Rob Manfred,Gambling,and Rearticulating “Baseball’s Best Interests”

Abstract

For Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, gambling’s relationship with baseball has been a top priority. His frequent attention to the subject aligns with the history of a commissionership that, since its creation in the wake of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, has prioritized keeping baseball at a safe distance from the negative associations of gambling. In direct contrast with his predecessors, however, Manfred has spent his tenure not denigrating but justifying the union of baseball and gambling. This essay argues that Manfred’s support of gambling comes at the expense of MLB ballplayers who, since sports gambling’s relegalization, have been subject to unprecedented quantities of personal threats. Manfred’s insistence that partnerships with sportsbooks and other gambling companies help protect baseball’s competitive integrity clashes with the presence of threats to ballplayers and a growing list of public gambling-related scandals in the sport. To track the public comments Commissioner Manfred makes is to see the path of gambling in baseball shift from immoral incursion to essential partner. Manfred’s communication about the intensifying integration of gambling into baseball demonstrate that “the best interests of baseball” are being deemed worth the risk to professional ballplayers.

Introduction

Rumors that the 1919 Chicago White Sox conspired to intentionally lose the World Series thrust professional baseball into crisis. The scandal dominated media coverage of the 1920 season, prompted a grand jury investigation, and led to the banishment of a group of eight players from the sport that included one of the game’s biggest stars, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. That the implicated team played in one of the country’s largest media markets further amplified what quickly came to be known as the “Black Sox Scandal.” The scale of the cultural impact was demonstrated by a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, when Nick Carraway is told by Jay Gatsby that a fictional party guest named Meyer Wolfsheim had fixed the 1919 World Series. Carraway responds, “The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919…It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe,” (Fitzgerald, 1925, p. 93). Baseball’s appeal as an entertainment product was reliant on the perception of competitive integrity, and a reality to the contrary threatened the future of the sport. To restore faith in baseball, the National Baseball Commission agreed in 1920 to a reform that would fill its sport-ruling board with voices from outside of the baseball industry, based on the presumption that they would be less prone to gambling-related corruption. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge, accepted baseball’s first commissionership in 1920 and declared that “we have got to have a higher standard of integrity and honesty in baseball than in any other walk of life—and we are going to have it,” (“Landis Confers With Herrmann,” 1920). Thus began baseball’s 95-year-long effort to stay as far away from gambling as possible.

Since the federal prohibition on sports gambling in the United States was struck down in 2018, Major League Baseball (MLB) has fully embraced the gambling industry that had so threatened its existence. The Supreme Court ruling on a combination of cases, Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association and NJ Thoroughbred Horsemen v. NCAA, dissolved the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) and put the matter of sports gambling legalization into the hands of individual state legislatures. When Rob Manfred became the tenth MLB commissioner in 2015, he became the spokesperson for baseball, its owners, and the sport’s attendant concerns, which included unprecedented support for legalized gambling. After a century of baseball commissionership aimed specifically at taking anti-gambling action, Manfred’s almost immediate pro-gambling position was a radical change of course. Manfred’s MLB not only welcomed gambling into baseball but made it a core part of the sport’s present and future.

In this essay, I argue Manfred has shifted the directive of MLB’s commissionership from repairing the image of baseball from gambling to repairing the image of gambling within baseball. This effort comes at the cost of ballplayer wellbeing. First, I discuss the global dynamics of legalized sports gambling to position the specifics of the MLB context as formative for international sports gambling concerns. Next, I consider the rise in gambling-related threats being made to MLB ballplayers and the cultural context that enabled it. The increased cultural affinity for data, statistics, risk, and gambling in the United States throughout the 20^th century is a product of what Aaron Duncan named “pokerization.” I argue this pokerization encouraged the transformation of data in everyday life into social practice so sought after that it has resulted in the reduction of athletes to numerical values by fans and teams alike. Then, I outline the history of MLB’s commissionership, which was created in the aftermath of the public fallout of the 1919 Black Sox scandal as a position focused on repairing baseball’s image as a trustworthy institution. The nine MLB commissioners who preceded Manfred dealt with several high-profile gambling incidents and remained steadfast in their public disavowal of sports betting. Finally, I examine the gambling-related statements Manfred has made in his decade as commissioner. Manfred has repeatedly insisted that gambling partnerships protect “the integrity of the game” while failing to prescribe action that combats increases in gambling-related threats made towards players. These public comments about player risk and safety contribute so meaningfully to ongoing discussions about what can, should, and must be done about gambling’s threat to baseball because the MLB Commissioner’s rhetoric has always been central to constructing the identity of baseball and locating gambling’s place within it. If Manfred’s statements and actions truly serve “the best interests of baseball,” which has been the mission statement of MLB commissioners since the creation of the position over a century ago, then contemporary baseball’s best interests are reliant on the dehumanization of its athletes.

