Category Archives: MLB

March Madness and MLB Linked by CEO Pool

By Joe Favorito
@joefav
How can baseball benefit from March Madness? It’s In The Pool.
As we head toward the Final Four and Opening Day of Baseball there is an interesting mix we had previously talked about that ties both sports together in an unusual way. At the beginning of March Madness, Bloomberg announced a pool with 32 high level CEO’s each kicking in $10,000, with the winner getting the whole pot, $320,000 to go to a dedicated charity of their choice.
The list of CEO’s ranged from Michael Bloomberg to AOL’s Tim Armstrong, and from the Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio to Under Armour’s Kevin Plank, all chipping in for the cause of their choice. From education to food banks, cancer charities to wrestling programs, the help would be for a wide range of programs.
As we turn the corner and head for home in Indianapolis the Final Four has little Cinderella and lots of favorites, all of which could lead to a compelling finish to a great event at Lucas Oil Stadium. Who in the Bloomberg pool could cash in? One unique mix has baseball potentially benefitting, while the other may have some good karma for basketball and LeBron James.
Gary Cohen, CEO of Goldman Sachs, leads the group with all four of his Final Four intact, but needs Bo Ryan’s Wisconsin Badgers to win it all. If Frank Kaminsky and company make it past Kentucky and through the finals, the windfall would go to HARLEM RBI, the not-for-profit that works with Major League Baseball to grow the game in inner cities.
Cohen’s 144 points places him ahead of Quicken Loans Founder and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers Dan Gilbert, who is second with 139 points and has 3/4’s of the Final Four left. The difference is Gilbert has overwhelming favorite Kentucky winning it all, which would move him to the top spot as he plays for the Children’s Tumor Foundation .
EBay President and CEO John Donahoe is third, with Milwaukee Bucks owner Mark Lasry fourth, although neither appear to have the mix to leapfrog the top two.
On the bottom, keep fretting Lakers fans, as it looks like CEO Jeanie Buss will be bringing up the rear with just 90 points, although she does have Kentucky winning it all. Plank sadly is just ahead of her and with no one left in his Final Four, he may hit bottom as well. All in fun and philanthropy though.
The new concept by Bloomberg could bode well for giving elsewhere as well. How about a Women’s World Cup pool coming up as well, with some global heads putting $10 K in the kitty.
View original Source: Bloomberg’s Brackets for a Cause

NBA owners support Silver’s gambling stance; Proposed Vegas NHL team would be an expansion franchise

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has been front and center in advocating a legalized sports betting infrastructure and his stance has won him many admirers, including his bosses.

NBA owners are coming out in force, throwing their support behind Silver as he continues to champion for legalizing sports gambling in the US.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he has always been an advocate of such a move. “We’ve always been hypocritical saying we didn’t realize it was a big part of interest in the game,” Cuban said, as quoted by a Newsday report. “When you do any work on where people are actually gambling, it’s all overseas and places we can’t see, and the league has got to monitor all these third-party betting sites and that makes it a lot tougher.

“By bringing it where we can see it, you reduce a lot of the risk that something bad can happen,” Cuban added.

Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss isn’t as quote-friendly as Cuban or some other owners. She rarely talks but when she does, her words carry a lot of weight. Buss declared that “as a league, we’re behind our commissioner in the process of supporting legalization on a federal level.”

“If our fans are already doing it, then it should be something that’s brought out into the mainstream and it should be regulated,” Buss added.

The question now is whether commissioners from the other four professional sports leagues in the US share Silver’s determination to push for a legalized sports betting infrastructure. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has said all the right things, but has yet to have any MLB owners vouch for his position. MLS Commissioner Don Garber has been quiet, as has the NHL’s Gary Bettman. As far as the NFL is concerned, well, as long as Roger Goodell is commissioner, don’t hold your breath on seeing him join Silver’s crusade.

Sports gambling hot topic at Sloan Conference

The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has become an increasingly important event in the sports community, having in large part revolutionized the approach taken by professional sports teams regarding their day-to-day businesses both on and off the playing area. But one question posed at this year’s conference paints a picture on how analytics can have a sophisticated effect on sports betting.

