In 2022, the “It’s Not My Money(ball)” series was created in response to the owners’ lockout, which disrupted that year’s Spring Training and arguably cost Clayton Kershaw a perfect game in Minneapolis (I had fun). As the season completes its first month, the World Baseball Classic now a memory, we must conclude the revival of this series as trouble looms in the distance, hanging in the air, exactly in the way a brick does not.
This trilogy in five parts (it’s yet another Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy joke) was initially conceived from a single essay that ballooned in size to the point where a split was necessary. As I worked on Pandora’s Box and MLB’s Dirty Dozen, I realized there was a deeper story than skinflint owners and a perception problem that the Dodgers are more than happy to lean into.
Like a child who ate everlasting gum, research for this story just kept getting bigger and exponentially worse.
I maintain that issues with private equity pose a greater threat to the league’s long-term health. Today’s final topic is utterly depressing, the exemplar of the times. A true example of greed incarnate, without any semblance of empathy, pretending to be something decent and good, yet being anything but by reducing people to numbers without any empathy. Where have I heard that phrase before?
MLB just embraced this cancer on the sport in a warm, welcoming hug. Subprime mortgages? No, something far more insidious. Today, we examine prediction markets.
The Devil’s Bargain
On March 19, 2026, MLB announced that it had entered into an arrangement with prediction market company, Polymarket. Evan Drellich of The Athletic reported that the deal will pay MLB $300 million over four years. The deal can be voided if courts rule that prediction markets violate state law, a league official who was not authorized to speak publicly said, confirming an ESPN report.
Per Mr. Drellich:
Attorney Doug Mishkin, a partner at the firm BCLP who worked on gambling and commercial transactions at the NFL from 2016 to 2022, said he sees parallels between 2018 and today. That year, the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban on sports gambling, opening up a new world for operators.
“There was this theme that, ‘Oh, how hypocritical of the sports leagues that they’re now getting into bed with all of these, these operators and official sports-betting sponsorships, when they had for years been fighting it and saying it was threatening the integrity of the game,’” Mishkin said. “But strategically, once the law had changed and it was going to be happening regardless, at that point, you don’t really have much of a choice.
“It’s sort of a similar dynamic here. You have the prediction markets they’re operating. They have millions of customers.”
Polymarket this month announced a partnership with data companies Palantir and TWG AI “to identify both suspicious trading activity, as well as trading by prohibited participants who probably shouldn’t be engaging and trading on certain outcomes,” Borod said.
(Emphasis added.)
Palantir is a topic for another day, especially regarding immigration enforcement. TWG AI is a division of TWG Global, a holding company founded by Dodgers’ owner Mark Walter. If you feel like the figurative call is coming from inside the house, you’re not alone.
The league announced the partnership as follows:
Major League Baseball (MLB) announced today two new agreements in the rapidly growing prediction market space. The league named Polymarket MLB’s Official Prediction Market Exchange.
In addition, Baseball Commissioner Robert D. Manfred, Jr. signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Michael S. Selig, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), one year after MLB wrote a letter to the CFTC calling for strong integrity protections in the rapidly evolving prediction market space. MLB pursued this agreement with the CFTC to further protect the integrity of baseball by ensuring swift response to incidents and anticipating emerging trends more strongly.
The comprehensive integrity commitments in the Polymarket agreement and the CFTC’s clear collaborative intent provides a critical step towards a strong integrity framework within the prediction market space.
As part of Polymarket’s Official Partnership with MLB, Polymarket and its brokers will get exclusive access to MLB marks and logos to be used within their prediction market products. Polymarket will also get access to Official League Data from Sportradar, MLB’s exclusive global distributor of data for prediction markets, and receive brand exposure across MLB’s digital ecosystem and at league events. A key component of the partnership between MLB and Polymarket will be establishing a comprehensive integrity framework, which includes working together to restrict markets that present an integrity risk to MLB, such as individual pitches, manager decisions, and umpire performance, among others. Polymarket will also integrate integrity controls into its US Rulebook to ensure all of its brokers are held to the same integrity standards.
Under the terms of the MOU, MLB and the CFTC memorialized a clear intent to share information with each other regarding the integrity of professional baseball and related prediction markets. Shared information will be treated confidentially, facilitating open lines of communication. Designated representatives will meet regularly to identify and discuss any issues that may impact the integrity of MLB’s games and the MLB prediction market landscape.
While Polymarket will be MLB’s Official Prediction Market Exchange with a set of exclusive rights, MLB intends to have integrity relationships with all other prediction market exchanges offering baseball contracts. Those exchanges will be required to integrate the necessary integrity protections into their individual rulebooks…
…“Polymarket is about bringing fans closer to the moments that define sports,” said Shayne Coplan, Founder and CEO of Polymarket. “By working collaboratively with Major League Baseball and regulators, we can create new ways for fans to engage with the game while protecting the integrity of the sport.”
(Emphasis added.)
Getting access to league data and receiving brand exposure via the league, with plans to expand to other prediction market companies — what could possibly go wrong? In other news, a local skulk of foxes has established rules to guard local chicken coops, with farmers smiling in agreement, anticipating future agreements with the nearby pack of wolves, the kettle of hawks, and the den of snakes from two towns over.
Baseball media was largely silent on the news. Admittedly, I saw, and I was horrified. I bookmarked the announcement with the header “this can’t be good, figure out why ASAP.”
Connor Moylan of sister site Royals Review was on the ball and at least attempted to analyze the events, citing the only other essay I could find on the subject: Mr. Drellich of The Athletic.
