If Washington state approves a massive expansion of legal sports gambling, Major League Baseball wants a slice of the money so it can “protect the integrity of the game” from potential scandals.

MLB is asking for payment of a 0.25 per cent royalty when people bet on its games. Gambling operators would pay the royalty, not the state or bettors.

Revenue would be used to hire more people and build monitoring systems to prevent scandals, said Marquest Meeks, MLB’s senior counsel for sports betting and investigations, at a presentation Thursday, Oct. 10, to the Washington State Gambling Commission.

“If someone bets $100 on a baseball game, we think we should get a quarter,” Meeks said. “The royalty is rooted in the fact that you can’t have bets on baseball without baseball.”

Meeks said baseball occupies a special place in American culture and its economy, but “sports betting puts all of this at risk.”

His PowerPoint presentation showed a newspaper headline about the scandal that erupted when eight Chicago White Sox players, dubbed the “Black Sox”, allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series. He also showed a picture of Pete Rose, who in 1989 was banned from baseball for life for gambling on the game.

“These scandals aren’t named for the bookies who took Pete Rose’s bets. They’re not named for the influence that corrupted the ‘Black Sox’ players. Instead, the association is attached to the baseball people. We are particularly sensitive to trying to make sure we can root out and avoid corruption before it gets to the point of scandal because it sticks to baseball for a long time to come,” Meeks said.