Locating MLB Baseball Within International Sports Gambling Frameworks

The proliferation of legal sports gambling in the United States has coincided with deliberations about the topic in sporting contexts across the world. Because the decisions on the shape and scale of legalization rest in the hands of individual states, the United States shares a middle ground on the spectrum of global gambling norms with countries like Argentina, whose provincial autonomy on the matter also results in various regulatory structures beneath one flag (Global Legal Group, n.d). As of February 2026, 40 of the 50 United States offer some form of legalized sports betting, with the exceptions being Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah (Sutton & Goldman, 2026). One end of the spectrum is occupied by countries like the United Kingdom, which has regulated sports gambling since the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act (Lopez-Gonzalez et al., 2020), and Austria (“History of Sports Betting in Austria,” n.d) and Slovakia (Georgian Gambling Association, 2021), which have regulated legal sports gambling for decades. There are also countries with strict bans on gambling in all forms that extend to sports gambling, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (Williams et al., 2012). Even more nuance exists in countries like Bermuda, China, Germany, India, and South Africa, where online gambling is specifically prohibited or at least heavily restricted (Williams et al., 2012). Governments and sports leagues around the globe have been forced to contend with the fact that sports gambling has become the fastest growing type of gambling, in no small part because of the rising revenues of the industry (European Gaming and Betting Association, 2024; Gainsbury & Russell, 2015). The relationship between MLB and the gambling policies of the United States may be just one of many such sport-government relationships, but its idiosyncrasies are derived from and continue to inform related decisions on an international scale.

One more recent development in international sports gambling has been the impact of live betting. Live betting, also referred to as in-play betting or microbetting, is the practice of placing bets while a sporting event is in progress. Technology had evolved to such a point in the late 1990s that bookmakers began to field bets during events over the telephone, and further technological growth has turned live betting into a focal point of the online gambling ecosystem (In-Play | Betting Terms | Oddschecker, n.d; Gambling Commission, n.d). The functionality of live betting depends on the online information infrastructures of participating sportsbooks as well as the unprecedented influx of sports tracking data (Hutchins, 2016; Marr, 2015). Live betting is a departure from the traditional placing of bets before an event has started, but for some gambling companies, it has become the predominant source of revenue (Killick & Griffiths, 2019). Gamblers who engage with live betting can still wager on traditional outcomes like the victor of a match and total points scored, but more granular and time sensitive options, like the result of a pending penalty kick in international football or the next team to score in a hockey match, exponentially widen the pool of potential options for people to choose from. The continued development of online betting and the uptake of live betting offerings have played an outsized role in the acceleration of sports gambling’s worldwide proliferation (Dyall et al., 2009; Killick & Griffiths, 2019; Lopez-Gonzalez et al., 2020).

The increases in gambling revenue that live betting has encouraged have emerged alongside the exacerbation of gambling-related harms. Griffiths and Auer argue that the speed enabled by live betting has turned “what was a low event frequency gambling activity into a potentially high frequency one,” (Griffiths & Auer, 2013, p. 2). This position is supported by the official report provided by the British Gambling Commission in 2016, “which claimed that live betting ‘changed formerly ‘slow’ forms of betting that traditionally had been considered to pose less risk of harm’ into a more rapid and potentially harm-inducing type of gambling,” (Lopez-Gonzalez et al., 2020, p. 65). Another study, one based in Australia, suggested that live betting was associated not just with more frequent gambling activity, but higher problem gambling severity and impulse betting (Hing et al., 2018a). These negative consequences have resulted in certain international markets that do permit some forms of legal sports gambling to institute severe limits on or total bans of live betting (Hing et al., 2018b). Other countries, like Spain, Australia, and the United States, have so substantially integrated live betting into their marketing and broadcast standards that any shifts away from this emergent status quo would be complex endeavors (Deitsch, 2018; Lamont et al., 2011; Lindsay et al., 2013; O’Brien et al., 2015; Russell et al., 2019).

The trajectory of these global developments in sports predate MLB’s relatively recent relationship with legal gambling, but MLB’s ongoing controversies have positioned it to be a key player in the future of gambling in and beyond the United States. In July 2025, pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz of MLB’s Cleveland Guardians were placed on leave as an investigation into potential gambling activity got underway. In the months since, both players have been implicated in scandals relating to their fixing specific pitches with friends, who were able to profit from live betting (Baumann, 2025). On February 5, 2026, the latest reports indicate that Clase may have thrown fixed pitches in at least 48 MLB games over the course of two years (Purdum, 2026). The rhetoric with which Commissioner Manfred has attended to this pitch fixing issue specifically and MLB’s relationship to gambling more broadly cannot possibly reverberate with the same significance in every sociocultural context. However, as the voice of a major sport in one of the world’s largest sporting markets, Manfred’s public address is a means for understanding the potential futures for gambling around the globe, especially those related to emergent concerns like live betting and its consequences. In the next section, I will set up the forthcoming analysis of Manfred’s rhetorical strategies with further explanation of how the expansion of gambling culture has affected how fans communicate with athletes and made MLB baseball into a nexus for contemporary gambling issues.

