Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was asked Monday if the league has decided to shift its stances toward gambling in the wake of Shohei Ohtani\'s interpreter scandal.
Specifically, prop bets are an area of concern, where fans can bet on individual outcomes from specific events, like a single at-bat.
\"We\'ve been on prop bets from the very beginning. When we lobby in states, there\'s always certain types of bets that we have lobbied against -- I mean, the first pitch of the game, we really don\'t want that available as a prop bet,\" Manfred said.
In the Ohtani scandal, Ippei Mizuhara, the interpreter, was making the illegal bets, Manfred reminded the room: \"We haven\'t had a player that was involved.\"
\"When you have problems in our sport or in other sports, it makes you refocus your efforts but we really do think that our integrity program -- in terms of the monitoring and data available to us -- protect the sport,\" he said.
MLB has employed a full-time integrity and compliance team for years. Players are allowed to gamble legally on other sports, but are not permitted to gamble on any diamond sports.
Manfred also offered up a curious quote regarding legalized MLB gambling.
\"We were kind of dragged into legalized sports betting as a litigant in a case that ended up in the Supreme Court,\" he said. \"Having said that, I recognize -- probably better today than when we were involved in that litigation -- that one of the advantages of legalization is it\'s a heck of a lot easier to monitor what\'s going on than it is with an illegal operation.\"