Prop bets have become a very popular choice among gamblers. They allow a person to wager on aspects of the game that help to make it more interesting. No sport is better suited for these types of wagers than baseball, at least according to one Major League Baseball (MLB) executive.
MLB does not believe it will stay this way, however, especially with the kinds of prop bets the sport has to offer. In speaking at the Vegas Sports & Information betting summit in Las Vegas, MLB’s president of gaming and new business ventures, Kenny Gersh, explained that baseball is better suited for these kinds of bets than any other.
“For the past however-many-years here in Nevada, it’s been pre-match betting on baseball with money lines and what the over/under is. Baseball, I think, has a huge opportunity to do a lot of things in-play because of the way the game is set up. We have some of these little discreet events during a game that some of the other sports just don’t have.”
Baseball is a statistics oriented league, where numbers during contests can often mean more than the results themselves. This is the sport where fantasy sports got its start, and it continues to be one of the most popular options for fantasy players.
For this reason, it is easy to see how prop bets would be quite a popular option. Gamblers could place wagers upon how many innings a starter will go, or how many pitches he may toss. They can wager on a number of hits for a team or player, or place a bet on how many home runs will be hit. Even the number of assists a shortstop records or the number of runners left on base could become potential prop bets. Because there are so many types of stats to the sport, the prop wagers may seem almost limitless.
The problem is that these types of wagers are not always available. It is one thing that MLB would really like to see change. “Ideally, sports betting would be legal in the United States and there would be a framework in place,” Gersh said. “That’s not the way it’s developing here in the U.S., so we just have to take what we can get now.”
