Betting Scandal Explodes: Two Guardians Charged by Feds

Pitches for sale. Feds charged two guardians in alleged betting rig scheme. According to the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Claes and Louis Ortiz have been indicted for allegedly coordinating specific pitch speeds and bull or strike outcomes to benefit betters. Prosecutors say co conspirators won at least $450,000. Individual props tied to single pitches on on dates spanning 2023 to 2025. Major League Baseball says it alerted federal law enforcement and is cooperating. Both players were previously placed on leave. Ortiz lawyer calls the case weak and circumstantial and both players are presumed innocent scores. The bigger story is structural prop markets now price actions as granular as a single pitch, creating a tempting target for anyone willing to trade integrity for cash. If the charges hold, it's not point shaving. It's pitch by pitch shaving. This is a new thing, and it lands as baseball's commercial ties to gamble data, sponsorships and on site books are deeper than ever. Okay, what's the real message here? It's not just Major League Baseball, it's all Major League Sports are corrupted. They are now rotten to the core because gambling money is filtrating every, every inch of it. And the league owners who think, well, we deserve to have billions and we're going to keep everything else clean and tidy over here are fooling themselves. This problem is going to get worse and worse and worse until it is outlawed completely. Let's dig a little deeper here. Now, I'm not a sports better, to my knowledge. I've never bet on a single game in my life. And I got to have no regrets about, you know, much money I've lost gambling on sports. $0. When I do watch sports, call me quaint, call me trite, call me old fashioned, I want to actually watch the sport and enjoy the craftsmanship of the players, the athleticism, the competition, and the thrill and drama of who's going to win, who's going to lose. I thought that was enough, but apparently it's not. We live in a culture where people feel like, unless I get that adrenaline rush of, you know, putting $2,000 on the big game, you know, it's really ruining a lot of things. And at some point you got to ask yourself if you're allowed to bet on every single pitch and make money on it, and if the team owners can get their big percentage of deals from all these gambling companies and the leagues themselves can make billions of dollars and you're a player and maybe you only get in occasionally, you're a relief pitcher and you can look at the data. Let's say you've been in the league five years. You're thinking, well, statistically speaking, I got to be about a year and a half left, and I'm never going to make any more money. It's obviously going to be extraordinarily tempting to say, how can I make a little extra money? Everyone else is getting rich. I'm about to become unemployed, and I'm not going to throw the game. I'm not going to intentionally walk someone or strike out. But hey, if I just tell people in advance, my third pitch of the night is going to be a fastball, nobody's really hurt, right? Well, that's where it starts. It's a corrosive effect. And let's give credit where credit's due. Major League sports in America, for most of the history of Major League Sports, treated gambling as if it were a sickness, as something to be avoided, as something shameful. Major League Baseball banned Pete Rose for life. You know, Pete Rose, were to come around today, he'd probably be, you know, given his own team and be treated like a hero. He's no longer with us. So again, there's DraftKings, there's FanDuel, there's Caesars. And full disclosure, I've worked with Caesars before doing media training. There's BetMGM. There's so many gambling companies out there, and let's face it's gambling. They call it gaming. It's gambling. They're all out there. They're all getting people hooked on this adrenaline rush of easy money. Wow. You can make money. You and your buddy sitting around watching the game, and come Monday morning, you're $2,000 richer than you were Friday night. What could be better? Except really what happens in the long run for pretty much anyone? These teams are sponsored. They're sponsored by it. They're putting their stamp of approval. It's not simply that it's legal and we can do nothing about it. You've got Major League Baseball and all the major leagues giving their stamp of approval, the ads every two seconds during a game. Gambling's good. Gambling is good. Gamble, you're going to get rich. You're going to get gamble, gamble, gamble. Players are a part of that milieu. They are a part of this environment, this zeitgeist that says everybody should be gambling every second of the day on whether someone's going to sneeze the right way, whether My temperature is 98.6 or 98.2, whether it's going to rain in five minutes. We have created a culture where it's now considered, frankly, especially if you're a young man, odd not to gamble on everything all the time. Now let's look at some of the money is roughly $150 billion a year on legal betting across all sports. 10 billion to 14 billion in operator revenue range. Baseball is getting billions of dollars of this. They're getting their fair share, even niche props. And if you don't know what that term is, I didn't either. But that's where you can, you can bet on, I guess it's based on the word proposition of okay, well this pitcher pass pitch a fastball or a curveball, the next pitch. You can make singular bets like that. Will this batter swing this time or not? You can make bets like that and you can make, make $100,000 on that. You can also lose your house. You can lose everything. So Major League Baseball is looking at lifetime bans and suspensions. But if they're looking for a real culprit, they need to look in the mirror. This idea that you can be a billionaire sports team owner, get all these endorsement deals, revenue slices, partnerships from all of these gambling companies, and you can be a league owner and get all the billions of dollars of revenue and then tell some player who thinks, I've got maybe 18 months left in my career, oh no, you can't be a part of this. We get to all the money, but you can't. I understand a legal case can be made, but I think this is the tip of the ice. Especially when we see a whole culture of corruption in embraced in Washington D.C. these days. There's a growing attitude in our culture that says I'm taking whatever I can anyway. To heck with not only ethics, but to heck with the law. We're seeing it from the top down. The only thing that surprises me is we're not actually seeing players brag about it. Now obviously they're not because they are afraid of being punished by their teams, being punished by legal authorities. But can it be that far away from a player essentially starting their own club? And for $10,000 a year, you can be a part of. Let's just say hypothetically, I'm a Major league baseball player. I'm a slugger, I hit home runs and I bat.292 a year. I'm already making $20 million a year. I'm going to start my own club. And for $10,000. Month. Let's just make it a month. You get a briefing from me, I'm going to have a private zoom meeting where I tell everyone how I'm feeling, whether I had a good night's sleep. I'm going to do this the morning of every game. I'm going to tell you how I'm sleeping, how I'm feeling, my own predictions for the game. Well, you can imagine how many betters would say that's irresistible. And now instead of that player making 20 million a year, maybe they're making 40 million a year. Sound far fetched, yes. Legal, right now, no. But the way we see norms continually eroding in our society at every aspect of culture, it would not surprise me one bit.