The next time your favorite baseball team negotiates a nine-figure deal for an injury-prone pitcher, blame the oddsmakers. They’ll soon be the source of cash upon which baseball depends to sustain the sport’s lofty pay packages.
Both Major League Baseball and media companies are vying to control the next wave of sports gambling, integrating betting into streamed broadcasts of games. The expansion of betting will make some baseball traditionalists queasy. But wary fans should consider the alternative — higher costs to watch or attend games as both teams and media companies grasp for new sources of revenue.
For years, baseball and other sports leaned upon regional television networks to pay them billions of dollars for the rights to broadcast games to the home fans. Now, cord-cutting is choking off that lucrative pipeline.
