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It’s pretty unusual, three days before the trade deadline, to have a different news story rocking the baseball world. But these are unusual times.
On Monday, Major League Baseball placed Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase on non-disciplinary paid leave through August 31, pending the results of a sports betting investigation. As the name suggests, Clase will still draw a check, and can still have contact with the organization, but for the next five weeks, he is persona non grata at major league facilities. Clase’s teammate, Luis Ortiz, has been on leave under the same designation since July 3, and is slated to come off leave the same day as Clase.
This is the latest in a series of embarrassing gambling-related scandals for baseball in general and MLB in particular. But with the exception of the Ippei Mizuhara Affair, in which Shohei Ohtani was involved but never accused of wrongdoing, all the players involved had been (at the risk of sounding impolite) relative unknowns.
Clase, a Cy Young finalist last season and one of the best relief pitchers in the game, is a bona fide, honest-to-God star. If this investigation turns up something untoward, he’d be the biggest baseball name implicated in a gambling scandal since you-know-who, because MLB commissioner Rob Manfred brought him back into the news this year as well.
The specific reason for Clase’s removal from the clubhouse is not yet public knowledge, but whatever comes of the investigation, whether Clase is implicated or exonerated, this news will have a major impact on a trade deadline that was already expected to be closer-heavy. These effects are of secondary importance to the integrity of the game, but they are time-sensitive, so I’ll dispense with those first.
Clase, 27, is not only one of the best relief pitchers in baseball, he’s on a team-friendly contract that pays just $4.9 million this year and $6.4 million in 2026, the last guaranteed year of the contract. That’s followed by a pair of $10 million club options for 2027 and 2028. I think relievers are so volatile that it’s foolish to count on anyone short of Billy Wagner three years into the future, but this is hardly a universal viewpoint. If not for this gambling investigation, there’s every likelihood that Clase would’ve brought back the biggest return of any player this week.
That’s not going to happen now. Even if a trade partner were dead certain that Clase would be cleared, and return to action on schedule, he’d still miss half the pennant race. Best to look anywhere else under those circumstances.
Absent specific details on Clase’s involvement, so far this story is an ink-blot test. Whatever your priors were about gambling were on Monday morning, you can find a way to work those into the discussion on Monday afternoon. Here’s where I’m coming from: I find sports betting in its current form tacky, but not necessarily morally objectionable. And I see no contradiction whatsoever in Major League Baseball partnering with legal sportsbooks while holding and enforcing clear and uncompromising standards for its own players’ behavior. Last June, MLB banned Tucupita Marcano for life after he put $150,000 on various bets, including wagers on 25 Pirates games when he was on the major league IL. Here’s what I wrote then:
There are two big red-letter no-nos if you work for MLB or a team: You can’t bet on baseball, and you can’t wager with unlicensed bookmakers. Betting on other sports through legal means is in bounds. Whether this position is morally consistent or socially healthy is entirely beside the point. These are the rules, and if players (or coaches or trainers or whoever) break them, the entire credibility of the sport crumbles rapidly.
This has, as I (and many, many others) have said repeatedly, been the de facto Rule No. 1 in baseball for 100 years. Players know this. Umpires know this. It’s written in big block letters on the wall of every clubhouse in the league. Nothing about that fact changed when sports betting became legal. I’d argue that Manfred did undermine that rule when President Trump woke up one morning and decided to care about Pete Rose, setting into motion a process that resulted in Rose being made Hall of Fame-eligible for the first time. But that indiscretion will only impact Marcano (and potentially Clase and Ortiz) after they’re dead.
For us, the living, the rules remain the same: If you want to play in the majors, you can only gamble through legal bookies, and only on sports other than baseball.
You’ll notice I wrote that twice in three paragraphs. Ordinarily, I’d cut that line for being redundant, but for some reason these two simple rules are just too tricky to grasp. Not just for players, but for some college coaches and umpires, too. It’s baffling. These are guys who can untangle the balk rule; some rudimentary phone game hygiene is surely not too much to ask for.
To be clear, neither Clase nor Ortiz is under official sanction. So far, we don’t have evidence of either player actually placing illicit bets or conspiring with gamblers. Until such a finding is published, I’m content to extend them the benefit of the doubt. But my sympathy for players or coaches or umpires who do get caught in gambling scandals is limited in the extreme.
