Copyright Slate
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The baseball games weren’t real. Tens of thousands of people bought tickets, many times that number watched on TV, and plenty more checked their phones obsessively to see the scores. And they were watching games that were a little bit less than real “games,” because not all of the players were trying to win. That’s what stings the most in the 23-page federal indictment filed last Wednesday against two soon-to-be-former major league pitchers, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz of the Cleveland Guardians. Every pitch shapes the next pitch, and if every pitch isn’t on the level, then nothing that comes afterward is completely on it, either. The Justice Department says that Clase and Ortiz repeatedly threw pitches out of the strike zone as part of a scheme with gamblers who would wager on those pitches to be balls. Sometimes, the bettors would also wager on the velocity of the pitches. These were the first pitches of at-bats, where sportsbooks offered action on whether it would be a ball or strike. (It appears they were often the first pitch of an inning, specifically, though maybe not always.) Clase did it in at least nine games over the past three seasons, according to the indictment, helping bettors win at least $400,000. Ortiz did it at least twice this year, earning himself $12,000 out of $60,000 he generated for the bettors whose pocket he was in. This isn’t a near miss. This isn’t baseball being fortunate that the abuse of its competitive integrity was not worse. This is the shifting of games by cheaters, and more than that, by a form of cheating that sports leagues and sportsbooks have helped to explode. The problem here is not “gambling” in generalities, but a specific kind of gambling that our modern sports betting boom has made a feature of the landscape. The indictments of Clase and Ortiz are just the clearest examples yet of the scourge of the prop bet. If you fix even one pitch, you change a baseball game. Major league hitters this year posted an .806 OPS after getting a first-pitch ball. After a first-pitch strike, their OPS was .607. A first-pitch ball turns the average hitter into Andre Dawson, a Hall of Fame outfielder. A first-pitch strike turns him into Brendan Ryan, shortstop who bounced between the Cardinals, Mariners, Yankees, and Angels between 2007 and 2016 and now makes for a pretty good Immaculate Grid answer. After Shohei Ohtani goes up 1–0 in the count, his career OPS is 1.128. Get a first-pitch strike past him, and it drops to .746. That first pitch is the difference between Ohtani being Ted Williams or being, say, Ike Davis or Paul Lo Duca. We have no idea how many times Clase, in particular, colluded with bettors in this fashion. The indictment mentions the nine specific games but says there were more than 100 total bets on Clase and does not posit an upper bound of how often this happened. Just the two specific games in which Ortiz is alleged to have worked with the bettors share obvious examples of the pitcher fundamentally changing the game. The indictment points to a game against the Seattle Mariners on June 15 of this year, in which Ortiz intentionally threw a ball to open the second inning against Seattle’s Randy Arozarena. The plate appearance ended in a five-pitch walk, and Arozarena scored a few batters later to give the Mariners a 1–0 lead. In the same half-inning, J.P. Crawford hit a grand slam. There were 41,000 tickets sold for this game. Everyone paid to see a pitcher intentionally put himself behind in the count, let a runner on base who would come around to score, and then give up a backbreaking grand slam. There was only one out at the time of that grand slam. Would Ortiz have gotten more outs if he didn’t have to contend with runners all over the basepaths? Was Seattle’s five-run inning, which keyed a 6–0 win, real? Leaguewide, hitters are much better when pitchers have to worry about baserunners than when the bases are empty. Twelve days later, Ortiz started against the St. Louis Cardinals. The indictment says that he intentionally missed with the first pitch of the third inning. He was facing Cardinals catcher Pedro Pagés, a weak hitter who slugged .363 for the year. But after throwing one more ball and falling behind 2–0, Ortiz served up a belt-high sinker on the inner half of the strike zone. Pagés turned on it and hit a home run to left field. Each team had a 50-percent win probability entering the at-bat, but the homer bumped St. Louis’ chances to 61 percent. It turned out to be the winning run, as the Guardians got shut out. The best thing MLB could say here is that these tied games were just tilted rather than decisively flipped from one team to another. The only reason it’s not even more damning is that Cleveland’s bats were silent in these games. Clase’s story might be even more troubling. He has been one of the best relievers in baseball over the past four years—in at least three of those, the feds say, he was working with gamblers. Since 2023, he’s thrown 58 pitches that met the following criteria: They missed the plate by a ton (defined as being in Statcast’s “waste” or “chase” zones), and they were the first pitch of an at-bat with nobody on base. All but a handful were taken for balls, although the humorous part of the indictment is that one of the compromised pitches became a strike anyway when a Dodger swung through it. (Kudos to L.A. center fielder Andy Pages, who we know was not involved in this operation.) Clase threw 30 of these pitches with the tying or go-ahead run either on base, at the plate, or on deck. How many of these were a sham? It’s a completely open question. MLB is lucky that Clase was so good he often got those hitters out anyway. I could only find two examples of these hitters in the most high-leverage at-bats even reaching base against him, and Clase didn’t give up a run in either case. Clase was such a beast of a pitcher that even after a 1–0 count, hitters could not reach a .600 OPS against him during his career. I now refer to that career in the past tense, but I do respect being so good at pitching that someone could plausibly tank so many first pitches and still be pretty much impossible for most hitters to touch. The sports betting industry has a standard line in cases like this: The fact that the alleged perps got caught is evidence of the system working. Indeed, the bets that turned up red flags here were placed on legal sportsbooks, where they were subject to monitoring software that could make someone think, “Hmm, that sure is weird, someone betting so much money that this specific Emmanuel Clase pitch will be a ball with a velocity of less than 94.95 mph.” I have some sympathy for this argument, in general: People will never stop betting on things, and there’s more potential for abuse in a black market. But in this specific case, legal sports betting is the arsonist, not the firefighter. Your friendly neighborhood bookie probably does not offer live betting markets on the outcome of so many specific pitches. He does not offer the same effortless means of crafting multileg parlay bets in seconds, as anyone could do when betting on these pitches. The boom in individual player prop bets is an innovation of legal sports betting. Player props are also at the root of the NBA’s current big-time federal problem. Major League Baseball has realized this obvious problem, and it’s settled on a half measure. The league’s sports betting partners have agreed to cap these sorts of bets at $200 and exclude them from parlays. Still, the league is trying to have its cake and eat it too, painting itself as proactive and the Clase and Ortiz bets as being, maybe, not that big a deal. The league’s statement on the matter says that microbets like these “present heightened integrity risks because they focus on one-off events that can be determined by a single player and can be inconsequential to the outcome of the game.” That’s mostly true, but saying these events “can” be inconsequential is like saying that a human encounter with a grizzly bear “can” be nonfatal. Every pitch changes the at-bat, and every at-bat changes the game. The most obvious reform that would make sports betting a bit safer is to federally ban credit card deposits for gambling accounts. The next most obvious thing would be to acknowledge that even a libertarian approach to sports betting does not mean people need to be allowed to bet on a specific pitch in an AL Central game in June.
