Major league pitchers pay price for gambling, but owners still play the game
Explicitly anti-competitive behavior has been detected around one of Major League Baseball’s historic Rust Belt franchises, resulting in the swift removal of the perpetrators and sparking a response that is sure to test the moral fabric of the game, even as piecemeal, placating solutions are snapped into place in a manner that will soothe the wounds of gambling partners while not beginning to address the underlying issue.
And still, somehow, Bob Nutting walks free.
The chairman and principal owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates is not, of course, charged with intentionally spiking pitches in a scheme to rig prop bets, as Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz have been. Clase and Ortiz were indicted by federal prosecutors in New York on Sunday and charged with a litany of crimes, including wire fraud.
Both Clase and Ortiz, through their respective attorneys, have denied any wrongdoing. Those denials notwithstanding, if convicted of the charges, each faces decades in federal prison and likely eventual deportation.
In exchange for a few thousand dollars apiece — and a few hundred thousand dollars in rigged bets for their co-conspirators — each has seemingly thrown away a major league career that was likely to earn them many millions.
These things are rarely considered in those terms at the time the sin is committed, either because of the underlying arrogance of believing they’ll never be caught, or because whatever force compels the risk doesn’t respond to rationality. It’s also difficult to ignore that MLB, as a whole, has been accepting, if not outright encouraging, different vehicles with similar results from ownership groups stretching back decades.
Aside from the financial instrument and the scale involved, the underlying impulse of the busted gambler is not particularly different from what is often described as the savvy business practices of ownership. Whether it’s Nutting, the Cleveland-based Dolan family, Minnesota’s Pohlad family or any of countless others who spring to mind, owners have long, under the guise of strategy and claims of inequity, failed to give their fullest efforts to putting a winning team on the field.
The difference between running out a Cleveland-sized payroll and spiking a slider in the dirt to win a prop bet is that if you get caught doing the latter, your career and life will never be the same. If you get caught doing the former, eventually you’ll accumulate enough value in your underlying asset to sell for a profit many times your initial investment, and you’ll toast your mastery of the universe.
There is no defense for what the pitchers are alleged to have done. Being in the employ of bad actors does not excuse bad behavior, and if the competition between the lines cannot be trusted, then the entire facade of the game comes crumbling down.
That facade is weakened, though, by the behavior of owners who choose to collect their revenue-sharing checks with one hand and bemoan the system with the other, pushing ostensibly toward a salary cap-based system that many seem unable to understand will inevitably reveal their ongoing scheme. The Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers do not generate the same revenue, but to suggest the gap between them is so wide as to justify a perpetual strip-down is born of the same impulse as scrolling through the betting menus.
MLB guidelines require teams to reinvest their revenue-sharing proceeds into team operations; in practice, that’s nearly impossible to either see or prove. Did the Pirates, the Colorado Rockies or the Chicago White Sox step onto the field in 2025 in a way that suggests competitive equity? The players on those teams — until proven otherwise — gave unadulterated efforts night in and night out, and it didn’t matter much, because the decisions being made above them had already rigged the game.
After all, sometimes the cheaters win by accident. One incident outlined in the indictment against Clase described a May appearance against the Dodgers in which he spiked his first pitch to Andy Pagés, a slider in the dirt a foot in front of home plate. Pagés swung anyway, as hitters are wont to do, leading to a grim text message exchange of sad face emojis between Clase and an alleged conspirator after the game.
A day after the indictments, MLB announced a new policy “in collaboration with Major Sportsbook Partners” that would cap single-pitch prop bets at $200 each while also excluding such bets from inclusion in parlays. In a press release co-signed by FanDuel president Christian Genetski and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, MLB noted that this policy accounts for “more than 98%” of the betting market in the United States.
So all that’s left is to assume that no one engaged in nefarious wagering practices would ever seek out the remaining offshore books, which are simultaneously far less likely to employ the kinds of integrated fraud protections that the major companies rely on to keep the appearance of the betting markets being on the up and up. If there’s any silver lining in this aggressively dark story — one that follows a trend from similar horrors out of the NBA — it’s that the books stopped it.
The indictment alleges that Clase roped Ortiz into the scheme in June 2025; by the next month, both were placed on administrative leave. The indictment also claims, though, that Clase had been a vehicle for unscrupulous bettors since as far back as 2023, which blows a big hole in the theory that getting caught is unavoidable.
If players were following the lesson of owners, they would simply need to work the game out loud and unrepentantly. They might even be praised for their ingenuity, or perhaps pitied in the face of an unfair system that left them no choice but to not try their best once in a while.
That’s not how it works, though. If there’s an American tradition more deeply rooted than baseball, it’s that malfeasance on the executive level is never viewed the same way as malfeasance on the individual level. Of course, being able to recognize that dynamic would likely have precluded the scheme in the first place.
There’s always somewhere else to make a buck.
