Copyright CBS Sports
On Sunday, Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis L. Ortiz were indicted on charges stemming from connections to gambling. Specifically, the Department of Justice has charged the pitchers with wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery, and money laundering conspiracy. The allegations are that each pitcher on multiple occasions manipulated pitch outcomes for the benefit of gamblers, taking money in return. Each bet in question was either regarding the velocity of a specific pitch or a ball or strike call. Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase, Luis L. Ortiz indicted for allegedly rigging pitches in MLB betting scheme Dayn Perry The pitchers, who were already suspended and under MLB investigation, are facing up to 65 years in prison if convicted on all counts. In terms of MLB moving forward, the league will face plenty of questions with its gambling partnerships and how to try and prevent something like this ever happening again. Here are some solutions. 1. Let this case serve as a deterrent Clase was set to make $4.9 million this season, $6.4 million next season and had $20 million worth of options for the 2027 and 2028 seasons. He allegedly took kickbacks of roughly $5,000 at a time. His MLB career is likely over and he's facing a long prison sentence. Was it really worth it to risk your livelihood and freedom for a small fraction or your future income? How ridiculous to just flush your life down the toilet like that. One would help any players thinking of future gambling entanglements would be smarter than this. MLB already banned or suspended four players last year for illegal gambling, but none were accused of throwing their own games. Surely reverberations are felt throughout baseball with this case and any player even thinking about doing something similar will think twice. 2. Continue to stay vigilant Something that could get lost in the shuffle here is that MLB has strict protocols and players getting caught means the system worked. If this was rampant and a bunch of players were getting away with it, we could suggest the league was asleep at the wheel and needs to wake up. Instead, the guardrails in place did their job. Casey Brett, Major League Baseball's senior vice president of business operations, told CBS Sports the following in 2023 and said the following: "[Sports books] are required to help us with investigations and notify us if they feel like some sort of fishy information is happening. Like if a large amount of money was placed on this event that doesn't make sense, they are required to exchange that information," he said. "...Are we ever going to get comfortable? No. If we get comfortable, we leave ourselves susceptible. I feel like we've built a really, initially, good platform to protect the integrity of the game, and it's solid, but we're going to continue to invest in the space. I don't think there's ever any amount of investment that is too much to protect." If anything, the cases of Clase and Ortiz will only make MLB more vigilant in monitoring gambling activity along with the sports books. 3. Work with sports books to eliminate betting on pitches Given that this is a team sport with a litany of individual plays pieced together over the course of roughly three hours, 162 times per team per season, team-level fixing is incredibly difficult nowadays. Individual battles, however, can be thrown. A player could pretty easily strike out on purpose, for example. Or, as is alleged in this case, a pitcher could control his velocity and throw balls on purpose. It's a pretty easy argument to say that there's simply no need to allow betting on whether or not a pitch will be a ball or a strike. Compare the upside (fan entertainment, making money, etc.) to the downside (what just happened with these two pitchers) and it seems like a no-brainer for MLB to urge all the sports books to simply not offer bets on individual pitches. 4. Eliminate prop bets altogether This takes it one step further. Just eliminate all bets on individual players and limit things to team-level wagers like which team will win and/or how many runs will be scored. 5. Sever all ties with gambling community There will be calls for this. There already have been, which means a scandal only makes the complaints louder. It is not happening, at least not now. Like it or not, a dozen or so pitches with bad gambling activity is a black eye, not the type of scandal that would get to the point of the league needing to do something so drastic, especially given that the players got caught and no games appear to have been adversely affected. Will it get worse? We can't know that. Plenty of people will say, yes, it's only going to get worse and MLB needs to cut this thing off before it does. As things stand, though, everyone is making too much money with high fan engagement to consider this option.