Athlete Threats, Pokerization, and the Statistical Frame

In the years since the legalization of sports betting in the United States, the intersection of athlete risk, access to data, and monetary value-driven fan experiences has resulted in increasingly violent threats made to athletes. Fan abuse of athletes predates legal sports betting, and is a problem that extends beyond the borders of any one nation (Håkansson et al., 2021; WTA, 2025), but it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that athletes are receiving more threats than ever (Tolan, 2021; Rosenblatt & Johnson, 2017; Purdum, 2025a). The public disclosure of these incidents by athletes supports this claim, as does ongoing research on athlete abuse at the amateur and professional level that includes the NCAA’s 2025 findings that “1 in 3 student-athletes received abusive messages from those with a betting interest,” (Heath, 2025). In MLB alone, examples of violent threats have accumulated with unprecedented frequency. Paul Sewald of the Arizona Diamondbacks said, “You hear it all, man. You blow a save, you don’t come through, you get it all. (Expletive) you. You suck. You cost me all of this money. (Expletive) you. (Expletive) your family. I’m going to kill you and then kill your family.” San Francisco Giants third baseman Matt Chapman also highlights the escalation of these comments in recent years: “Fans used to just say normal things like, ‘You’re a bum.’ Now, that they have all that money on us, fans will talk a lot of (expletive) to us.” Christian Walker, Sewald’s Diamondbacks teammate, said, “It shouldn’t be part of it. But it is part of professional sports now,” a sentiment much aligned with MLB veteran Tommy Pham, who said “it’s getting completely out of hand,” (Nightengale, 2024).

The magnitude of this problem isn’t hidden from the public. In the midst of constant advertising for sportsbooks and gambling apps during the 2025 NCAA March Madness basketball tournaments, the NCAA began airing an advertising campaign pleading with gamblers to enjoy the games how they want but not to harass the athletes. This campaign has noble ambitions, but when juxtaposed with gambling advertisements in the context of one of the most heavily bet on sporting events in existence, the effectiveness of it and other campaigns like it are dubious at best. Saquandra Heath (2025) found that 80% of all student-athlete abuse was directed towards players participating in the men’s and women’s NCAA March Madness basketball tournaments, “with women’s basketball student-athletes receiving approximately three times more threats than men’s basketball student-athletes.” In order to effectively set up analyses of the MLB commissionership’s history of image repair and how Manfred departed from that tradition, it is important to first consider the broader context of pro-gambling culture in the United States that enabled baseball’s unprecedented turn.

Throughout the 20^th century, gambling was integrated into disparate elements of United States culture. Aaron Duncan (2014) encapsulates gambling’s broad cultural impact with the concept of “pokerization,” which describes gambling’s shift from an act that was regarded as immoral to one that was generally accepted and endorsed (p. 41). Culture’s pokerization is indebted to America’s enactment of what Ulrich Beck calls a “risk society,” (Beck, 1992). Risk societies qualify as such when their preoccupation with the future coalesces into a focus on risk (Giddens, 1999). In a wide variety of contexts ranging from extreme sports to the high arts to academia, risk is a commonality in the modern day social experience of the United States (Lyng, 2005). To that end, Stephen Lyng (2005) argues that risk is “an integral part of the very fabric of contemporary social life, pursued not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself,” (p. 5). The pokerization of American culture acknowledges the elevated role of risk as motivation for and the means of cultural participation, whether one ever actually participates in gambling or not. As a result, as institutions like MLB pushed back against gambling throughout the 20th century, gambling’s logic and practice was being folded into increasingly acceptable and desired ways of life.

The spread of pokerization is also indebted to growing familiarity with and affinity for what Michael Butterworth named “the statistical frame.” According to Butterworth (2014), the statistical frame is a mechanism for understanding “a culture defined by the rapid expansion of new media technologies and the increased access to data,” (p. 896). The statistical frame coalesced as a result of the emergence of shows like Shark Tank, books like Moneyball and Freakonomics, lifestyle trends like the “quantified self” movement (Nafus, 2024), and the projections of data journalist Nate Silver, whose profile peaked in the context of his work on political data but who maintains that “baseball offers perhaps the world’s richest data set,” (Butterworth, 2014, p. 901). Jason Kalin and Jordan Frith (2016) attribute the rapid rise in data literacy to the popularity of wearable accessories (like the Apple Watch), which collect, process, and remediate data as their users move through the world. The capabilities of these devices and their data are articulated by Amy D. Propen, who argues that wearable technologies are “rhetorical artifact[s]…that elicit interaction and bodily engagement in everyday settings and mundane activities,” (Propen, 2012, p. 123). In other words, smart devices aren’t merely accessories to contemporary life, but active participants in the way life is lived in an increasingly data-centric world. The statistical frame keeps these cultural norms legible to the people enacting them while also encouraging and informing specific data-driven actions within a pokerized culture.

