In 1919, Shoeless Joe Jackson was a top-10 position player in baseball. He led his White Sox to the World Series, where he hit .375/.394/.563 over eight games against the Cincinnati Reds and topped the other hitters in win probability added and championship win probability added. No one who appeared in more than three games of that series had a higher wRC+ than Jackson’s 164. On the surface, the stats seemed to support what Jackson claimed in September 1920, as he testified before a grand injury that was seeking to indict dirty Sox players for throwing the series: “I tried to win all the time.”
A deeper dive casts doubt on that idea. Almost all of Jackson’s production came in the games the White Sox—now known as the notorious Black Sox—were trying to win. In the others, he had a negative WPA, in addition to multiple suspect plays in the field. The only runs he produced in fixed contests came late in the last game, when Jackson batted with the Sox behind by scores of 5-0 and 10-1. Charles McDonald, the presiding judge for the grand jury inquiry, later testified under oath that Jackson—who confessed to accepting money to throw the series, before repeatedly changing his story in subsequent years—had admitted to him, before Jackson’s testimony, that “he had made no misplays that could be noticed by the ordinary person but that he did not play his best.”
Jackson initially copped to taking $5,000 of a promised $20,000 payment to throw the series. History rhymes: As it happens, $5k is the same amount promised in one instance to each of the two pitchers implicated in the next outcome-fixing scandal to envelop the sport, more than a century after MLB commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned Jackson and seven of his teammates from baseball. The successors to the Black Sox are the blackGuards.
From May of 2023 through late July of 2025, only one MLB reliever had a higher FanGraphs WAR than the Cleveland Guardians’ Emmanuel Clase, and no one came close to recording as many saves. Clase was an All-Star in 2023 and 2024, and in the latter season he recorded a 0.61 ERA, the third-lowest mark ever for a reliever with at least 50 innings pitched. He won MLB’s Reliever of the Year award, finished third in American League Cy Young voting, was listed on almost half of AL MVP ballots, and formed the backbone of what was, by win probability added, the best bullpen ever.
With results like those, it would seem safe to assume that Clase (to echo Jackson) “tried to win all the time.” Yet according to a case made by government investigators and prosecutors, Clase (to echo Judge McDonald) “did not play his best,” even though he, too, may have “made no misplays that could be noticed by the ordinary person.”
On Sunday, Clase, 27, and fellow Guardians pitcher Luis L. Ortiz, 26, were indicted for bribery and multiple counts of conspiracy in connection with a scheme to rig individual pitches. Clase and Ortiz are accused of colluding with two sports bettors to throw pitches that would make particular prop bets pay off, thereby enriching the bettors they tipped off by at least $450,000 over hundreds of bets (and also enriching themselves via kickbacks from the bettors). The two pitchers, who could (but almost certainly won’t) each face up to 65 years in prison—not to mention, more realistically, lifetime bans from baseball—had been placed on non-disciplinary paid leave in in July, when the investigation into their actions commenced. This weekend, the other shoe dropped, as sharply as their pitches did when money was allegedly riding on them to be balls.
The arrangement described in the indictment is fairly brazen. Clase is said to have started rigging pitches “in or around” May 2023, and he evidently continued to do so until being joined by Ortiz in June 2025. The two pitchers and their coconspirators seemingly took advantage of prop bets that allowed people to wager on whether a pitch would be a ball or a hit by pitch and/or whether it would be above or below a certain speed. Betting on sports is generally a losing endeavor, but not if you know what’s going to happen. And per the indictment, the bettors did, because Clase (and later, Ortiz) would agree beforehand to, say, throw a slider instead of a cutter when a wager called for a lower pitch speed or to throw a pitch way outside the strike zone when a wager called for a ball. (Say it ain’t low.) This often took place on the first pitch of an outing or inning, when the stakes are more predictable and lower leverage than they can become later on.
All involved seemingly left a substantial trail of calls, texts, audio messages, and wire transfers pointing to their misdeeds. One of the bettors reportedly visited Clase’s residence several times and attended games using tickets left by Clase. Most egregiously, Clase is said to have communicated with that bettor during games, including one occasion this past April when Clase texted with and talked to the bettor immediately before entering a game and rewarding a wager with a sub–98 mph pitch. (MLB rules forbid players from using cell phones during games, with “limited exceptions” that surely don’t include coordinating violations of the sport’s cardinal rule against gambling.) The indictment says that when Clase or Ortiz received payouts for their role, they pretended that the money was for purposes such as “repairs at the country house” or “payment for a horse.”
Even if the charges are accurate, the charging document leaves a lot unexplained, including how the scheme started, why Clase and Ortiz did it, and how they got caught (or, more importantly, why Clase didn’t get caught until this summer). If the two did what they’re accused of, though, then the indictment is dead-on in saying that the defendants—in roughly descending order of how much the typical baseball fan cares—“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.” Representatives for Clase and Ortiz issued statements in which they claimed that their clients are innocent and anticipating their days in court.
