The baseball world is still reeling after Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted on charges related to their alleged participation in a gambling scheme. No, federal prosecutors don't claim that any of Clase and Ortiz's activity actually affected the outcomes of games, and no, neither pitcher ever bet on their team to lose. But if you don't think the integrity of the sport is at stake here — a confidence in good-faith competition that lies at the foundation of every league in the country — think again.
The pitchers may not have thrown games, but they intentionally threw the result of over 100 pitches dating back to the 2023 season. The fact that none of those pitches wound up costing Cleveland a win, and plunging MLB into a full-on crisis, is little more than sheer luck. And the Rob Manfred can't afford to sit around and wait for that luck to run out.
So it's no surprise that, on Monday, Manfred announced that the league had reached an agreement with major sportsbooks to place a $200 limit on pitch-level microbets while also excluding those bets from being included in parlays. Which is certainly a step in the right direction, given just how easily gamed those wagers are and how many of them there are in a given game. But Manfred is kidding himself if he thinks this solves the problem.
Because make no mistake: This problem isn't going away, and there's every chance that the next scandal will be something far worse. Legalized and mobilized sports gambling has become so pervasive that it demands not just a response for preemptive action. In the past Manfred has had no problem making bold moves when he identified a problem that needed to be solved; just look at how resoundingly he altered the pace of a sport that had existed one way for over a century. He needs to adopt that mindset again now — but what will it take to put this incident behind him and convince the public that something like it will never happen again?
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There is a silver lining to Emmanuel Clase, Luis Ortiz indictments
It is worth reiterating. These stories are no doubt concerning, and do real and lasting damage to the leagues (not to mention the players) involved. But in a way, the fact that we hear about them at all is a good thing: It means that enforcement mechanisms are working and this behavior is being caught and punished rather than allowed to continue under the radar. That was always the promise of legalizing sports betting, that bring regulatory power to bear would actually decrease illicit behavior because books and the leagues themselves would be empowered to root out bad actors.
And that's certainly true, at least to some extent. But if the Clase/Ortiz scandal tells us anything, it's that gambling innovation comes too rapidly to stay one step ahead of, a game of whack-a-mole that leagues, books and law enforcement are destined to lose. There will always be some people trying to make a bit of extra cash, and there will always be new ways for books to make it easier to gamble than ever before.
That is, unless Manfred has it in him to try and cut this problem out at the root.
Banning prop bets is MLB's only path foward
Really, the fact that you can even place a wager on whether the next pitch in a given at-bat will be a strike or a ball is absurd on its face. It's one thing to allow prop bets based on pure chance in harmless ways, like we see with the Super Bowl every year. But it's quite another to do so in ways that could potentially be brought to bear on the outcome of a game, like we saw in Cleveland. The upside simply does not outweigh the downside.
And while you can try to nibble around the edges, the only way to really make sure this neer happens again is to ban individual prop bets. Not just those based on individual pitches — all of them. Keep team-level wagers around if you want, like total runs scored in a game, but as long as there are bets tied exclusively to one player's performance, you've created a weak point that's just dying to be exploited.
At this point, there's no use in debating whether sports leagues were right to get into bed with books to begin with; that ship has long since sailed, and this is the world in which we live now. But even while the checks cash, Manfred and his counterparts around the sports universe have to understand just how fine a needle they're trying to thread here. The money is great for now, but it won't much matter if things escalate to a point in which the average fan no longer trusts that they're product they're watching or spending money on is legitimate. And while Clase and Ortiz were eventually caught, enforcement will always be trying to play catchup.