Athletes, teams, fans, and media all continue to push the limits of the tools available to them to better understand sports and the data available about them. The development of new statistics and the recording of more data have unlocked new possibilities for athletic training, like individualized bodily maintenance programs that cost millions of dollars per year (Mutoni, 2018). Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is a statistic that emerged in baseball that also functions as a thesis statement for the use of advanced data in sport. WAR allows for an individual’s overall performance to be summarized by a single number that is measured against a league average “replacement player” to more accurately quantify value than any single traditional box score statistic. Updated terminology like WAR and data-centric smart devices could in theory liberate athletes from objectifying discourses of the past, but the reality of baseball’s rapidly evolving quantification has been more attunement to performance, value, and ultimately, dehumanization.

Dehumanization in sport has historically been grounded in areas like race (Oates, 2007), gender (Utych & Fowler, 2022), and science (Hoberman, 1992), but the context of data, statistics, and gambling have exacerbated these preexisting concerns. Sports communication scholar Munene Mwaniki coins the term “biological fandom” to describe the increasing fetishization and abstraction of athletes (Mwaniki, 2017). Fans and industry professionals alike have come to expect resources like advanced tracking statistics and official medical reports as accessories to their making value-based claims about and, more recently, legal bets on athletes. The omnipresence of “ownership” has always cast this sense of entitlement over professional sport, occasionally opening the institution to criticism from athletes like Curt Flood, who famously proclaimed that “a well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave,” (Khan, 2012; Streeter, 2019). Thomas Oates repackages this historical context into new media trends and identifies “vicarious management” as a quality of contemporary sports fandom that has emerged through the commodification of athletes in products like amateur drafts, sports video games, and fantasy sports (Oates, 2014, p. 80). Andrew McGregor goes further still, arguing that “the increased use of numbers and the rise of fantasy sports have created a new culture of fans that dehumanizes players and constructs an unhealthy culture of ownership,” (McGregor, 2016, graf 13). Bettors living in the context of all this new data want to be correct and reap financial gain, but when they are not, they are resorting to threatening athletes. While all this information that has proliferated through pokerization and the statistical frame can and does help many people understand athletes and their sports more completely, it is also inextricable from the amplification of harm to athletes since sports gambling’s legalization.

In the following section, I outline the gambling-centric focal points in the history of the MLB commissionership, each of which overlap with the gradual pokerization of culture in the United States. This mapping throughout the 20th century will help to emphasize how Manfred has stood apart from his predecessors since he took over as commissioner in 2015. The specifics of Manfred’s strategies will be discussed in more detail in the analysis that follows the important context of the history of MLB’s commissionership.

The History of the MLB Commissionership’s War on Gambling

Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1920-1944) accepted the first MLB commissionership in 1920 on the condition that he would be the sole commissioner and would have unilateral power to investigate anything “suspected to be detrimental to the best interests of…baseball,” (Pietrusza, 1998, pp. 173-4). This authority was granted in pursuit of new emphasis on honesty and integrity in baseball, characteristics in direct opposition to the dishonesty and immorality qualities associated with gambling. Baseball’s best interests and integrity are subjective concerns, and Landis’s active efforts to keep baseball from integrating Black ballplayers throughout his 25-year tenure are an example of the consequences of such loosely constructed power. Still, the unanimous vote by baseball’s owners to let Landis act on his ideals initiated a formal era of baseball that emphasized integrity above all else. To this day, the official MLB constitution allows the commissioner to “act in the best interests of the national game of Baseball,” vague language with roots in Landis’s specific campaign to banish the specter of gambling from baseball (Brown, 2005).

Starting with Landis in the 1921 season, MLB commissioners worked against myriad gambling-specific controversies throughout the 20th century. The most significant controversy was the case of Cincinnati Reds legend Pete Rose. Rose, one of baseball’s signature 20th-century stars, was placed on baseball’s permanently ineligible list in 1989 alongside the banned members of the 1919 Black Sox for his involvement in betting on MLB games. In February 1989, Peter Ueberroth, the MLB commissioner at the time (1984-1988), learned that Sports Illustrated was preparing to publish a story about claims Rose had bet on baseball. Ueberroth and A. Bartlett Giamatti (1988-1989), who was set to replace the soon-retiring Ueberroth, were told by Rose in a meeting before the Sports Illustrated piece that he had bet on other sports, but not baseball (Dow, 2020). However, the subsequent investigation conducted by lawyer John M. Dowd on behalf of MLB revealed significant evidence of Rose’s baseball gambling activity, including bets on games involving the Cincinnati Reds, for whom he played and managed (Sutelan, 2024). Giamatti, with support from his own future successor, Fay Vincent (1989-1992), decided to place rose on the permanently ineligible list. The fact that three commissioners played a role in Rose’s ban and two others, Bud Selig (1998-2015) and Manfred (2015-Present), sustained it speaks to the temporal and emotional investment in this story and the haunting of baseball by the ghosts of gambling scandals past. ¹

