Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz Face Federal Indictment

Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz have been on non-disciplinary paid leave since July, as Major League Baseball investigated the two men’s involvement in a prop betting scandal. The allegation was that Ortiz had intentionally thrown at least two pitches outside the strike zone after tipping off bettors that he would do so. Armed with this advance knowledge, Ortiz’s confederates had profited in extremely specific prop bet markets.

Clase soon joined Ortiz on the sidelines, though the specifics of his supposed wrongdoing were not made public at the time. Both pitchers spent Cleveland’s terrific stretch run, and its playoff series against Detroit, in limbo.

Well, the other shoe dropped on Sunday, and what a shoe it is. The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York indicted the two pitchers on four counts: wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery, and money laundering conspiracy. The first three counts come with a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment, each. Money laundering conspiracy has a five-year maximum. Ortiz was arrested in Boston on Sunday morning, and his attorney maintained his client’s innocence in advance of a scheduled Monday court appearance. Clase is not in custody as of this writing.

The 23-page filing details how Clase and Ortiz “agreed in advance with their co-conspirators to throw specific types and speeds of pitches, and their co-conspirators used that inside information to place wagers on those pitches. In some instances, the defendants received bribes and kickback payments—funneled through third parties—in exchange for rigging pitches. Through this scheme, the defendants defrauded betting platforms, deprived Major League Baseball and the Cleveland Guardians of their honest services, illegally enriched themselves and their co-conspirators, misled the public, and betrayed America’s pastime.”

And here I thought fraud was America’s pastime now. Good to know the government is still sticking up for baseball.

I ordinarily wouldn’t quote that extensively from a legal document — especially when the passage in question is mostly rhetoric. But it is helpful to remember that this isn’t a couple of Robin Hood types siphoning a few bucks from a casino. This is a breach of public trust and a blow to Major League Baseball’s credibility.

After that florid introduction, the government lawyers detail a pattern in which the two unnamed bettors, and other unnamed accomplices, allegedly wagered on the velocity and location of a single pitch. Usually, according to the indictment, they took the under on the pitch’s velocity and bet that it would either be a ball or hit the batter. Chase or Ortiz would then choose to throw a slider, and bounce it.

The indictment mentions the two pitches from Ortiz, but the government has identified Clase as the original string-puller. According to the U.S. Attorney, he allegedly started rigging these prop bets as early as May 2023 — potentially more than 100 of them in total. In 2025, the indictment states, Clase started receiving kickbacks from the gamblers, and then in June, he roped Ortiz into the scheme. By this point, “the scheme” also allegedly included Clase sending the two bettors money to wager for him, which is also a violation of MLB rules.

According to the U.S. Attorney, the bettors won about $60,000 betting on Ortiz this past season, and some $400,000 betting on Clase over the past three seasons put together. They allegedly wagered incrementally, sometimes on the pitch alone, other times using it as a multiplier in a parlay, with each take coming in the tens of thousands of dollars. The kickbacks to Clase and Ortiz were modest, usually $10,000 or less.

SABR editorial director and 1919 White Sox expert Jacob Pomrenke pointed out that one set of alleged payments to Ortiz and Clase matched, to the dollar, what Shoeless Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams got from gamblers to throw the World Series. Wage stagnation seems to have hit match fixers as hard as anyone.

Of course, bribery and wire fraud can be an unpredictable business. It seems pretty safe to bet on a pitch being a ball when you know what the pitcher is throwing in advance, but that’s not always the case. On May 28, 2025, the two bettors allegedly put down roughly $4,000 on Clase throwing his first pitch for a ball in a game against the Dodgers. Here’s the pitch:

The U.S. Attorney highlighted eight intentional balls Clase allegedly threw on behalf of an individual bettor as part of parlay bets; this was the only one that got chased. Clase and “Bettor-1” took the defeat in stride. From the indictment:

Approximately 20 minutes after Bettor-1 lost the wager on May 28, 2025, Bettor-1 sent a text message to [Clase]—a .gif image of a man hanging himself with toilet paper. Even though the Cleveland Guardians won the game, approximately 10 minutes later, Clase responded to Bettor-1 with a .gif image of a sad puppy dog face.

