Baseball’s Big Whiff on Gambling
In a striking turn of events, Major League Baseball (MLB) is grappling with the fallout from a gambling scandal involving two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz. Recently indicted, the duo stands accused of participating in a scheme that manipulated specific pitches to benefit gamblers, allegedly netting them a mere $12,000 while risking their careers and freedom. Prosecutors suggest that the scheme could lead to severe penalties, with potential sentences reaching up to 65 years in prison, although such harsh outcomes are generally deemed unlikely. The charges highlight a troubling trend within professional sports, where the increasing normalization of gambling has begun to erode the integrity of the games themselves. While the MLB has historically distanced itself from gambling, the recent surge in legalized sports betting—following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling—has introduced new complexities, with leagues now reaping substantial financial rewards from partnerships with betting companies.
The scandal raises critical questions about the broader implications of legalized gambling in sports. Unlike the infamous 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, where players were accused of intentionally losing games, the current allegations against Clase and Ortiz reveal a more insidious form of manipulation. The indictment suggests that the players’ actions were driven by prop bets—wagers on specific outcomes that can be influenced by individual player performance, making them particularly susceptible to corruption. This shift from traditional betting on game outcomes to more granular prop bets poses a unique threat to the integrity of the sport, as highlighted by sports analysts. In response to the growing concerns, MLB has begun to limit prop bets on specific pitches, yet critics argue that this is merely a band-aid solution to a much larger issue.
As the MLB and other major sports leagues continue to embrace the lucrative gambling industry, the potential for corruption looms larger than ever. The financial benefits of legalized betting are undeniable, with projections suggesting that MLB could generate upwards of $1.1 billion annually from such partnerships. However, the societal consequences—ranging from increased gambling addiction to financial ruin among vulnerable populations—cannot be ignored. The case of Clase and Ortiz serves as a stark reminder of the risks associated with intertwining sports and gambling, prompting a reevaluation of the ethics surrounding this burgeoning industry. As the lines between sportsmanship and profit blur, it becomes increasingly clear that the integrity of the game may be at stake, raising the question: can sports leagues truly navigate this new landscape without compromising their core values?
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Gambling is a numbers game, so here are a few: The
pitcher Emmanuel Clase
’s 2025 salary from Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians is $4.5 million dollars. This weekend, prosecutors unveiled charges that he had made just $12,000 from two recent rigged pitches. And he could face as many as 65 years in prison (though such a stiff sentence seems unlikely).
Clase and the fellow Guardians hurler Luis Ortiz were indicted last week for their involvement in the scheme, which allegedly netted bettors hundreds of thousands of dollars. (
Attorneys for Clase and Ortiz
have denied the allegations.) The scheme outlined in the
indictment
is the latest instance of legalized gambling’s corrosive influence on professional sports. Major leagues have welcomed the industry with open arms and greedy palms, signing contracts with betting companies and bringing casinos into stadiums and arenas, but they act astonished when gambling starts to corrupt their own players.
Traditional sports fandom involves rooting for your team to win; traditional sports gambling involves putting money on the game results too. The most notorious baseball-gambling episode was the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox (including “Shoeless Joe” Jackson) were accused of intentionally losing the World Series as part of a mob betting scheme and banned from the sport.
The indictment against Clase and Ortiz alleges something that is both less directly threatening to the game’s integrity and somehow even bleaker. Nothing in the charges suggests that Clase, a fearsome closer and three-time All-Star, intentionally lost any games. Instead, prosecutors say, he and Ortiz agreed to throw balls on particular pitches. The gamblers then placed prop bets—wagers on specific outcomes—and won money. In other words, this was gambling for gambling’s sake, staking money on things that no one would care about for any independent reason, and then concocting elaborate methods of cheating to make those things happen.
For decades after the Black Sox scandal, MLB rigorously pushed gambling away. Pete Rose, the sport’s all-time-hits leader, was permanently banned when he was revealed to have placed bets on baseball, though he claimed this didn’t
taint the game
, because he bet only on his teams to win. (Rose’s ban was repealed earlier this year, after his death, following pressure from President Donald Trump, a longtime casino owner.)
Since a
2018 Supreme Court ruling
effectively legalized it, betting has been available widely and has shed much of its stigma. Individual problem gamblers are suffering, and Clase and Ortiz seem likely to pay for their involvement if found guilty. Yet the big corporations of the sports world are doubling down on gambling. Last week, ESPN announced that it was ending
ESPN Bet
, a gambling foray with Penn Entertainment that failed to capture many users. But the network isn’t abandoning its hopes: It’s signing a new deal with DraftKings, one of the two biggest industry players.
The big sports leagues are way out ahead. Hard figures on how much revenue their involvement with betting has brought them aren’t available, but it’s safe to say the numbers are large. A
2018 projection
from an industry group suggested MLB would make $1.1 billion and the NFL would make $2.3 billion annually. And if those estimates aren’t exactly impartial, anyone who’s watched a game, looked at the ESPN app, or driven past innumerable billboards for DraftKings and FanDuel can surmise that a lot of cash is washing around—whether from direct agreements or indirect effects such as ad spending and more attention.