The placement of Pete Rose on baseball’s permanently ineligible list, a list created in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, by men in a commissionership created in the wake of the very same scandal, is a continuation of decades-long efforts to keep gambling out of baseball. Rose’s ban was an enactment of the promises made by Landis as the first MLB commissioner, a fulfillment of the plan for corrective action that could keep baseball alive. As the figures of authority in this story, Ueberroth, Giamatti, and Vincent were not in the position of needing to repair baseball’s image that Landis once was. Rose’s framing by these men and the punishment given to him put the onus of image repair on him, a disgraced star who threatened the integrity of the game that the commissioners of baseball were trying to protect. Rose’s attempts and failures to successfully repair his own image throughout the rest of his life merit separate study. Nevertheless, the stakes of the Rose scandal signal that, sixty years after the Black Sox, MLB remained committed to keeping gambling out of baseball.

The passing of the commissionership from Vincent to Selig in 1992 marked a shift in the position towards appeasing ownership above all else. Vincent’s work as commissioner upset MLB’s owners with actions like expediting the 1990 lockout by working with the MLBPA, making Negro Leagues veterans and their families eligible for MLB’s health plan, and attempting to invoke the “best interests” clause to realign the National League (O’Brien, 2012). Vincent’s deteriorating relationship with ownership and an 18-9 no confidence vote led to his resignation. He was replaced by Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, who had led efforts to oust Vincent from his position and whose family retained ownership of the Brewers during his tenure as commissioner. The shift of the “non-baseball voice” of Vincent and which had been the original intent of the MLB commissionership to team owner Selig signaled “the end of an era in which the commissioner could operate as an independent voice in MLB” and the start of an era of commissioners expected to operate in the best interests of baseball’s owners (O’Brien, 2012). Tension with owners was nearly nonexistent during Selig’s tenure, which included a prominent public controversy regarding performance enhancing drugs but which also featured the explosion of television revenue growth and slowing of player salary growth (Remington, 2010). The ownership-oriented commissionership born in the Selig era has matured during the decade-plus tenure of Rob Manfred, Selig’s successor and the commissioner under whom baseball brought gambling from deep background into the spotlight.

An owner-friendly commissioner did not immediately equate to positive impressions of gambling. In 2013, when New Jersey governor Chris Christie led an appeal on the state-level sports betting ban, Selig said that the very notion of legalized gambling beyond Nevada was “corruption, in my opinion,” and MLB teamed with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and NCAA to file a civil suit claiming that a decision in the state’s favor would have “irreparable” effects on American sports (Hutchins, 2013). Selig went so far as to say it was an “evil, which creates doubt and destroys your sport,” (Weaver, 2018). Selig continues the commissionership’s defense of baseball’s image by actively taking responsibility and emphasizing the stakes of betting’s legalization. This final wave of anti-gambling rhetoric by Selig is clear in its intent to repel gambling, sustaining the initial role of the commissionership 90 years after its inception. His strong language makes MLB’s decision to change course on gambling and completely renovate its vocabulary for talking about it under Manfred all the more interesting to take seriously as an object of rhetorical significance.

Manfred’s language has an important part to play in this legacy of image repair and gambling, cultural pokerization, and the dehumanization of MLB ballplayers. Manfred’s tenure as commissioner has featured two significant breaks from the precedent set by commissioners before him. First, Manfred shifts the focus of his image repair efforts from being entirely focused on the image of baseball to the shared image of baseball and gambling. His doing this highlights the second break, which is that Manfred’s rhetorical strategies are attack-focused, tackling potential critiques of the partnership between baseball and gambling before they come to light and dismissing the severity of the issue of increased threats to MLB players.

The Manfred Era (2015-Present): Gambling’s Turn from Taboo to Opportunity

From the moment Manfred became MLB commissioner in January 2015, he fielded questions about gambling in baseball. ² Manfred’s comments about gambling revolve around engagement, opportunity, and integrity. These values stand alone in some comments but overlap in others. MLB’s relationship with gambling has evolved from undesirable to impossible to potential to essential. Even though Manfred’s comments only span a decade, his oversight of gambling’s integration into sport lends his comments historical authority on the relationship between gambling and baseball. The progression of the comments in these categories since 2015 demonstrates how “the best interests of baseball” clause that was instituted to help protect the sport from gambling-related corruption has evolved to justify gambling’s place in baseball’s economic success. Manfred’s comments revolve around these values and function as simultaneous acts of image repair for baseball and the gambling industry. The governing forces of professional and amateur sport throughout the United States have attempted to keep pace with the always evolving legal dimensions of sports gambling since the dissolution of PASPA in 2018. The fluidity of gambling’s legal position across years, sports, states, and countries makes the speed and definitiveness of Manfred’s comments even more noteworthy. Ultimately, the rhetorical and financial investment in protecting baseball’s integrity and the lack thereof in protecting MLB players demonstrates that as far as Manfred’s speech is concerned, player protection simply isn’t worth the cost.

