Baseball’s sign-stealing scandal threatens to get in the way of the new and still strange-bedfellow embrace Major League Baseball has made with sports betting.
A class-action lawsuit filed last week by a Massachusetts resident in US District Court against Major League Baseball, the Red Sox, and the Astros seeks to recover damages sustained by DraftKings fantasy sports participants who did not realize they were wagering on Astros and Red Sox games in which players may have been cheating.
Coming at a moment when MLB has voiced enthusiastic support of legal sports betting, the lawsuit is likely to compound the substantial damage already inflicted to the integrity of the sport by the scandal, which was exposed by The Athletic last November.