Sports betting in Missouri delayed as Cardinals fans await new way to follow team

For years, the Missouri sports teams and the betting world had been trying to get approval for gambling to be legal in the state of Missouri. After failing many times to get the legislature to come up with a bill that would pass, those groups went around the state legislature and put an amendment on the ballot last November to let the citizens decide. The amendment passed. 

Soon after the election, the Missouri Gaming Commission filed with the state a request for emergency procedures to be issued. Since the amendment stated that this must be implemented by December 1, 2025, they wanted to make sure they had time to vet all the companies that would apply for licenses. The emergency, as they saw it, was the amount of revenue that the state would lose if they missed out on all the bets placed during the baseball season.

Now, several months later, the Secretary of State, Denny Hoskins, has rejected their proposal. He stated it didn’t meet the requirement to declare an emergency. They will now follow standard procedures. The Missouri Register will publish the proposed rules on March 18, starting a 30-day comment period. They will conduct a public hearing at 10 a.m. on April 17 in the Missouri Gaming Commission’s hearing room in Jefferson City.

Following the close of the comment period, the proposed rules and public statements are submitted to the legislature’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR), which has 30 days to request changes or hold a hearing. Once the process is complete and they are published, the rules take effect and the vetting can begin.

When Hoskins was asked, “Would the public input mean there could be any changes?” his answer was “Yes, most certainly.” He said that JCAR would look at those changes to see if they are “actually favorable and good for the state of Missouri.” That sounds like an even longer delay. 

The St. Louis Cardinals, when talking about this year’s budget, cited the expected loss in TV revenue and the expected loss in ticket sales. They also were counting on the gambling infrastructure being in place to offset some of that. Bernie Miklasz used the Cubs as an example and estimated at least 10 million dollars a year would go to the Cardinals. That would mean the difference between Lars Nootbaar’s salary and Ronald Acuna Jr's. or the Cardinals being able to eat a bigger chunk of Arenado’s salary. 

When I asked the Cardinals if they had any comments on the delay, their answer was, “The Cardinals organization does not have any comment on this topic.”