Make no mistake; gambling, at its core, is inherently analytical, but there’s still a heavy appetite for increased coverage on this front. That’s a big reason why sports gambling was heavily discussed at the conference, specifically the way analytics can have an effect towards legalizing sports gambling in the US.

One of the key items was discussed by Florida State professor Ryan Rodenberg, who suggested that a heavy and sophisticated dose of analytics could quell fears of fraud and match fixing. Rodenberg pointed out that outside the US, a handful of private firms like Sportradar already specialize in this kind of analytics and it’s already being used by a wide variety of sports leagues and associations all over the world.

During the same conference, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred also took time to discuss his stance on legalizing sports gambling in the US. While he admits that the topic is complicated enough on its own right, he also acquiesced to the growing reality that there are inherent benefits in legalizing sports betting, especially with a sport like baseball that has seen its popularity wane in recent years.

Having that legalized betting element could drive up interest in the sport without circumventing any rules that would, as all these commissioners are so used to saying, “ruin the integrity of the sport.”

“I think that enough has happened that it’s incumbent upon me and my staff to take to the owners the developments in this area, to have a conversation about some of the rules that go beyond the play of the game on the field that we’ve had traditionally in baseball and revisit those,” the MLB commish added.

Manfred also took time to acknowledge his NBA counterpart for “starting the debate” on the issue, and while he doesn’t whole-heartedly embrace everything Adam Silver said, he agreed with Silver’s proposition that a universal federal system to govern sports gambling is the way to go, if it does end up going there.

Wagering On Baseball? MLB Comish Manfred Open To Talking

Wagering On Baseball? MLB Comish Manfred Open To Talking
by Joe Favorito @JoeFav
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Sports in the United States and the relationship with some form of advanced gaming and gambling continue to do a very slow and seductive dance toward an eventual plan, and the gyrations continued all weekend at the annual MIT Sloan Analytics Conference, the ever-evolving stats geekfest that this year drew over 3,000 media personalities, innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and business leaders to the Boston Convention Center for two days of stats filled discussion and debate.
It was the largest-ever gathering for the conference, the brainchild of two MIT grads, now Houston Rockets now GM Darryl Morey and  VP of Customer Marketing & Strategy, The Kraft Sports Group Jessica Gelman, who saw the continued confluence of analytics and  data into every aspect of sports business, and as that area of evaluation and innovation has grown, so has the event.
While wearable tech, wireless devices and every form of statistical breakdown was on the docket, the issue of gambling as a new frontier was a constant subject when the biggest of the big, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, MLS commissioner Don Garber and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred all took the stage at various times. While Silver has been the out-front champion of acknowledging and then finding ways to adapt some form of legalized national wagering, it was really Manfred in his new role that had the most to say on the issue in a Friday conversation with MLB Network Brian Kenny. In years past, especially under former commissioner Bud Selig, the notion of anything progressive with gambling and baseball would never have even been part of the conversation.  But baseball’s latest leader has taken a more progressive and outspoken stance on several topics, from international play to the speed of the game, and the “someday” notion of legalized gambling seems to fit the bill.
“In terms of the ‘away from the field’ issues associated with the legalization of gambling – I think that enough has happened out there that it’s incumbent upon me and my staff to take to the owners the developments in this area, to have a conversation about some of the rules that go beyond the play of the game on the field that we’ve had traditionally in baseball and revisit those,” he said during the conversation.
He later told CNBC that the gambling “landscape is changing very quickly” but that no one should expect “players or on-field personnel” betting on games anytime soon. Manfred admitted again that  the “industry will have to take a hard look at” the larger issue of legalizing sports gambling and went on to praise Silver for taking the leadership role in the conversation and driving the talk to see if there is a Federally-controlled system that all sports would participate in going forward.
The great irony in such a discussion Manfred pointed out, is that the actual office he now holds is a product of the 1919 Black Sox scandal which has forever changed the face of gambling on baseball. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed by the owners to basically keep themselves and the clubs in line when it came to the integrity of baseball, and the sport has had a zero tolerance rule ever since when it came to gambling and baseball of any kind, with the Pete Rose case still being the greatest challenge to the issue of gambling and baseball.
The other irony is that baseball’s long standing preponderance with numbers has actually given rise to much of the conversation on gaming and sport in America today, starting with the advent of what was then Rotisserie Baseball and is now full-fledged fantasy baseball, and then moving on to the concept of “Moneyball” and the new era of detailed analytics in sports. Without baseball and its analytic preponderance, who knows where all this talk would be today.
Now where legalized wagering goes in the near future is anyone’s guess. Later in the weekend a panel hosted by ESPN The Magazine editor Chad Millman had the consensus that legalized federal rules on sports gambling is probably four and a half to five years away, but the growing opportunities in daily pay fantasy games for all sports, including baseball (where MLB.com has a minority stake in the uber site Draft Kings), continue to escalate with each passing week. No less than ten companies with some sort of fantasy attachment were on display at MIT, with hundreds more wannabees roaming the halls.
What was clear from Manfred’s comments with regard to legalized sports wagering is that he, like Silver, see the potential opportunity in the future and are willing to examine and publicly discuss the risk and the reward. In a world where teams are constantly battling for other new areas of revenue to offset the rising costs of doing business without continuing to zap the fans pocketbooks, baseball and legal gambling may make for strange, but smart bedfellows down the line, especially now with a commissioner willing to engage in the discussion for the first time.

