MLB Players Union Pushes to Ban Player Props at Sportsbooks and Prediction Markets

The Major League Baseball Players Association has put a ban on individual player prop bets on the table in its opening collective bargaining position, and the proposal reaches further than any state regulator has gone. According to ESPN, the union wants wagers on a single player's performance, home runs, strikeouts, hits, pulled from retail sportsbooks, online sportsbooks, daily fantasy operators, and federally regulated prediction-market exchanges. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires December 1, talks are early, and both sides have only swapped initial proposals. An MLB official said the league would respond during negotiations.

The union's stated reasons are harassment and integrity, and both now carry hard numbers rather than anecdotes. The NCAA's most recent survey found that 36% of Division I men's basketball players reported betting-related social media abuse over the prior year, and roughly 12% of all verified online abuse aimed at college athletes traces to angry bettors. Prop bets sit at the center of that abuse because they let a stranger lose money on one athlete's box score. The MLBPA wants the same logic applied to its members, and it is asking MLB to lobby alongside it rather than across the table from it.

The integrity case the union is leaning on

Baseball does not have to reach for hypotheticals. In June 2024, MLB handed infielder Tucupita Marcano a lifetime ban, the first active player banned for life over gambling in roughly a century, after finding he placed 387 baseball bets worth more than $150,000, including 25 on Pirates games while he was on the roster. Four other players, Michael Kelly, Jay Groome, Jose Rodriguez, and Andrew Saalfrank, drew one-year suspensions in the same action. The more direct threat to prop markets came later. Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted on fraud, conspiracy, and bribery charges for allegedly rigging individual pitches so bettors could cash prop wagers, with one indictment describing Ortiz agreeing to throw a first-pitch ball for $7,000. MLB has since capped first-pitch prop bets at $250, a quiet admission that micro-markets on single events are the soft target. These are the same conditions that produced earlier match-fixing and athlete betting bans across US leagues.

Props are not a rounding error in the wager mix, which is why operators will fight this. Individual-player props account for an estimated 20% to 30% of total handle on a game, per ESPN's reporting on the proposal, and they are among the highest-margin products a book offers. A blanket ban would carve out a meaningful slice of the most profitable inventory in US sports betting and remove a primary engagement hook for casual bettors, the same audience affiliates monetize hardest.

The union is not asking books to disappear, only to drop one product line. In a telling detail, the MLBPA separately asked MLB to confirm that players may sign endorsement and sponsorship deals with legal betting operators, including prediction markets, even while it tries to ban props on those same players. The proposal also reworks discipline: players under betting investigation would go on administrative leave, and those serving suspensions could take a 15-day unpaid minor-league rehab assignment near the end of a ban.

Why the ask faces long odds, and what it means for the industry

The legal map splits the proposal in two. Prediction markets are the easier target, because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulates them federally, so a single federal action could in theory strip player-performance event contracts from venues like Kalshi. Sportsbooks are the hard part. The Supreme Court's May 2018 ruling in Murphy v. NCAA struck down the federal ban and handed states the power to authorize sports betting, so a nationwide prop ban on books would require Congress to act, and Congress has shown almost no appetite for it since.

The track record of federal sports-betting bills is the precedent worth weighing, and the outcome is not encouraging for the union.

The state route offers the only working model, and it is partial. Since the NCAA began pressing regulators in 2024, four states (Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, and Vermont) eliminated college-athlete props, and the broader count of states restricting college props sits around 15 to 18. Even there, momentum cooled: most states still allow single-player wagers on professional sports, including MLB. The NCAA spent two years lobbying and converted a handful of states for college sports alone. The MLBPA is starting from zero on the professional side, where the revenue at stake is far larger and the operator lobby far better funded. The major books left the American Gaming Association in part to chart their own policy course, and they have spent heavily to keep federal hands off state markets.

For affiliates and B2B operators, the near-term read is procedural, not existential. A CBA opening offer is a negotiating marker, and a federal prop ban is not arriving before the December 1 deadline or likely for years after. The medium-term signal matters more. Player unions are now allied with the same harassment-and-integrity argument that already pushed operators toward AI tools that ban bettors who abuse athletes. Prediction markets carry the most acute exposure, because their federal regulator could act without 50 statehouses, a vulnerability already visible in the court fights over their legal status. The product most associated with engagement is now also the product most associated with scandal, and the people who play it are organizing against it.