Photo: Nick Cammett/Diamond Images/Getty Images

On June 27, I was watching my beloved St. Louis Cardinals play the Cleveland Guardians on Apple TV, a streaming platform I pay 13 bucks a month for, in large part so I can watch baseball games on Friday nights. The Cardinals were off to a surprisingly strong start to the season, and I remember this game specifically because actor J.K. Simmons was visiting the broadcast booth during the third inning and had thrown out the first pitch.

Make sure to watch the first pitch of that inning. Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz came into the game with a 4.30 ERA, fresh off his best start of the season (a ten-strikeout, six-inning shutout performance against the Oakland A’s), and he’d shut down the Cardinals for the first two innings. But then he threw a pitch that bounced roughly ten feet in front of the plate — a pitch so cartoonishly incompetent that Cardinals batter Pedro Pages even looked out at Ortiz as if to say, “What the hell was that?”

Two pitches later, Pages — largely because he had a 2-0 count and was able to sit on a fastball — hit a home run over the left-field wall. Simmons interrupted the interview to yell “Oh!” Alone in my family room, I jumped up and cheered. My Cardinals were up 1-0.

And it turns out it was all bullshit. It turns out that Ortiz earned $7,000 for throwing that pitch, according to authorities, coordinating with gamblers who had wagered $18,000 that Ortiz’s first pitch would be either a ball or a hit by pitch.

On Sunday, Ortiz and his teammate Emmanuel Clase were indicted on federal charges related to illegal sports betting. Ortiz was arrested in Boston on Sunday, Clase is currently out of the country, and both have been suspended by Major League Baseball since July pending an investigation. It is unquestionably the biggest baseball-gambling scandal since Pete Rose bet on his own team while manager of the Cincinnati Reds, leading to his lifelong ban from baseball. (Which was lifted by the MLB commissioner in May, a month before the Ortiz pitch, reportedly at the request of President Trump.)

That start against the Cardinals in June was the last of the season, and probably of his career, for Ortiz; Clase was suspended a month later. According to the indictment, this was going on as early as the 2025 season. In April, Clase was talking to “an associate” in the stands of a game he was pitching in — despite a ban on players using cell phones during games for this exact reason — and allegedly agreed to throw a certain pitch “under 97.95 mph.” A mere four minutes later, he won that associate and bettors he’d clued in $11,000. The scheme continued throughout the season. The Athletic describes the typical plan:

The pattern they deployed involved Clase relaying the pitch he would throw and whether it would land in the strike zone. The go-to combination? A slider that bounces in the dirt. Clase’s cutter routinely clocked in at 99-100 mph. His slider registered about 91 mph. So, armed with the knowledge that Clase would try to throw a slider for a ball, bettors would allegedly wager on both the velocity of the pitch and the result of it. Over the course of two-plus years, bettors placed more than 100 straight bets and parlays on Clase’s offerings.

At one point — in fact, the day of that very J.K. Simmons game in June — Clase allegedly even put down the money himself, withdrawing $50,000 from his bank that morning and giving $15,000 to a bettor he’d provided with tickets to the game. The bettor then bet on that Ortiz pitch to Pages — and won, of course.

Many have questioned why Clase and Ortiz — two men who have made millions of dollars playing baseball, with Clase just signing a five-year, $20 million deal with the Guardians in 2022, a deal widely considered under market — would risk their careers to make such small wagers. The answer to this is likely twofold. First, both pitchers come from the Dominican Republic, a notoriously poor country, and seem to have thought of their bets as a way to help out family back home; Clase, at one point, directs a bettor to “send some” of the winnings “to DR.” The other reason is simpler: Why would anyone involved in sports right now see anything involving gambling — which is pasted across every broadcast, every stadium, even teams’ uniforms, in every American sport right now — as illicit at all? After all, you can do it from right there inside the stadium. When you read the indictment, it’s clear that Clase and his associates only barely hid their activities; when you are taking $50,000 out of a bank account in the morning and handing it to someone (whom you just gave tickets to) so that he can make a bet on a pitch your associate will make later that evening, you are not acting like someone truly terrified they may be caught.

Defenders of betting, who say these scandals are minor, tend to make three primary arguments:

(1) The bad guys inevitably keep getting caught, which will discourage future bad actors from doing the same thing. This is belied, of course, by the fact that this keeps happening.

(2) These are not bets that actually affect the outcome of the games, that they’re just small micro-betting parlays — a pitch in the dirt here, a missed free throw there. The Ortiz pitch, of course, directly contradicts this; Pages hit a homer in large part because of that first pitch, and the Cardinals ended up scoring three runs that inning in a game they won 5-0. And this also ignores that, of course, as gambling debts accrue — as they did with the NBA betting scandal, in which Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups lost so much money gambling he was immediately set upon by mobsters looking to take advantage — it makes these players more and more vulnerable.

(3) Most people think sports are rigged anyway! I’ll confess this was a new one, foisted upon us by New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang last week, most recently seen arguing that Stephen A. Smith is an actual feasible candidate for president. Kang decried “people who write and talk about sports for a living” being “more likely to freak out” about gambling because they “like to wax rhapsodic about American innocence,” a straw-man argument — when is the last time you read anything that waxes rhapsodic about “American innocence,” let alone in the sports section? — that featured this truly deranged sentence:

Most fans, in my experience, either assume the games have always been fixed or don’t really care either way.

This is only true if Kang exclusively hangs out with degenerate gamblers, which I suppose is possible; he did used to work at Grantland. But the rest of us, while being fully aware of the limitations of “American innocence,” maybe would just like to be able to watch our games without having to constantly worry that someone is purposely throwing them for money. And incidents like the Ortiz and Clase indictments are reminders that these things are real, that they do affect games, that an entire $100 billion sports industry does require fans to trust the sport they are watching. The entire thing collapses without it. How could it not?

The point is: The Clase-Ortiz scandal is mammoth because it is so banal and pedestrian — millionaire athletes being so blasé about throwing bad pitches and getting their buddies paid is exactly the sort of thing that’s so terrifying about this. There was no genius involved, no real plan. They just thought they could do it and it would be fine. Looking around — at stadiums, at broadcasts, at uniforms, at the entire structure of sports — why wouldn’t they think that? Why would they think there is anything wrong with what they were doing at all?

Related

The NBA Is Not Innocent in the Gambling Scandal

From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed