Major League Baseball (MLB) will be keeping a closer on suspicious sports betting patterns thanks to a deal they recently signed with London-based Sport Integrity Monitoring (SportIM).
The deal is part of the MLB’s ongoing efforts to insure that the integrity of the game isn’t compromised by internal and external forces and was not triggered by any specific incidents.
In a statement to the press, as reported on by the International Business Times (IBT). MLB lawyer Dan Halem, said monitoring sports betting is just good policy:
Given how important integrity is to sports, the price we’re paying is well worth it even if we have no reason to believe there’s any gambling going on.
Specific terms of the deal weren’t released, but it is known that MLB is SportIm’s first US client. The company monitors a range of regulated and black market betting operators to look for anomalies in betting patterns that could indicate fraud.
While baseball wagering is nowhere near as big in the United States as football and basketball, it still accounts for around $720 million worth of wagers in Nevada, the only US state where sports betting is legal.
Since it’s generally believed that only about one percent of all American wagers pass through Nevada, that leaves a lot of room for game fixers to wager in an unregulated environment.
The MLB/SportIM deal is also a quiet indication of the increasingly warm relationship between American professional sports leagues and the regulated sports betting industry. It doesn’t take too big a stretch of the imagination to see the MLB using data from SportIM to help make a case for legal sports betting in the United States; an idea that seems more likely to happen every week.