The MLB Players Association asked the league to do something rare: spend its lobbying muscle protecting players instead of a revenue stream. MLB said no.
A letter MLBPA general counsel Jeffrey Perconte sent to Congress this month, first reported by SBC Americas and confirmed since by ESPN and CDC Gaming, tells the real story: during this year’s collective bargaining talks, the union proposed that MLB jointly lobby against player prop bets. MLB, according to the union, balked. MLB didn’t counter, didn’t say it needed time to study it; it just said no.
The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, who covers labor issues for MLB, confirmed the proposal came up directly in bargaining sessions:
The union’s reasoning wasn’t abstract. Lance McCullers Jr. got death threats in May referencing his two children after a bad outing — Houston police traced them to an intoxicated bettor overseas who’d lost a prop wager. Lucas Giolito says the abuse doesn’t wait for bad starts anymore. “I get angry messages after every single game, regardless of whether I pitched well or not,” Giolito told reporters, warning Commissioner Manfred directly that it could escalate. Nolan Jones, Steven Kwan, and Tanner Bibee have all fielded death threats and racist messages from bettors who lost money on how many strikeouts or bases they produced, per Deadspin’s reporting on the Guardians’ complaints. The union calls it threats and abuse, not stalking: aimed at players and, in McCullers’s case, at his kids, over a stranger losing a $20 parlay on a strikeout total.
Something less visceral, but just as damning: players who bet heavily on individual props show up in problem-gambling data at rates the MLBPA says are significantly higher than the general betting population. In writing, to Congress, the union is telling MLB that its most heavily marketed bet type is also its most addictive.
MLB has not explained itself. No statement, no on-record pushback, nothing. Just silence, which answers the question on its own when you consider what the league would be giving up.
Player props make up an estimated 35 to 40 percent of all betting volume on MLB games. DraftKings pays MLB somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 to $200 million a year as the league’s official daily fantasy partner. FanDuel’s deal runs bigger. BetMGM’s in there too. Add it up and you’re looking at $800 million to a billion dollars a year in sportsbook money tied, directly or otherwise, to a bet category the league’s own players just told Congress is getting them killed in their group chats.
Nobody at MLB has said “we need the prop money” out loud. They don’t have to. The league had a clean, low-cost option here — lobby alongside the union that represents its own players against a bet type tied to documented harassment — and it passed. The likeliest explanation for that is sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere, not a mystery.
This is the same building MLB has been renovating for years now, the one where FanDuel and DraftKings are currently in court arguing their VIP programs don’t target problem gamblers. Different lawsuit, same architecture: sportsbook revenue treated as untouchable, everyone downstream of it treated as an acceptable cost.
Prop bets aren’t going anywhere. Nobody’s banning them this week. But the league had a chance to stand next to its players on a documented safety problem, and instead it stood next to DraftKings. That’s not an accident. That’s a budget line.
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