowiecki discuss why prediction markets are useful tools, but also discuss the danger of turning anything that generates sufficient interest into a prop bet. If this went completely unchecked, we likely would see more incidents like Clase and Ortiz.
On the other hand, what if the very existence and popularity of sports gambling and prediction markets in particular are unreasonable risks to the integrity of the game? A key component of the Guardians’ pitcher scandal was essentially insider trading. Insiders, the pitchers themselves, knew that the pitch being thrown was going to be a ball because it was in their control. This ability to self-deal, allegedly for years, was critical to this scheme being pulled off.
Polymarket doesn’t explicitly ban insider trading, but has a broad ban on fraudulent bets. Borod paid lip service to avoiding props that have already proven to be a risk for the league, telling Drellich:
“I can’t share different specifics on parameters, but what I can share is that props that are easily susceptible to manipulation, or that, again, raise unreasonable integrity concerns, we want to keep those out of the game as well,”
Clearly, the phrase of the day is unreasonable integrity, but it’s a concern this time instead of a risk. Insider trading seems like it raises an unreasonable integrity concern, yet Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan apparently has a different perspective, viewing insider trading as a feature and not a bug. Here’s a summary of his point of view from a Forbes article about the topic:
Coplan has publicly supported the idea of using insider information to trade in prediction markets, framing “insider trading” in these markets as a public good that would enable the masses to get access to accurate information more quickly.
Insider trading is a key component to making these prediction markets as accurate as possible, yet it is also the very thing that makes them so susceptible to people with knowledge not available to the public enriching themselves at the expense of other people. Someone else and their money is at the other end of those contracts, not a massive entity like FanDuel or DraftKings.
The very existence of a market that, at the very least, implicitly encourages insider trading being allowed to carry MLB related product seems like an unreasonable integrity risk to me, no matter how much you try to police the worst elements of it. This seems like it’s going to end up in a whack-a-mole situation; another scandal will pop up around one of the products being offered, then there will be some change meant to address that specific product, rinse and repeat. How long until this process starts to completely erode public trust and start to hurt the bottom line in MLB remains to be seen. I would bet, however, you can wager on the outcome.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com ’