Videos of shady-looking pitches have been making the rounds since Ortiz and Clase were placed on leave and reports and rumors about a gambling scandal started circulating. The indictment includes screenshots of eight balls (six by Clase and two by Ortiz) that the duo are said to have thrown on purpose; in a usage of MLB.com’s Film Room that the league undoubtedly didn’t intend, I’ve compiled them in the reel below. Follow the bouncing balls!
Now that we know what Clase was charged with, the statistical indicators are apparent, and they’re even more glaring than in Jackson’s case. Actually, looking at the numbers now is a little like realizing too late that trash-can bangs were audible during the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme and that even before the Astros’ actions were public knowledge, opposing teams were taking longer to cycle through signs when facing them, in an attempt at counterintelligence. Taken individually, Clase’s wayward pitches seem like simple mistakes. Taken together, they paint a disturbing pattern.
The table below shows the percentage of pitches that Clase spiked—that is, threw in zones 37, 38, or 39 of what MLB defines as the “waste zone,” far below the plate—on 0-0 counts with no outs and none on (a decent proxy for the first pitch of the inning) and on non-0-0 counts with no outs and none on, from May 2023 through July 2025. It also displays the same breakdowns for the league as a whole. The charging document doesn’t specify whether Clase continued his reported pitch-fixing in the 2024 ALDS or ALCS; I’m including postseason play in both samples, although excluding it wouldn’t make much difference. (If you’re looking for evidence that Clase was rigging in October, too, check out the first pitch he threw in that ALCS, with a 7-0 lead: a 93 mph slider so low that it caused catcher Bo Naylor to fall over.)
Low Waste Pitches on First Pitches With Zero Outs and None On, 5/23-7/25
Clase spiked pitches more than twice as often on first pitches than he did on subsequent pitches. That’s the inverse of the overall pattern across the league; all pitchers combined spiked pitches less than half as often on first pitches than they did on subsequent pitches (which makes sense since pitchers tend to stay farther away from the zone when they’re ahead in the count and are more liable to break out bendy pitches in search of strikeouts).
Maybe that seems suggestive but not conclusive, considering the number of pitches involved: 14 out of 173 first pitches and 20 out of 511 subsequent pitches from Clase. Should we cue up the small sample size song? Hold on; it gets worse for Clase. The table below shows the highest percentages of spiked pitches on first pitches with no outs and none on from May ’23 through July ’25, among pitchers with at least 125 total pitches in those situations.
Percentage of Low Waste Pitches on First Pitches With Zero Outs and None On, 5/23-7/25
Even though that pitch-total threshold is set well below the number of first pitches Clase threw, which theoretically could have allowed a more extreme, smaller-sample performance to sneak onto the list, Clase led all qualifiers. But wait; the data isn’t done getting more incriminating for Clase. It’s one thing to spike a high percentage of pitches when you’re, say, Josiah Gray, who had the third-highest walk rate among pitchers with at least 150 innings pitched in 2023. It’s another thing to do it when you’re a control artist like Clase, who had the 10th-lowest walk rate among pitchers who threw at least 190 innings from 2023 through 2025. In this next and last table, then, we’ll compare pitchers’ spike rates on 0-0 pitches with no outs and none on to the same pitchers’ spike rates in the same situations on pitches after 0-0. If we set minimums of 125 total pitches for the former split and 410 for the latter, 251 pitchers threw enough pitches to qualify.
Ratio of Low Waste Pitches on 0-0 to After 0-0, Zero Outs and None On, 5/23-7/25
That table of 10 pitchers—which, by the way, includes Ortiz at the bottom—contains every one of the qualifying pitchers who spiked pitches at least as often after 0-0 as they did on 0-0. The other 241 had lower spike rates after 0-0 than they did on 0-0. Even in smallish samples, it’s unusual for that trend to be reversed. Yet there’s Clase, reversing it so dramatically that there’s a bigger gap between his ratio and the second-place player’s than between the second-place player’s and the 22nd-place player’s. As they say on Twitter, ratioed. One could quibble with those precise parameters of time, count, and pitch location, but there certainly seems to be some signal, if not a statistical smoking gun, that something fishy was afoot.
In a sense, it’s good news for baseball (if not for Clase) that the Cleveland closer clearly stands out. For one thing, it suggests that simple statistical comparisons, bolstered by analyses of release points, spin rates, and speeds, could flag bad behavior, giving MLB another tool with which to police illicit betting. For another, Clase’s outlier status could be taken as a sign that behavior like his hasn’t been rampant. MLB could dismiss him as a bad apple who corrupted a countryman and teammate; he and Ortiz, who hail from the Dominican Republic and are less than a year apart in age, are reportedly “close friends” who occupied adjacent lockers in spring training following the three-team trade that brought Ortiz to the Guardians last December. To make Clase look worse, he has a history of cheating; he was suspended in 2020 after testing positive for the steroid boldenone, months after Cleveland traded Corey Kluber to Texas for Clase and Delino DeShields Jr.