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…
…The phrase that really stood out to me is unreasonable integrity risk. I think this [phrase] 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…
…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…
(Emphasis added.)
One would wonder why MLB, or any league, would strap itself to such an institution with all the subtlety of someone selling a subprime mortgage without income verification in 2006, or put it another way:
Before we say how the league has committed a blunder of spectacular proportions that has somehow not gone nuclear yet, we must first understand the following question.
What is a prediction market?
Prediction markets are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives, i.e., gambling on real-world events. Now, the preceding sentence should have horrified you. While this idea has existed in one form or another before, generally, there has been enough collective empathy to reject the premise back into the nihilistic horror from whence it came.
Not so, now, which is arguably the goal of prediction market companies like Polymarket and Kalshi. Bet everything, get money — empathy be damned. These companies would argue that they want to turn the wisdom of the crowd into a predictive tool.
In a benign, “not really thinking about it too hard because life is complicated” sort of way, it makes sense. But even a cursory, fleeting, basic look at these markets with even the tiniest scintilla of empathy demonstrates the nihilistic horror involved in literally turning everything into gambling, but with extra steps.
Kalshi and Polymarket would vehemently disagree with this assessment. You might too. But spend five minutes looking into these companies, and you quickly realize that you are not looking at an investment vehicle; you are looking at a sportsbook and an online casino in all but name.
Trevor Hayes of More Perfect Union provides a report on how Polymarket reached out to the outlet to pursue a partnership. What follows is a sobering 21-minute examination of greed gone amok with absolutely no empathy. The report demonstrates how these exchanges are clearly gambling, why they are trying to skirt taxation as a sportsbook by trying and failing to be a commodities exchange, how there is virtually no regulation apart from being enabled by both having Donald Trump Jr. serve as a special advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and general stories of despair from people who are serving as the chafe for the miniscule number of accounts who win, mostly on the back of insider information.
Who could know that writers like Bradbury, Asimov, Dick, and Huxley would imagine dystopias that seem quaint and naive in comparison to the absolute horror unfolding?
Why these prediction markets are bad
If the More Perfect Union report serves as a serious, thoughtful examination of prediction markets. John Oliver of Last Week Tonight comes out rhetorically swinging as he recently used his show’s long-form format to break down prediction markets, including the history of Polymarket, which owns two exchanges, one of which is still banned under US law, yet still and routinely accessible via a virtual private network (VPN).
The entire 32-minute video is well worth your time. Apart from a handful of instances of language, the video is mostly safe for work for the first 31.5 minutes. The final 90-second bit to close out the segment is a callback to some behavior people bet on in the prediction market exchanges (involving people throwing sex toys on the court during WNBA games), involving the audience throwing phallic sex toys at John Oliver (with his consent).
The link to the non-age-gated video is here. Viewer discretion is advised (especially at work).
Mr. Oliver went more in-depth than More Perfect Union. Here are some facts that were left out of Mr. Hayes’ piece in the Last Week Tonight report.
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Kalshi recently received a valuation of $22 billion, up from months ago, with Polymarket trying to get the same, and numerous other companies trying to get in on the act.
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Kalshi became the first regulated exchange in 2020; Polymarket did not receive approval and started anyway around the same time, ultimately paying a $1.4 million fine and banning American citizens from the platform, a ban that is usually circumvented by using a VPN.
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Polymarket has about two million users, and roughly 700 accounts currently hold 2/3rds of all the money on the exchange.
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“News” organizations like CNN are entering into partnerships with Kalshi and putting odds tickers up during programming, effectively legitimizing and whitewashing the prediction market’s reputation.
All of this information is open and easy to find. No one who spends even the slightest ounce of effort can pretend not to know the harm that these gambling sites, by any other name, are causing. Which is when you remember that Commissioner Rob Manfred willingly attached MLB to these people for $150 to $300 million over the next four years.
What I would give for the sport of baseball to be run by those who clearly did not hate the sport.
In search of moral redemption
On May 1, Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic reported movement on this issue, especially as to the possibility of insider trading:
Major League Baseball also sent a letter to the CFTC asking that leagues be given a certain amount of latitude in setting predictions markets events because they, the letter said, are “best placed to identify which markets related to their respective sports raise significant manipulation or insider trading concerns.”
Player unions for the NBA, NFL, MLB, MLS and NHL sent a joint letter that argued for restrictions. The letter asked the CFTC to ban what it described as “negative” contracts, which they say are ones that allow people to bet on unders, if a player is hurt or penalized, or if certain words are said during a live broadcast and event. The unions also asked the CFTC to enforce fan conduct policies to protect players inside arenas and venues, as well to ban trading on unauthorized player health data.
Given the person “regulating” these services, I remain skeptical that anything productive will be done.
What’s to be done by the average person? At the risk of overthinking it, it’s pretty simple. Anyone associated with these markets, be it an influencer or a team: starve them of time and attention. Shame them at every opportunity. If the 2008 financial crisis taught us anything is that the party ultimately ends right quick once things become unsustainable, once the madness reaches its peak.
With any luck, by this time next year or the year after, these companies will be thought of in the same way as most cryptocurrency exchanges or whatever fly-by-night outfit we collectively forget as the last dumb fad, which took the money of the foolish and desperate.
When you leave predators in charge of prey, is it any wonder that everyone is gobbled up? But hey, it’s not my money(ball), and I won’t let these jokers have one thin dime. We will provide updates as they become available, but the focus will be on lighter fare, at least until December.
Read the full article here
