Long MLB lockout wouldn’t be apocalyptic for sports books
The Major League Baseball lockout is showing no signs of resolution.
It’s still early, but if this drags on, the effects of potential game cancellations would be wide-ranging and rife with implications. Missing games would mean players miss paychecks and fans miss the opportunity to watch the game. The loss of game revenue would spawn a chorus of complaints from the owners, but that’s likely the difference between buying a second or third yacht.
Further down the list of sympathetic figures is a once-taboo industry that has exploded into the mainstream in recent years: sports gambling.
If there are fewer MLB-related events to wager on, the sports books would obviously rake in less money from their clientele. But, according to one expert, the losses from a baseball black hole wouldn’t be nearly consequential enough to cause any real issues.
“(If) we hit that mid-June period and we get to the NBA Finals and there’s still nothing from MLB, sports books are going to be concerned at that point,” said Matt McEwan, editor-in-chief of Sports Betting Dime. “But they wouldn’t be setting off panic alarms. They wouldn’t crumble, but they’ll get a little worried at that point.”
Sports Betting Dime is not a sports book. McEwan refers to it as “one of the top sports betting portals on the internet.” The site does not take bets, but does provide reviews on all the available sports books as well as betting information and promo codes for new bettors. McEwan’s job, essentially, is to monitor sports gambling across all of the North American major sports, and even some of the extremely non-major ones.
“We cover a lot, I think everything but cricket at this point,” he said.
The gambling obsessed people at home who would miss the feeling of betting on a late-April Diamondbacks-Brewers game are one thing. There’s also the fact that MLB was finally starting to come around on the idea of using sports gambling as a way to build their audience. The sport has famously been reluctant to embrace gambling and as such, has fallen behind the other leagues in that respect.
“This was going to be the first year that MLB was really going to lean into sports betting,” McEwan told the Daily News. “They were going to do the ads, the promos. The NFL already has like nine different sports betting partners at this point and they’re making a ridiculous amount of money off that. NBA, NHL, same thing.”
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in April that he was given a piece of advice from Adam Silver, his counterpart in the NBA. Silver, according to Manfred, counseled him to stop agonizing over baseball’s pace of play because it provides more time for fans to place bets between innings or even between pitches.
MLB already has a partnership with DraftKings, but in July both parties announced their plans for future integration of betting-related broadcast experiences within MLB. tv, the league’s streaming platform. Those plans would come to an abrupt halt if there are no games on MLB.tv this summer, and if there are fewer than expected, one would imagine DraftKings would be a bit miffed.
“If you lose this season, and sports books survive without you, there’s going to be no urgency in 2023 to strike these deals with the league,” McEwan laid out. “If sports books and gambling sites can say, ‘We don’t need this,’ MLB has lost a ton of revenue.”
There is, of course, a precedent here. Major League Baseball lost over 100 games from its 2020 season as the league scrambled to figure out how to play amid a deadly pandemic. When that happened, McEwan explained, a long-held theory was unquestionably proven true.
People who love to gamble will gamble on anything and everything.
“We saw this last year during the pandemic when there were no sports going on — sports books were still taking millions of dollars in bets,” McEwan remembered. “It was Korean baseball, African soccer leagues, some books went as far as marble racing. It was wild. Some people love the action, right?”
There is a stretch of the calendar — the infamous dog days of summer — when baseball has to carry more weight at sports books, though. MLB doesn’t drive a hugely significant portion of sports books’ betting handle, or the total amount of money that comes in on wagers. But as McEwan knows well, every year there are spikes in baseball betting from July to August.
“Looking to those months where it’s just baseball, I think upwards of 50% of that (money) would just get reallocated to something else that’s going on,” he stated. “Golf, tennis, even table tennis, that’s what’ll happen there.”