“There’s a sportsbook in the ballpark.” Great, you still can’t bet on baseball. “There are DraftKings ads on the broadcast.” Great, you still can’t bet on baseball. “I can bet on football and tennis and buzkashi all from an app on my phone.” Go nuts, I hope you win big. You still can’t bet on baseball.
And of all the justifications and equivocations and deflections, one in particular has become especially problematic: “It’s not hurting anyone.”
Throwing a World Series, I think we can all agree, is bad. Betting on your own team, to win or lose, is also bad. There are a few Rose dead-enders who’ll still argue this point, but they are neither numerous enough to matter nor coherent enough to be worth engaging.
But with increasingly granular and specific prop bets — “microbets” is apparently the term of art — a player could enrich himself, or his confederates, without impacting the game too adversely. In the modern baseball betting environment, a player doesn’t have to throw games, or shave points, or even pad his stats in garbage time, in order to impact the markets.
Back when the Ortiz investigation came to public attention, ESPN reported that betting integrity firm IC360 flagged suspicious wagering activity in three states, including Ohio. A suspicious amount of money had come in for Ortiz to throw a ball or hit a batter on certain pitches: The first pitch of the bottom of the second inning against the Mariners on June 15, and the first pitch of the top of the third inning against the Cardinals on June 27. Here’s one of the pitches in question:
Have you ever seen such a forgettable, innocuous thing in your life? This is one pitch with no outs and the bases empty, early in a Mariners-Guardians game in June. The game, which is itself abnormally inconsequential, could not be less on the line here.
All gambling is based to a greater or lesser extent on chance, but someone who knows baseball could theoretically put that knowledge to use by placing a futures bet on a Cy Young winner, or exploiting a favorable starting pitching matchup to win a wager on the outcome of a game.
Betting on whether the first pitch of an inning will be a ball or a strike is, well, truly troubled behavior. If you saw Uncut Gems, you might remember that Howard wasn’t just betting on the outcome of the game. (To be honest, betting heavily against the Sixers in the playoffs is hardly compelling evidence of gambling addiction.) Howard doesn’t just rely on Kevin Garnett, charged up with the power of the titular opal.
Howard stakes his entire million-dollar parlay on the outcome of the tipoff. That’s how obscure professional match fixers are getting.
This is what happened a decade ago in tennis. The match-fixing scandal there didn’t involve Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic conspiring to rig the Wimbledon final. It involved innumerable smallish prop bets placed on obscure players in even more obscure tournaments. The 2023 Washington Post feature on tennis match-fixing kingpin Grigor Sargsyan details the last bribe he offered an athlete before the Belgian police busted him: €1,000 to a player ranked outside the top 200 in the world, in exchange for her dropping a single service game.
Nobody, not even devout tennis diehards, would care about the outcome of such a match. But Sargsyan eventually built a criminal enterprise that included some 180 professional tennis players.
He ultimately got caught the same way Alabama head coach Brad Bohanon got caught, and the same way Ortiz came under suspicion: Regulators noticed and flagged unusual amounts of money flooding in on obscure bets. Could a criminal with access to a major league pitcher make big money without anyone noticing? Maybe, but not all at once.
But once a gambler, or an illegal bookmaker, has the ability to blackmail an athlete, the worst-case scenario becomes a possibility: A player being paid or coerced to throw a game, or even a playoff series.
That’s why there’s no such thing as trivial, victimless match fixing. MLB and regulators have to run down every 59-foot slider in the third inning of a meaningless Guardians game. They have to fire an otherwise highly-rated umpire who shares his login information with professional gamblers. If they don’t, an enterprise like Sargsyan’s could emerge in professional baseball in short order.
Like it or not, the sports betting genie is out of the bottle now, and it’d take some naiveté to believe that said genie wasn’t already at least partially liberated before legal gambling, or even daily fantasy. Maintaining the integrity of the game — more specifically, public belief in the integrity of the game — is of existential importance. This much MLB has known since before there was an MLB as we know it.
That means throwing the book at anyone who steps out of line. Whether they’re actually throwing games or not, whether they thought what they were doing was actually wrong or not, whether they’re a perpetual Triple-A guy or a Cy Young finalist. The people who run the league, for all their multitude of failings on this and other issues, understand this. I am dumbfounded that there are players out there who haven’t learned this lesson yet.