An aggressively glass-half-full observer could also stress that the reportedly rigged pitches by Clase that are identified in the indictment—which, admittedly, may be but a fraction of his total transgressions—didn’t conclusively cost Cleveland any games: Either the batter who reportedly got gifted a 1-0 count was subsequently retired or stranded on base, or he reached and scored but the Guardians won anyway. (In both of the Ortiz incidents, the leadoff batter reached and scored, but additional runs were scored against Cleveland later in the game, and the Guardians got shut out.)
Which would all be well and good if not for one takeaway that’s inescapable, assuming the indictment’s details hold up: Clase seemingly rigged pitches with impunity for more than two years. For all that time, MLB, the sportsbooks, and the feds either didn’t detect his activities or didn’t act to curtail them. The indictment doesn’t say how the scheme came to light, but conspiracies are harder to keep secret when more people are involved, and this one seems to have been discovered not long after Ortiz got in on the action. A July ESPN report said that a betting integrity firm had flagged “unusual gambling activity” on two Ortiz pitches, and given that Clase reportedly instigated Ortiz’s involvement, the scrutiny of Ortiz may have led to Clase’s exposure. If so, perhaps Clase could have kept going indefinitely if he’d stayed a solo act.
That possibility is particularly galling given that the leagues, the sportsbooks, and other advocates of legal sports betting consistently insist that officially sanctioned sports betting helps protect the integrity of the games. There’s a certain logic to that argument: Leagues and sportsbooks are heavily incentivized to safeguard the perception that games are on the level, and it’s easier to monitor legal bets through an app than illegal bets through a bookie or an offshore site. It’s possible that we were better off not knowing so much about the seedy side of sports—ignorance being bliss, and all that—but if gambling was going on in a way that swayed wins and losses (or even individual stats), most fans would want it rooted out. Gambling boosters might point to the NBA’s swift investigation and banning of Jontay Porter after his actions on March 20 of last year, or even Ortiz’s sidelining less than a week after his alleged rigged ball on June 27.
But March 20 wasn’t Porter’s first violation, and June 27 wasn’t Ortiz’s. And what of Terry Rozier, who was investigated and cleared by the NBA years before his indictment last month? Or MLB’s failure to flag Clase’s apparent pattern of pitch-fixing? If that kind of bad behavior can go undetected and unpunished for so long, then the new normal is mostly downside, as devil’s bargains often are: a vast increase in sports wagering, without a commensurate strengthening of integrity guardrails. We would then be left to depend on the hope that well-paid pro athletes simply won’t see the upside in risking their careers for modest amounts of money.
And sure, they shouldn’t. Even Ortiz, who wasn’t making much more than the $760,000 major league minimum salary, was unwise to put his future earnings at stake for the $5,000 and $7,000, respectively, he reportedly received for throwing two balls on purpose. (That $5,000 was worth a lot more in 1919.) Clase signed a $20 million extension in 2022, and although he was underpaid relative to his production (as so many pre-arbitration or pre–free agency stars are), the pittance he reportedly received for rigging pitches hardly changed the equation. As far as we know, Clase and Ortiz weren’t acting under duress, but athletes might make seemingly senseless decisions about betting for any number of other reasons: because they’re trying to do an ill-advised favor for a friend, because they’re intensely competitive, because they think they can’t lose or get caught, because they rationalize their behavior as not being a big deal.
Presented with a pitch-fixing opportunity, Ortiz could tell himself that he’d thrown balls on roughly 40 percent of all first pitches; maybe he’d throw one even without trying to. Clase could say that he wanted to throw a slider anyway or that he was nasty enough to overcome falling behind by a ball. Most of the time, he would’ve been right. Still, wasting even one pitch on purpose comes at a cost to the team and, in the long run, the player. On average, the value of changing a strike to a ball is about .14 runs; it’s roughly half that on 0-0. If the going rate for a win in free agency is approximately $8 million and there are roughly 10 runs to a win, then we’re talking $800k per run, or upward of $50,000 per 0-0 strike conversion. It’s a fraction of that for Ortiz, who can expect a strike on a little less than half of his honest 0-0 pitches, but it’s still more than he made (or would be more than he made, if he were closer to cashing in as a free agent).
There’s another reason a well-compensated competitor might throw it all away on a wager: because they’re addicted to gambling, as are a growing number of young American men. Here, the leagues have a qualified culpability. There’s nothing inherently hypocritical about a league promoting gambling to fans while prohibiting it for players: The former can’t affect the proceedings, while the latter can. But it’s virtually certain that pervasive advertising, which the leagues (and, yes, sports media companies, including The Ringer) have endorsed and helped drive, has made the temptation tougher to resist. Regulation of advertising, and of some of the sportsbooks’ more predatory policies, could address that problem to some extent. Countries that have allowed legal gambling—and felt its ill effects—for longer than the U.S. has have already taken some steps down that road.
The more politically expedient path may be banning parlays and/or prop bets. It’s hard enough to make one winning bet; parlays pay off even more rarely because they depend on a bunch of bets being right. Perhaps the best illustration of parlays being bad business for bettors is a tidbit in the indictment about one parlay involving Clase. One of the bettors reportedly “placed approximately 16 parlay bets in which one leg of each parlay was that eight specific pitches by Clase would be a ball/HBP.” Seven of the eight pitches proceeded as had apparently been planned, but the eighth backfired when free-swinging Andy Pages swung at and missed a pitch well below the zone. Even when the fix is in, it might not be enough to nail a parlay.
With parlays, the house almost always wins. With prop bets, the house almost always wins except when it’s set up to lose by a duplicitous, unscrupulous player. In 2021, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred divulged that NBA commissioner Adam Silver had advised him not to dwell on baseball’s deliberate pace because all that time between its hundreds of thousands of pitches per season made the sport perfect for micro-betting—an in-game, real-time form of prop bet along the lines of the kind Clase is accused of abusing, which wasn’t even feasible in sports betting’s bookie-based era, before smartphones and apps. Micro-bets are made for problem gamblers—both the kind that can’t lose and the kind that can’t win.
Manfred, to his credit, pursued the pitch clock anyway. Now, even Silver, the first acting commissioner to publicly support the legalization of sports betting, is pumping the brakes on prop bets. So is Manfred, who in July told reporters, “There are certain types of bets that strike me as unnecessary and particularly vulnerable, things where it’s one single act, doesn’t affect the outcome necessarily.” Manfred and MLBPA executive director Tony Clark don’t agree on much, but Clark is concerned about prop bets, too, if only because they invariably lead to harassment of athletes when people’s prob bets backfire. MLB could confiscate players’ phones during games like Bob Dylan does attendees’ during concerts, but that alone would be a Band-Aid on a wound that needs stitches.
In Ohio, where the Guardians play, Governor Mike DeWine has championed a ban of player prop bets in collegiate sports and called for a federal ban on pro prop bets (particularly micro-prop bets). He renewed that campaign this summer, spurred by reports of the two Guardians’ disgrace. Late last month, he said that Manfred had told him that MLB was close to blocking those bets.
As the image macro goes, the best time to delete these props was before they ensnared major league pitchers. The second-best time is now. Even if outright match-fixing is on the decline globally, spot-fixing continues to plague plenty of sports—soccer, cricket, and tennis among them. In the U.S., the drumbeat of betting scandals is building. And if someone on Clase’s salary is susceptible, then imagine minor leaguers’ or amateur athletes’ liability. Recent polling by Pew and YouGov shows that Americans—even those who have bet on sports—increasingly believe that the practice as constituted is bad for both society and sports. Whether because they’ve experienced the dangers firsthand or because they’re just tired of hearing about people’s props, young men in Clase and Ortiz’s age range are among the most vehemently opposed, compared with their past positions.
MLB has weathered multiple scandals stemming from player, manager, or umpire bets on baseball, from Pete Rose to Tucupita Marcano to Pat Hoberg. But out of naivete or not, not since the Black Sox has there been a substantiated allegation that a player intentionally tanked a pitch or a play because of a bet. Rigging pitches isn’t as bad as rigging games (let alone World Series games), but the difference is one of degree, not kind. At least steroid users and sign stealers were trying to win.
After a robust regular season and an all-timer of a postseason, capped off by a World Series that swung on a succession of coin toss–type plays and yielded banner ratings, MLB was riding high. Now that this scandal has spiraled into the latest sign of the sports-betting apocalypse, the league’s good vibes are badly dinged, Clase’s and Ortiz’s careers are probably ruined (even if the charges against them don’t stick), and fans are left to wonder whether every pitch that’s just a bit outside is really on the level. If pitches are fixed, baseball is broken.
Baseball is incessantly said to be a game of failure, and while it hardly has a unique claim to that distinction—most sports are rooted in futility, because a game of nonstop success would be boring—all of that unwilling ignominy can camouflage purposeful failure. With apologies (sort of) to Hawk Harrelson, players can’t truly will themselves to win, but they can intentionally lose. And when they succeed, however briefly, at failing, we all lose—even if we weren’t gullible enough to bet on them to win.
