Sports gambling scandals have not been infrequent occurrences in the United States. Virtually every sport and league has been at one time been forced to root out and overcome some form of corruption that threatened to permanently undermine faith in its play.
But there’s always been something about a baseball scandal that tugs harder at the sentimentality of the nation. When eight members of the Chicago White Sox were found to have conspired to throw the 1919 World Series at the behest of gamblers, a nation grieved the soul of what then in truth was the national pastime.
A sizable faction of baseball fans defend Pete Rose despite the revelations of the Dowd Report, despite the fact that this eventual admission that he bet on baseball was begrudging, because he didn’t bet on the Reds to lose while managing them. His death in 2024, in the ever-expanding era of legal sportsbooks as partners and revenue stream for Major League Baseball clubs, has amplified calls for him to be elected posthumously to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
And now come Emmanuel Clase and Luis L. Ortiz, former Cleveland Guardians teammates who were in October indicted on charges of manipulating microbets to profit gamblers and themselves — for around $12,000 — almost certainly ending their careers and forcing a fan base to again question if what they have poured their emotions and dollars into was a sham.
In a time when sports betting scandals, particularly in men’s basketball, have come at a rapid pace, the Guardians incident — perhaps because of the threat of more revelations, perhaps because it rekindles past disappointments — has taken its unfortunate place on the mantel of gambling infamy in the U.S.
InGame spoke with Jacob Pomrenke, the chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, on how this latest controversy compares with MLB’s previous painful gambling episodes.
“This is definitely a self-created problem. People have been betting on these sorts of things, whether the next at-bat was a hit or an out, whether the next pitch was a strike or a ball, ever since baseball began. So you’re not going to totally curb that activity.
Jacob Pomrenke
The difference today is that the opportunities are just endless.”
How does this compare to the 1919 White Sox and Pete Rose scandals?
Pomrenke: The important thing to know about this scandal is that it kind of opens up new terrain for baseball. This is now in the area of spot-fixing.
And this is something that we’ve been talking about for years now. There have been other sports, especially internationally, that have dealt with spot-fixing scandals, but baseball has avoided that for a number of years.
And now we’re entering a new era where any pitch could be suspect. Any plate appearance could be suspect. And I think that’s something that makes this one a little bit different.
Have sportsbooks gone far enough in limiting these pitch markets to $200?
Pomrenke: I think this is just a kind of a Band-Aid over the situation. The reality is, baseball has so many situations where these types of microbets can be made on individual pitches or individual events.
The reality is, there’s just too many profit opportunities out there for people to make money. This is a situation where if you have a player who is going to accept a bribe, throw a pitch in the dirt – which is something that happens dozens of times every single game – this is the type of situation that Major League Baseball and its partners need to be very concerned about, because we don’t know what can happen from here.
This always has been kind of a red line for players, not to take bribes for this sort of thing. But it’s very, very difficult to observe in the moment that something is happening, whether a player makes an error or a throws a pitch in the dirt. It’s hard to tell whether they’re actually trying their best or not.
Is this a modern problem that baseball was ill-prepared to police?
Pomrenke: For a hundred years, they didn’t really have this problem. So this is definitely a self-created problem. People have been betting on these sorts of things, whether the next at-bat was a hit or an out, whether the next pitch was a strike or a ball, ever since baseball began. So you’re not going to totally curb that activity.
The difference today is that the opportunities are just endless. You can pick up your phone and bet on that next pitch within five seconds. So, there’s just more opportunities.
Once sports betting became legal, we’ve been talking about this situation for a long time that the opportunities were out there for a scandal like this to happen.
What do you say to those who defend Clase and Ortiz because they supposedly didn’t try to throw games, just manipulate microbets?
Pomrenke: These are the same arguments that were being made a hundred years ago about players like Hal Chase, who was also betting on his own team. He had the argument that Pete Rose made, which was “I always bet on my team to win.”
Clase was pitching very, very well, even during what has been alleged for three seasons of potentially throwing balls in the dirt and making some extra money that way.