In addition to building a legal case, the indictment outlines alleged breaches to MLB player rules. The big one is obviously Rule 21, the prohibition against betting on games in which the player has a duty to perform. It also mentions, repeatedly, the prohibition on players using cellphones during games, with limited exceptions for time-sensitive personal use.

The in-game cellphone use rule pops up every few years, usually as a curiosity. Rodolfo Castro’s iPhone came flying out of his pocket on the basepaths during a 2022 game. You might remember Pablo Sandoval getting in trouble with the Red Sox for liking a woman’s Instagram posts while using the clubhouse toilet during a game. Scrolling thirst traps on the john during work hours might not be a crime, but it violates company policy.

But these rules exist for a reason; the Red Sox got caught using an Apple Watch to transmit stolen signs to the dugout back in 2017, a scandal that was later overshadowed by subsequent events.

And Clase was apparently texting and calling his gambling buddies from the Guardians clubhouse, passing along inside info while the game was in progress, sometimes minutes before he was due to take the field. Enforcement of the no-cellphones rule is the responsibility of the league’s Game-Day Compliance Monitors (GCMs), who have full access to team areas. Apparently they can’t be everywhere.

The government seems to have quite a bit of documentation here: Text messages, betting records, cellphone records, in-person meetings, records of payments among the various conspirators. Nevertheless, there is, and should be, a wide gulf between an indictment and a conviction.

But if there’s an innocent explanation for all this, I’d love to hear it, because the evidence presented in the indictment looks damning. Whether it’s enough to stick in court, I don’t know. I am, to my parents’ everlasting disappointment, not an attorney. I don’t think anyone ought to go to jail for up to 65 years for defrauding sportsbooks of less than half a million dollars, but the criminal repercussions aren’t the most important part of this case anyway.

Major League Baseball is not bound by the same standard of proof as the federal government. The former is a corporation that’s interested in protecting its profits and reputation; the latter is imbued by the consent of the people with the legitimate use of force. We know this because MLB suspends and bans players for all kinds of stuff that slips through the cracks of the legal system: PEDs, on-field fights, even things as trivial as spitballs and corked bats.

MLB exerts the right to punish employees, including players, for sins against the sport. Barring some shocking revelation that causes the evidence chain presented in the indictment to collapse, only one punishment fits: Lifetime banishment from organized baseball.

I’ve been making this case every time a new gambling scandal pops up. Here’s what I wrote when Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter and confidant Ippei Mizuhara was preparing to plead guilty to bank fraud in 2024:

In order for competitive sports to work as an entertainment enterprise, it has to not only be irreproachably legitimate, but look irreproachably legitimate. And if the Mizuhara affair proved anything, it’s that a sizable percentage of baseball fans are willing to call the probity of the sport into question with little evidence.

A match-fixing scandal, more than any number of offenses that are more odious by any reasonable moral standard, has the capacity to threaten the sport existentially. For that reason, if I were in charge, I’d be downright puritanical in writing the rules and draconian in enforcing them. Nobody who draws a paycheck from MLB or its clubs would be allowed to bet on sports, period. Nobody who has regular access to players and managers — journalists, doctors, agents, family members — would be allowed to bet on baseball, period. Violation of those rules would come with a significant suspension, up to a lifetime ban.

And what I wrote two months later, when Tucupita Marcano received a lifetime ban and four other players were suspended for a year for betting on baseball:

There are two big red-letter no-nos if you work for MLB or a team: You can’t bet on baseball, and you can’t wager with unlicensed bookmakers. Betting on other sports through legal means is in bounds. Whether this position is morally consistent or socially healthy is entirely beside the point. These are the rules, and if players (or coaches or trainers or whoever) break them, the entire credibility of the sport crumbles rapidly.

By banning players for betting on baseball, MLB is not contradicting its own position on gambling — it’s merely enforcing a boundary that’s necessary to protect the welfare of the sport and its players. I don’t remember anyone having trouble holding both of these ideas in their heads at the same time when beer companies sponsored NASCAR teams. We could all see the difference between enjoying a can of Miller Lite in the grandstands and chugging a six-pack before hopping in the car to do 200 mph at Talladega. Gambling is no different.

