- Kalshi announced multiyear partnerships Tuesday with the Red Sox, Braves, Dodgers, Padres and Giants.
- Four of the five teams play in California or Georgia, where no state-licensed sportsbook can legally operate.
- Massachusetts won a January injunction against Kalshi’s sports contracts, now on hold while the state’s highest court hears the appeal.
- Kalshi said baseball trading volume on its platform is 36 times higher than a year earlier.
NEW YORK – Kalshi announced multiyear brand partnerships Tuesday with five MLB clubs – the Boston Red Sox, the Atlanta Braves, and California’s Dodgers, Padres and Giants – planting the prediction market’s name in four ballparks located in states where no licensed sportsbook can legally operate.
Signage Where Sportsbooks Cannot Buy It
The deals include in-stadium signage, social, online and radio activations, and fan activations, Kalshi’s announcement said. The Dodgers agreement goes furthest, with LED signage around Dodger Stadium, branded activations in Centerfield Plaza and naming rights to the ballpark’s Gold Glove Bar.
Three of the five clubs play in California and one in Georgia, two states that have never legalized sports betting, so the ballpark inventory Kalshi just bought was never available to a licensed sportsbook. A federally regulated exchange that treats state gaming law as inapplicable can advertise where DraftKings and FanDuel cannot, and it is spending accordingly. California tribes are already contesting that premise in federal court, a fight covered on the California prediction markets page.
“The idea is that fans are already engaging with their favorite teams on Kalshi, so it only makes sense to extend that fandom to some of the most beloved baseball teams in America,” said Adam Barrick, Kalshi’s head of sports partnerships, in the announcement.
The Massachusetts Collision
The Red Sox deal lands in the one partner state actively litigating to shut Kalshi’s sports contracts down. Attorney General Andrea Campbell secured a preliminary injunction on Jan. 20 barring the exchange from offering anything that constitutes sports wagering under state law without a Massachusetts Gaming Commission license. Kalshi appealed, the Supreme Judicial Court took the case on direct review, and the injunction is on hold while the appeal runs, so the exchange keeps trading in the state.
The stakes of that ruling are laid out on the Massachusetts prediction markets page.
Signing a Boston team mid-appeal builds the audience the injunction would orphan, and it signals to other teams that pending litigation is no bar to a deal.
Volume Behind The Spending
Kalshi said baseball trading volume is 36 times higher than a year ago, the growth funding a sponsorship push that has already spread across gambling sites serving USA players. For the teams, the deals monetize a category their states’ laws keep closed to conventional sportsbook money.
The Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling is the next event that can redraw the map; a reinstated injunction would leave Kalshi sponsoring a team in a state where it cannot lawfully trade on the sport.