Gerrit Cole may not know it, but every fastball he throws is now a financial transaction.
The instant the ball leaves his hand, Hawk-Eye and Statcast capture thousands of data points — release point, spin rate, velocity, movement, and extension. That information streams in real time to broadcasters, sportsbooks, fantasy platforms, and front offices. MLB packages, licenses and sells it. Under the collective-bargaining agreement, the players whose performances generate that data receive none of the revenue.
That arrangement made sense when player-performance data was a niche scouting tool. Now that legal U.S. sports betting generated roughly $160 billion in handle in 2025, the question is no longer academic. Ahead of the Dec. 1 expiration of the CBA, the union is expected to argue that data revenue is the next frontier of player compensation. It is a serious argument. On close examination, it is also a weak one.
A familiar question in a new form
Every round of baseball labor negotiations has asked a version of the same question: What value belongs to the players, and what belongs to the enterprise that finances the game?
The reserve clause was about mobility. Free agency was about market rates. Group licensing addressed names, images and likenesses. The union will frame data rights as the next entry in that lineage — and the framing has intuitive force. The question worth asking is whether data actually belongs in that lineage or only resembles it.
The union’s case, stated fairly
The MLBPA’s argument is not frivolous: Without the players, there is no data. Cole’s spin rate has value because Cole threw the pitch; Soto’s exit velocity moves betting markets because Soto hit the ball. The players are not sharing in a revenue category that barely existed when the current economic structure was built. The union can also point to direction of travel — the NIL movement and expanded likeness monetization reflect a broader shift toward recognizing the commercial value athletes generate. Any honest analysis has to concede the equitable pull of that position. The harder question is whether the law and the underlying economics support it.
What the law actually says
The foundational case is National Basketball Ass’n v. Motorola, Inc., 105 F.3d 841 (2d Cir. 1997), which held that real-time game facts — scores, statistics, play-by-play — are not copyrightable. Facts belong to no one. That principle is usually cited against the league — but it applies with equal force to the players. If the observation that a pitch traveled 99 miles per hour belongs to no one, the player who threw it has no more proprietary claim to the raw datum than the league does.
The narrow “hot news” misappropriation doctrine that survived Motorola was constrained further by Barclays Capital Inc. v. TheFlyOnTheWall.com, Inc., 650 F.3d 876 (2d Cir. 2011), and courts have shown little appetite for manufacturing new quasi-property rights in factual data for anyone. Baseball’s antitrust exemption and the Curt Flood Act add complexity without resolving the core point: Neither side owns the facts.
If the dispute is not about who owns the facts — because no one does — then it is about who owns what actually carries commercial value: the certified, low-latency infrastructure that turns raw observation into a saleable product. On that question, the record is far less ambiguous.
Why sportsbooks pay
Sportsbooks do not pay for the existence of a 99-mph fastball. They pay for the instantaneous, accurate, certified delivery of that information at scale. For betting markets, a 400-foot home run and a ball dribbled back to the pitcher carry the same economic value — one that derives from near-instantaneous knowledge, not quality of play.
The commercial value operators purchase is created at the point of capture, validation, and delivery: the links in the chain the league financed and controls. The performance is the occasion for the data. The infrastructure is the source of its market value.
What ownership built
The league spent two decades and substantial capital building Statcast, Hawk-Eye integration, the validation systems and the distribution partnerships that turned raw observation into a certified product. The premium that “official” data commands flows directly from that investment in reliability, standardization and regulatory acceptance.
A framework that redistributes data revenue to a party that bore none of the development cost introduces uncertainty into long-term media and betting deals and weakens the incentive to fund the next generation of capture technology. The party that builds an asset and bears the attendant risk has the strongest claim to its returns — a principle that holds well beyond baseball.
The players are asserting a claim to the returns on capital they did not provide, layered atop compensation systems that already pay them, very well, for the performances that occasion the data.
What December should produce
The players have an equitable argument and a real grievance about being left out of a growing revenue category. But the league has the better legal position, the investment record and the stronger claim to the part of the chain where value is actually created.
If labor peace requires some accommodation, it should be a bounded, negotiated concession — a modest, capped participation tied to the union’s acknowledgement that the infrastructure and its output remain league property — not recognition of a player ownership right the law does not support.
Baseball has spent half a century deciding how to divide the value created on the field. The next agreement will decide how to divide the value created by the infrastructure built above it. Those are different questions — and conflating them is the union’s strongest rhetorical move and its weakest analytical one.
Mark Salah Morgan is a litigation partner at Day Pitney LLP’s New York/New Jersey law office, and also serves on the firm’s executive board committee.