There are going to be people who are going to defend that and say, “What matters is the wins and losses. What matters is his overall performance,” which was tremendous.
But this still threatens the integrity of the game and you can’t have that. Fans and everybody involved in the game have to believe that what is happening on the field is legit.
And they have to believe that what is happening on the field is everybody trying their best. I think that’s something that we can’t really tolerate, that a player that is going to essentially take a bribe to do one thing or the other.
That’s something that Major League Baseball cannot abide by.
Isn’t the (alleged) arrogance of it all fascinating?
Pomrenke: This is the type of thing where it works until it doesn’t.
As the stakes get higher in a situation like this, as maybe the dollar amounts get higher on how much he’s getting paid, allegedly, to throw these pitches [gets higher], you never know how that is going to affect you mentally and emotionally.
I mean, this is what makes these athletes so great. And this is why we watch sports, is to see them test their limits, to see them perform at their best. And again, this is the threat to the game’s integrity, if some of these elite athletes start saying, “Well, I need to find another test.” Maybe that test is, “How many times can I get away with this situation?”
That’s not great. And what turns fans away eventually is, “Can we trust what we’re seeing on the field?”
This is the line Major League Baseball really has to enforce.
Do you think any Guardians will ever admit if they were suspicious?
Pomrenke: No, I don’t think so. I think the clubhouse code is going to stay pretty strong here. The reality is, what we’ve seen with both performance-enhancing drugs and other gambling and game-fixing scandals over the last hundred plus-years is that you can have all the suspicions you want, but unless they say, “Hey, this is what we’re doing,” you’re never going to know 100%, because there’s too many things in baseball that can go wrong on the field.
A guy can slip.
A guy can swing at a ball in the dirt.
There’s so many things that can go wrong. You can groove every pitch down the middle all you want, and you can get every batter out because they just happen to pop it up, even though you’re trying to lose. There’s just so many opportunities out there for failure to happen that I don’t think anyone on the outside can tell.
How cynical do you think fans have become because of the Guardians scandal?
Pomrenke: I don’t think it’s quite to the level of the Black Sox, the faith of 50 million people, but the language is very similar after the 1919 World Series and baseball, for whatever reason, has always held this kind of higher moral standard than other sports.
We’ve seen scandals in football and basketball and other sports, and they don’t quite rise to the level, for whatever reason, in the public imagination as a baseball scandal does.
We saw that with Shohei Ohtani and his interpreter and that scandal. It gets more attention. It gets more outrage.
People hold baseball to a higher standard, and they have for a hundred plus-years. They probably always will. I mean, it’s part of the fabric of American society. It’s always been known as the national pastime, whether it is or not.
How will this be remembered?
Pomrenke: We’ve got to wait, to see what else is going to come out because, the reality is, every sport is dealing with this right now. Not only do we have federal investigations going on, but we have internal investigations as well.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this gets handled, what comes out of this federal indictment, but also whatever Major League Baseball does, as well. This is an area where all the leagues have a lot at stake because, again, once you lose that credibility for what’s happening on the field, on the court, it’s very, very hard to rebuild that reputation, rebuild that credibility in fans’ eyes.
We’ve got to see how extensive this is. Is this limited to two pitchers? Major League Baseball is absolutely going to say, “Well, this is it. These guys are out and the problem is over.”
But as we’ve seen with other scandals, that’s never true. There’s always more happening. Again, there’s too many opportunities.
I fully expect that there will be more news and more scandals coming out. I do think it’s kind of inevitable at this point.
Do sports betting partnerships suggest to players that this is OK?
Pomrenke: Absolutely.
It’s a universal, human thing. We’re in a situation, really, everywhere in the world right now where a lot of people are getting rich off certain activities, and you look around, and the corruption is much higher, in a lot of different ways.
That’s something that was true in the Black Sox era as well. Government corruption was at an all-time high at the time. People were looking around, like, “Hey, where’s my cut?”
Obviously, the world has changed in many, many ways.
But humans don’t change and the way they react to situations doesn’t change.