The beginning of Manfred’s tenure overlapped with an influx of venture capital investment into daily fantasy sports, which contextualized his initial comments on MLB’s business interests in gambling. In the years before legalization, DraftKings and FanDuel emerged as competitors in the fledgling market for daily fantasy sports. An important dividing line between fantasy sports and sports betting was a determination of whether the practice in question was a skill game, and daily fantasy qualified as a skill game even as gaps between skilled players and unaware newbies turned “a gambling economy into a predatory market,” (Kang, 2016). In April 2015, Manfred answered CNBC’s question about the distinction between fantasy sports and gambling by saying, “It’s not just my view, there’s a line in the law. And we understand that line very carefully,” (Rosecrans, 2015). After confirming that the MLB had put considerable effort into researching the decision to deem DraftKings’s offerings fantasy and officially partner with them, Manfred emphasized that “the fantasy space is really, really important to us in terms of engaging young people,” (Rosecrans, 2015). The encroachment on the line of legality in this DraftKings deal and the emphasis on meticulous attention to detail are attempts to build trust in MLB’s decision-making processes. By emphasizing the pros of the fantasy sports association and the “predatory” cons of gambling, Manfred balances the particulars of the partnership on a fine line. By persuading audiences that the business of daily fantasy was not at odds with but servicing the values of baseball, Manfred set the stage for potentially fruitful and generally accepted gambling partnerships in the future.

The groundswell of support for daily fantasy, in addition to public comments from NBA commissioner Adam Silver about the financial benefits of broad sports betting legalization, helped keep gambling on Manfred’s agenda (Silver, 2014). ³ At the 2017 Yahoo! Finance All Markets Summit in New York, Manfred confirmed that MLB was actively rethinking its stance on gambling. “There is buzz out there in terms of people feeling that there may be an opportunity here for additional legalized sports betting. We are reexamining our stance on gambling. It’s a conversation that’s ongoing with the owners,” he said (Roberts, 2017). Echoing his comments about the league’s partnership with DraftKings, Manfred added that fans betting on games “can be a form of fan engagement, it can fuel the popularity of a sport. We all understand that.” Finally, he follows the blueprint of Silver, whom Manfred says, “framed it best,” to speak about legalization and regulation:

Sports betting happens. Whether it’s legalized here or not, it’s happening out there. So I think the question for sports is, really, “Are we better off in a world where we have a nice, strong, uniform, federal regulation of gambling that protects the integrity of sports, provides sports with the tools to ensure that there is integrity in the competition…or are we better off closing our eyes to that and letting it go on as illegal gambling?” And that’s a debatable point (Roberts, 2017).

Fantasy sports’s potential impact on baseball’s bottom line is a justifiable focus for the owner-oriented Manfred. It is not an inherently nefarious priority, either: in theory, boosting the standing of a sport however possible should be the core goal of any commissioner. Manfred’s specific note that young people were a target demographic for their daily sports partnership speaks to the desire of most entertainment media entities to engage audiences who might remain invested both emotionally and financially for the rest of their lives. The opportunity to maximize this investment potential drives the legalization rationale and ties it to integrity, which allows support for sports betting to simultaneously increase engagement and protect the “integrity” of sports, and specifically baseball. Framed this way, accommodating the desires of fans while protecting baseball in the process dampens the potential for these gambling-adjacent initiatives to be considered improper. As gambling’s relegalization approached, Manfred’s public statements put baseball in the position of an institution that was checking all of the right boxes.

Manfred positioned himself and MLB as allies to sports betting’s seemingly imminent integration into the status quo. In June 2017, the Supreme Court announced that they would reconsider the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in the coming year. Manfred told the Baseball Writers Association of America in July 2017 that “if there’s going to be a change in the regulatory structure with respects to sports gambling, we needed to be in a position to meaningfully engage and shape, try to shape what the new regulatory scheme looks like,” (Purdum, 2017). In November 2018, a few months after PASPA had been overturned, MLB publicly revealed what their internal deliberations had decided when it made MGM Resorts “the first official gaming partner of MLB,” (Shaikin, 2018). ⁴ In Manfred’s terms, baseball “gives an opportunity to be creative” with the kinds of wagers that can be made as frequently as pitch to pitch because of its slower pace of play relative to other sports (Rovell, 2018). Part of this agreement was that MGM was granted “the right to use an official statistics feed” that provided “exclusive access to what the league called ‘enhanced statistics.’” This allowance aligned with Manfred’s assessment of the partnership with MGM, which “will help us navigate this evolving space responsibly, and we look forward to the fan engagement opportunities ahead.” By more prominently positioning MLB as an authority on the matter of gambling enforcement than as a purveyor of gambling practice, Manfred reinforces baseball and gambling’s image so that it will not sustain damage that needs to be repaired.

