Earlier this week, Kalshi self-certified a binary market that will allow its account holders to choose “yes or no” options related to how many total games will be played during the 2027 MLB regular season. The ensuing conversation, in which several industry analysts have already participated, shows that there could be a massive “hedging” surge within that specific market once it opens.
Sports journalists who cover professional baseball are currently forecasting that there will be a lockout starting in December of this year. The mechanism, expected to be triggered by the team owners, would immediately prohibit players from entering team facilities while barring all team communications between players and staff.
Readers who are seeking to learn more about why Kalshi’s recently self-certified 2027 MLB total games market is setting up to be a high-volume market in terms of trading should look no further than a recent social media thread that is circulating on X.
On August 4th, Event Horizon Substack author Dustin Gouker noticed that Kalshi had recently advised the CFTC that it would be offering a binary market on how many MLB regular season games will be played in 2027. From there, the conversation immediately began focusing on the significant number of small businesses that outright depend on a full 162-game MLB regular season schedule each year.
Local bars, food vendors, parking lots, souvenir shops, and even ticket scalpers could see their revenues catastrophically slide if the MLB regular season is canceled or shortened due to stalled negotiations between the league’s owners and the MLBPA next year. But Kalshi’s total games market for the 2027 MLB regular season may provide another option for those small business owners… hedging.
“I believe it would be difficult to find an example of a PM contract whose outcome has a more binary economic impact for dozens of cities, hundreds of business[es] and thousands of people than this,” posted Trading Bases author Joe Peta in reaction to Gouker’s social media notice. “We should be cheering Kalshi for its existence.”
Once InGame Co-Founder Adam Small inquired whether potentially impacted organizations had built-in options to hedge against a shortened 2027 MLB regular season, the discussion shifted to the topic of insurance. “I highly doubt insurance is available for these types of events,” said 2015 WSOP H.O.R.S.E. bracelet winner Andrew Barber. “So it does seem like a valuable market.”
The influence of Kalshi’s anticipated 2027 MLB total regular season games market could also be seen by small business owners as a way to remove “middlemen” insurance firms altogether via prediction market hedging. The relatively low trading fees that exchanges offer, paired with the “broad-stroke” total games approach, could prove to be a business-saving option for low-investment entrepreneurs who would otherwise be limited to hedging on a per-event basis.
There is a hard deadline for negotiations between MLB owners and players to result in a new Collective Bargaining Agreement: March 2027. The last time MLB regular season games were under threat was in 2022, when players and owners scrambled to reach a mid-March deal that salvaged the entire 2022 regular season.
However, many longtime pro baseball fans will recall that the “nightmare scenario” played out in 1994, which resulted in the cancellation of the entire postseason, including the World Series.
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