MLB Odds: World Series Futures

I’ve always believed that betting on futures in baseball is the most difficult of the five major sports leagues in the US. Unlike the other sports, determining a favorite in baseball before the season starts is like basing it on the flashiness of a team’s roster and their offseason spending habits. Go back to last season and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Remember when the Detroit Tigers and the Los Angeles Dodgers were deemed head and shoulders above the rest? Conversely, how many people had the San Francisco Giants and better yet, the Kansas City Royals making it to the World Series?

How about the supposedly revamped Toronto Blue Jays from two seasons back? Go back a few years and you’ll remember that the Miami Marlins – the Marlins! – were actually once preseason favorites.

There’s so many moving parts in baseball that betting on a favorite this early has become a tricky proposition. It’s a big reason why the favorite to win the World Series receives significantly higher odds than favorites in other sports leagues.

Right now, the Washington Nationals sit on that said spot…and it’s been priced at 7/1 odds. Depending on what sportsbook you use, you’ll see that the two LA teams – the Dodgers and the Angels – are not that far behind, getting anywhere from 7/1 to 10/1 odds.

Oh, and after these three teams? It’s the Tigers again at 12/1 odds.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t bet on any of these four teams, but recent history will tell you that putting money down on favorites has been a losing proposition. You’re better of identifying a team flying under the radar that has the requisite roster balance that can get into the postseason.

MLB commish Rob Manfred to have sports betting “conversation” with owners

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred (pictured) says he wants to have a sports betting discussion with team owners. In an interview aired Thursday on ESPN’s Outside the Lines program, Manfred said gambling “in terms of society has changed its presence on legalization and I think it’s important for there to be a conversation between me and the owners about what our institutional position will be.”

Manfred said he “understands the arguments” recently made by National Basketball Association commish Adam Silver, who sparked a media ruckus in November by penning a New York Times op-ed calling on the federal government to introduce a regulatory framework for legal sports betting. Silver recently told ESPN that he’d broached the subject with the heads of the other pro sports leagues, who Silver claimed were all studying the issue carefully.

Manfred, who took over the commissioner’s chair from Bud Selig this year, declined to publicly endorse Silver’s appeal to Congress, but his comments nonetheless represent a significant realignment of MLB’s traditionally vehement anti-betting stance.

Meanwhile, an ESPN poll of 73 NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB athletes showed nearly two-thirds (63%) would support legal sports betting. The percentage is all the more surprising given that, of the athletes who responded to the poll, 41% echoed their leagues’ tired talking points that legal sports betting would negatively affect game ‘integrity.’

Just over one-third (34%) of respondents copped to gambling on sports other than their own, while 58% said they enjoyed other forms of gambling. Of those who gambled, the average amount spent per day was $1,763, although one player admitted to wagering a hefty $30k. (Did Charles Barkley come out of retirement?)

Non-sports challenges were particularly popular wagering opportunities, with NHL players betting on rock-paper-scissors matches while “multiple” NBA players reported wagering on whether they could bed a girl. A far nastier challenge involved eating “skin shaving and toenail clippings.” Some 37% of athletes suspected a current or former teammate of having a gambling problem, while 100% of them likely believe teammates have really nasty toenails.