The answer from the leagues has been to try to cut back on prop bets.
Keith O’Brien
argued in
The Atlantic
last month—after another depressing gambling scandal, this time in the NBA—that “prop bets pose a particular threat to the integrity of the game.” Any individual athlete has only so much control over whether his or her team wins or loses. But prop bets focus on smaller outcomes over which one player can have a great deal of influence, such as their point total (in basketball) and yardage (in football). As a result, players are particularly susceptible to manipulation, and that in turn corrupts their sport as a whole. After the Clase and Ortiz indictment, MLB said that its partners would limit
bets on specific pitches
, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver earlier asked
platforms
to “pull back some of the prop bets.”
That seems better than nothing, but barely. As
Charles Fain Lehman
wrote in
The Atlantic
last fall, the problem is not particular
kinds
of sports gambling—it’s sports gambling more broadly. “The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households,” he argued,
citing
research
that has found that less saving, more bank overdrafts, and greater rates of bankruptcy are associated with looser gambling laws. These problems are particularly common among young men, who are becoming dangerously addicted, as
my colleague Hana Kiros
has reported.
Young men also, of course, make up the rosters of MLB, the NFL, and the NBA. No one should be naive about how money suffuses professional sports—the leagues exist to turn a profit—but it’s easy to see why putting intensely competitive men in situations where gambling is celebrated and advertised is going to create temptations they can’t all resist, even if the payoff likely amounts to a rounding error on their paychecks, as in the Clase and Ortiz indictment.
Prohibition has a bad reputation, and American society seems to be
turning against regulating vices
. I tend to agree that banning everything that is socially undesirable just creates opportunities for overweening enforcement, but gambling still brings out my most puritanical impulses. (You can make a good policy case against banning betting and other vices while still disapproving of them; a principled libertarianism need not be libertine.) Before the 2018 Supreme Court ruling, though, betting wasn’t completely banned. In addition to friendly leagues among friends, gambling was legal in a few select places: Las Vegas, Atlantic City, certain Native American lands. That provided enough of an outlet for people to be able to indulge in gambling from time to time yet ensured that it was viewed as an irregular indulgence, faintly improper.
The past month has seen the best of baseball, in the epochal World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays, and some of the worst, in this indictment. MLB should think hard about the lessons of the latter. Sports leagues think that they’re in on the deal, but they’re really the mark, falling for the same trap that every gambler does. They see money on the table and can’t resist trying for it, forgetting that the house always comes out ahead.
Related:
Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake. (
From 2024
)
“I’m treating guys who would never be caught dead in a casino”
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Today’s News
The Senate
approved a bipartisan funding bill last night
to end the government shutdown, sending it to the House for a vote, expected tomorrow afternoon. The measure would keep the government open through January of next year and fund key agencies for most of 2026. The proposal leaves out the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats had pushed for.
A Utah judge
rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map
on Monday, siding instead with a centrist coalition’s proposal, in a redistricting victory for Democrats.
Flight disruptions continue as
airlines are expected to cut about 6 percent of today’s flights nationwide
. More than 1,200 U.S. flights were canceled and 2,000 delayed amid a mix of Federal Aviation Agency staffing shortages and severe weather; the agency warned that cancellations could rise to 10 percent by Friday.
Evening Read
Illustration by M. Fatchurofi
What a Cranky New Book About Progress Gets Right
By Tyler Austin Harper
During the five years I worked as an environmental-studies professor at a progressive private college, I undertook a small, semesterly rebellion: I had students read
“Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,”
a 2011 essay by the British writer and former green radical Paul Kingsnorth. In it, Kingsnorth chronicles his disenchantment with the activism that had once been his life’s work—the very kind of advocacy that had driven many of my students, that had driven me, into that classroom in the first place.
The essay makes the case that mainstream environmentalism has abandoned the commitments and ideas that originally defined it.
Read the full article.
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PS
Back in April, I wrote about what I called the
“pardon-to-prison pipeline”
: the string of people who reoffend after receiving clemency from Trump. Yesterday I saw two relevant updates: First,
John Banuelos
, who allegedly fired a gun into the air during the January 6, 2021, insurrection, was arrested last month in Utah on charges of sexual assault and kidnapping. And in New York,
Jonathan Braun
, whom I mentioned in April, was sentenced to more than two years in federal prison after his conviction on charges including assault and sexual abuse. “He is at least the eighth convict to whom Mr. Trump granted clemency during his first term who has since been charged with a crime,”
The New York Times
noted
. Also on Monday, the White House announced that Trump had pardoned 77 people accused of involvement in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. I’m not a betting man, as you may have guessed, but if I were, I wouldn’t stake much on that group staying out of trouble with the law.
— David
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