And when the Clase news broke this past July:

Like it or not, the sports betting genie is out of the bottle now, and it’d take some naïveté to believe that said genie wasn’t already at least partially liberated before legal gambling, or even daily fantasy. Maintaining the integrity of the game — more specifically, public belief in the integrity of the game — is of existential importance. This much MLB has known since before there was an MLB as we know it.

That means throwing the book at anyone who steps out of line. Whether they’re actually throwing games or not, whether they thought what they were doing was actually wrong or not, whether they’re a perpetual Triple-A guy or a Cy Young finalist. The people who run the league, for all their multitude of failings on this and other issues, understand this. I am dumbfounded that there are players out there who haven’t learned this lesson yet.

MLB can’t countenance this kind of behavior — players rigging bets, and arranging to do so from the ballpark during games — and survive. Commissioner Rob Manfred, for all his other faults and blind spots, understands this.

Every time something like this happens, we go through a cycle of discourse about how legalizing sports gambling has been bad for society at large, and how MLB has invited the vampire into its house by partnering with legal bookmakers.

At the time, I was ambivalent about the impact of Murphy v. NCAA, the Supreme Court decision that led to the widespread legalization of sports betting. To this day, I’m not dogmatic about gambling in either direction. I don’t gamble myself, and I think people who are really into it can be a little annoying, but I don’t think it should be illegal. It’s like polyamory, or Lin-Manuel Miranda.

With the benefit of seven years of hindsight, I am willing to admit that I was naïve about the extent to which gambling would come to pervade the sports world, and the negative externalities that would come with it.

But I’m not convinced that MLB’s decision to partner with legal sportsbooks is the original sin here. The Mizuhara Incident came about through illegal bookies. So did the Black Sox scandal, Pete Rose, Hal Chase, and every sports gambling fiasco from the invention of the ball to 2018. Legal gambling certainly enabled Clase and Ortiz, and Marcano, and disgraced Alabama coach Brad Bohanon, but it also brought in oversight and safeguards that allowed the would-be match fixers to be caught. (And not to lean too far into the being-from-New Jersey stereotype, but I knew people growing up who worked for illegal bookies. I’ll just say this: FanDuel doesn’t send people to your house to break your legs when you lose.)

In any case, that particular horse is not going back in the barn. If you think sports gambling is antisocial and predatory and shouldn’t be allowed, that’s a totally defensible position. I’d use the same words to describe golf, TSA Pre-Check, and the GMC Yukon Denali, all things that have about the same chance of federal prohibition as sports betting for the foreseeable future.

MLB is never going to roll back its gambling partnerships out of a sense of social responsibility. So I’d like to make a case based on self-interest.

Picture the kind of person who’d wager on the outcome of a game, or place a bet on a team to win its division months down the line. That seems in line with the vision online casinos sell: Gambling as an emotional additive to the sports-watching experience.

Now picture someone betting on whether the first pitch of the ninth inning of a May Dodgers-Guardians game is going to be a ball or a strike. In my July column, I compared it to pegging a million-dollar parlay to the opening tip-off in Uncut Gems. Anyone who’d put a nickel into that kind of prop bet market is either an addict, an idiot, or a crook. Maybe more than one.

Corruption like this happens in smaller, easy-to-influence markets like the one Clase, Ortiz, and their partners allegedly found. It’s what happened in the Alabama case, where two suspicious wagers at the Great American Ball Park’s BetMGM sportsbook, along with some Coen Brothers-y hijinks by the man placing said bets, set off alarms with regulators. (The game itself was played in Baton Rouge; Paul Skenes was the winning pitcher.) It’s also what happened in the landmark tennis match-fixing case I cited when Clase was first implicated.

So my solution is this: As a matter of self-preservation, both from public outrage and from rampant match-fixing issues, MLB should set limits on how specific its gambling partners can make prop bets. Any casino or online bookie that offers single-pitch prop bets can’t advertise in MLB ballparks or on MLB broadcasts. Maybe single-game player props need to come off the board, too; the NBA is currently having a nightmare of a time with those.

If match fixers are allowed to hang around; if MLB continues to embrace, for short-term profit, the means by which its credibility is being undermined; then the whole house of cards will eventually collapse. Even one pitch at a time, one five-figure bet at a time, credibility lost is not easily regained. And without credibility, not only will nobody want to watch professional baseball, nobody will want to bet on it either.