Manfred’s emphasis on the rich intersection of engagement and opportunity masks the tension that exists between the two in the context of gambling. Although MLB does not command the gambling attention that the NFL does (no other American sports league does), it is still a major player in that market and can thus justify a claim to wanting a say in how legal sports betting would be integrated. However, MLB’s provision of special statistics to MGM, presumably to aid in their ability to set fair lines on their available wagers, has an inherent tension with MLB’s fan engagement opportunities. After all, the “best” lines a sportsbook can set are those that maximize the earning potential of the house without dissuading would-be bettors from participating. It is unclear exactly what data MLB has provided to their gaming partners over the years, but the fact that it actively helps the sportsbooks means that, at its core, it is working against the fans playing the game. Like daily fantasy sports before it, the market for betting on sports presents as egalitarian in that any fan who wants to can participate under the guise of an equal playing field, when the reality is that the odds are stacked against them (Kang, 2016). Kang (2016) reported that it took a long time for FanDuel and DraftKings to respond to the discovery that high-volume gamblers had tilted the odds of daily fantasy in their favor by using computer scripts and optimization software. He elaborated that, “when evidence of the competitive advantages enjoyed by these high-volume players became too overwhelming for the companies to ignore, DraftKings and FanDuel enacted rules that in the end are likely to protect the high-volume players rather than regulate them,” (Kang, 2016). There is a substantive difference between experiences that enhance fandom for fans and those that encourage addictive behaviors, but in Manfred’s terms, it all falls beneath the umbrella of “fan engagement” (Yeola et al., 2025).

Even as the sport has made its about face on gambling, Manfred has maintained that “it’s important to say that our number one issue, the single thing on which there is no compromise, is the integrity of the game on the field,” (Haring, 2024). Baseball long rejected gambling associations because, despite the activity’s popularity, the risk to the sport was too much. While Manfred has ultimately welcomed the shift with a focus on engagement, opportunity, and integrity, his reluctance is also on record. At the 2024 Associated Press Sports Editors Commissioners Meetings, he told reporters that “we were kind of dragged into legalized sports betting as a litigant in a case that ended up in the Supreme Court,” (Snyder, 2024). At the same event, he spoke to concerns about the specific threat of prop bets, a form of live betting which allow bettors to wager on granular events within a game as opposed to the outcome of the event as a whole. He said that “when we lobby in states, there’s always certain types of bets that we have lobbied against—I mean, the first pitch of the game, we really don’t want that available as a prop bet,” (Purdum, 2025b). Manfred’s specific concern about first pitch live bets came to fruition during the 2025 MLB season, when Clase and Ortiz were implicated for their involvement in betting scandals. Manfred has now deemed “microbets,” like those often available to place on individual pitches, to be “unnecessary and particularly vulnerable,” (Purdum, 2025b). Ultimately, he returns to the well of integrity to say that a benefit of being “dragged” into the Supreme Court case is that “one of the advantages of legalization is it’s a heck of a lot easier to monitor what’s going on than it is with an illegal operation.” Manfred frequently cites MLB’s ability to “protect the sport” from the potential dangers of gambling, but his most recent comments demonstrate the limits of such protection when the integrity of the sport is pitted against the safety of those who play it.

Manfred, baseball’s owners, and their gambling partners often praise the economic and enforcement-related benefits of legalized sports betting, but gambling-related controversies continue to pepper the sport’s front-page news. On July 16, 2024, hours before Major League Baseball’s annual All Star Game festivities, Manfred used a portion of his annual press conference to address multiple concerns related to gambling. To that point in the calendar year, the 2024 MLB season had already been marred by gambling scandals. Former San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano received a lifetime ban from baseball for gambling, interpreter Ippei Mizuhara plead guilty to bank and tax fraud charges after having stolen millions of dollars from his former best friend and baseball’s biggest star, Shohei Ohtani, and standout umpire Pat Hoberg was removed from duty upon the initiation of an investigation into his potential betting activity. ⁵ That these cases were caught and addressed does support Manfred’s enforcement-centric claim. In response to these specific issues, Manfred expressed confidence that MLB’s ongoing association with various gambling entities was helping the league enforce established policies and that “penalties and demonstration of your ability to figure what’s going on serves as a deterrent,” (Rogers, 2024). However, so many major stories emerging in such a short span of time, especially relative to the scarcity of high-level gambling controversy in the years since the Rose scandal, raises concern about whether Manfred’s confidence on this matter is warranted.

