MLB moves to cap bets on single pitches, ban them from parlays

Major League Baseball is cracking down on the type of micro-bets that U.S. authorities allege are at the heart of criminal conspiracy charges laid Sunday against two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, as allegations of illegal behaviour in sports betting hit the third pro league in less than a month.

MLB announced Monday that its U.S. sportsbook partners will cap bets on single pitches – or what it calls “pitch-level markets” – at $200 and banned the wagers from being included in parlay bets that are made up of a series of such single-event bets.

The league, which said the authorized sportsbooks represent about 98 per cent of the U.S. betting market, confirmed to The Globe and Mail that the action also affects operators in Ontario, the only province in Canada with a regulated mobile marketplace that includes private companies.

The announcement came one day after U.S. federal authorities indicted Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz for allegedly taking bribes from bettors in exchange for guarantees they would throw certain kinds of pitches, such as balls or low-speed pitches. The two had been on non-disciplinary paid leave since July, pending an investigation by MLB into what the league said was an unusually high volume of in-game wagering when they pitched.

Wagers on single events in a sports match which depend on an individual athlete – such as a hockey player’s ice time, their number of shots on net, or how many three-point baskets a basketball player will score in one game – have exploded in popularity since they were legalized in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2018 and a change in Canadian federal legislation in 2021.

Sports betting's ever-deepening stranglehold on North American sport

By some estimates, proposition, or prop, bets comprise 20 per cent of all sports betting, which hit almost US$14-billion in revenue in the U.S. last year. (In September, the most recent month for which data are available, more than $1-billion was bet by Ontarians on sports, esports, prop and novelty bets, as well as exchange betting, according to the government agency iGaming Ontario.)

Micro-bets are a subset of prop bets that are easier for an individual athlete to control, such as the speed or accuracy of a baseball pitch or a tennis serve, or the speed of a hockey shot. But critics have been warning that they are also susceptible to corruption. Last year, the NCAA began urging states to ban prop bets on its games, noting that college athletes are especially vulnerable to the activity around such wagering.

Last week, the NCAA banned six men’s basketball players who were found to have manipulated their performances to help bettors.

Pro leagues across North America, which signed rich contracts with sportsbooks after the activity was legalized, are now grappling with the reality that their multimillionaire employees are also susceptible. In the past few weeks alone, MLB, the NBA, and UFC have been stained by allegations of athletes conspiring with gamblers by fixing their performances to guarantee successful bets.

The NBA was rocked last month when the Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and the former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones were arrested along with 31 others as part of an investigation related to illegal sports betting and fixing poker games.

The investigation stemmed in part from games involving Jontay Porter, the one-time Toronto Raptor who was banned by the NBA last year after being found to have shared information in advance with bettors about how he would perform in a series of games.

Last week, the UFC released the featherweight fighter Isaac Dulgarian after analysts hammered his poor performance in a match in which he tapped out during the first round. Fans became suspicious after noticing a sharp move in the betting lines away from Dulgarian in the hour or so before the match, due to a surge of bets against him.

The UFC has grappled with challenges to its integrity in the past, including in December, 2022, when the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario banned wagering on its fights for a month over what it called “risks of insider betting.”

In a statement about the move on Monday, MLB said the risk to “pitch-level markets will be significantly mitigated by this new action targeted at the incentive to engage in misconduct. The creation of a strict bet limit on this type of bet, and the ban on parlaying them, reduces the payout for these markets and the ability to circumvent the new limit.”

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