Manfred’s comments about the major gambling scandals in the news and the gambling-related threats being made toward ballplayers differ in the levels of confidence with which they were delivered. Bob Nightengale’s (2024) USA TODAY feature about player threats included valuable on-the-record reports from veteran players who shared specific details about the threats they’ve received and heard about. Manfred said that he’d also heard from players about threats they’d been receiving, but he did not get into specifics of policies, enforcement, and action. He said that he’s “had players in the last month mention this issue to me as one of concern and we’re discussing what we should do to be more proactive in this area,” (Rogers, 2024). Additionally, Manfred responds to this issue of player safety with a general comment that “if a player received a threat from any source, on any topic, it is a matter of concern to us that we take really seriously.” Some measures now exist to help address this new normal, but they were not initiated by Manfred. The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) had to collectively bargain for an amendment that included team accountability for prohibiting betting-related abuse, the development of a safety hotline to report threats, and the restriction of placing gambling information in the stadium during games. Whatever value these measures bring, though, is immediately contested by the rest of the baseball environment, which, as USA TODAY’s Nightengale highlights, includes multiple MLB ballparks housing fully operational sportsbooks.

The protections players have attempted to build into their experiences have value, but they have been ineffective deterrents within a sport led by Manfred that has deemed the benefits of its gambling partnerships worth the player-facing costs. While Manfred expresses confidence in policing matters related to the integrity of the game, the ambition to form a plan to address threats to the players themselves indicates that, as it stood, no such plan currently existed. ⁶ The difference between the plans to protect the sport and the plans to protect the players justifies Manfred’s claim that the game is “the single thing on which there is no compromise” while simultaneously raising the question of what the cost of such justification should be.

MLB’s failure to substantively act on concerns about threats to players is made more apparent when contrasted with Manfred’s very specific and plentiful citations of how gambling helps baseball. He repeatedly touts MLB’s enforcement capabilities in the context of protecting baseball’s integrity. For example, Manfred said the following in his statement about the decision to fire Hoberg: “An extensive investigation revealed no evidence that Mr. Hoberg placed bets on baseball directly or that he or anyone else manipulated games in any way. However, his extremely poor judgment in sharing betting accounts with a professional poker player he had reason to believe bet on baseball and who did, in fact, bet on baseball from the shared accounts…creates at minimum the appearance of impropriety that warrants imposing the most severe discipline,” (Castrovince, 2025). Manfred’s assessment here makes sense, but its significance is once again tied to what has been said in the past and what goes unsaid in the present. Like MLB’s commissioners before him, Manfred deemed it appropriate to punish Hoberg even though the investigation determined it to be unlikely he bet on baseball: the threat to the game’s integrity was enough. The swift and strict enforcement in response to an umpire potentially betting on baseball stands in sharp contrast to Manfred’s general future-oriented hopes about protecting players from death threats that seem to be amassing for players throughout the league. Based on what he has chosen to address directly and what he hasn’t, it is apparent that Manfred’s top priorities are protecting the integrity of the game, that the games are still “fair” for fans to bet on, and that partnerships with sportsbooks can continue to be built on trust. In this context, the safety and general wellbeing of the players is a risk worth taking.

Conclusion

Rob Manfred’s commissionership and the public comments he makes during it are an important source for tracking the path of gambling in baseball from immoral incursion to essential partner. Many interrelated aspects of the sports gambling industry warrant and receive interdisciplinary scrutiny, but Manfred’s comments specifically, and non-athlete public address more broadly, have substantive additions to make to these conversations. This essay argues that Manfred’s comments about gambling endorse the union of baseball and gambling at the expense of the sport’s athletes. Manfred and MLB’s stated efforts to protect “the integrity of the game” with the help of new gambling partners have been prioritized while unprecedented numbers of gambling-related threats are being made to MLB athletes with minimal protection. Manfred’s comments do not provide a comprehensive view of all the gambling industry’s nuance, but their specificity, especially in the context of baseball’s unique history with gambling, help demonstrate tangible strategies for and consequences of gambling’s integration into the status quo of professional sports.

In the context of a professional sporting industry that has come to resemble “a mutual fund that includes television and digital content, real estate, retail clothing, hospitality, catering, and concessions,” examples of how revenue is ruling the day are becoming increasingly common (Schoenfeld, 2023, p. xxi). On June 16, 2025, MLB columnist Joon Lee wrote a column for the New York Times about how the explosion of streaming and the pricing out of fans from even watching their teams is a symptom of the fact that “fandom isn’t being nurtured anymore. It’s being mined,” (Lee, 2025). The same can be said not just of athletes, as Mwaniki explains in the context of biological fandom, but of the average person in today’s United States. Rhetoric scholars, cognizant of how technological innovations have altered conditions for communication and persuasion, have studied the emergent ubiquity of data collection and its connection to other cultural events like the proliferation of wearable technologies and the quantification of everyday life (Gouge & Jones, 2016). It has always been the case that for as much as the world informs the way sports work, sport informs the way the world works. As such, continuing to study what sport, and baseball specifically, can tell us about gambling and data in culture is in our collective best interests.