Baseball Needs To Make Clean Break With All Gambling Entities

by Dan Schlossberg

November 2025

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SPECIAL FROM THE IBWAA

This article appeared in the IBWAA on-line publication Here's The Pitch on November 14, 2025 and is used here with permission.

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Even Jeff Bezos would have known if $17 million disappeared from his bank account.

So says jailed bookie Matt Bowyer, now serving a one-year sentence for taking illegal bets from Shohei Ohtani’s one-time translator, Ippei Mizuhara.

Though cleared of involvement in gambling by both Major League Baseball and the federal government, Ohtani would have been banned for life had those investigations gone the other way.

Rule 21 — posted in English, Spanish, and Japanese in major-league clubhouses — prohibits betting on baseball and warns violators of lifetime suspensions.

Pete Rose, the lifetime leader in hits, was caught and banned in 1987 but reinstated by Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred after his passing, along with Shoeless Joe Jackson and the seven other players implicated in the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. All will be considered Cooperstown’s Class of 2027 by the Eras Committee when it votes a year from December.

But Manfred has much bigger worries, such as what to do with indicted Cleveland pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis L. Ortiz.

They’re charged with a litany of offenses dating back three years and allegedly involving close cooperation with gamblers — even home visits.

No matter what the courts find, both could be kicked out of baseball for good, following San Diego infielder Tucupita Marcano in 2024 and umpire Pat Hoberg in 2015. And who knows what’s ahead?

Anxious to rake in new revenue streams — even dubious ones — to meet rising-out-of-sight payrolls, Major League Baseball followed a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision to legalize sports betting by forming partnerships with a myriad of online gaming sites.

The sport that once banned Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays for acting as greeters at Atlantic City casinos now runs odds rather than scores in the constant moving scrolls across the bottom of the MLB Network television screen.

On Halloween night, readers of The New York Post had to suffer through five full pages of betting suggestions.

As the Chicago street urchin once said to his castigated hero, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

Assuming that Clase and Ortiz are just the tip of the iceberg, Manfred would be wise to sever baseball’s ties with gambling interests. With a new Basic Agreement to be negotiated, the time is ripe to start fresh — and return the game to its one-time status as “America’s national pastime.”

I for one couldn’t care less what DraftKings, Fan Duel, or any other site suggests. While betting might make the games more exciting to watch, it also increases the chances of cheating — or much more dire results.

Houston pitcher Lance McCullers, Jr. and free agent reliever Liam Hendriks both reported gambling-related threats to their families.

Paul Sewald, another pitcher, told USA TODAY that he’s also been a target: “You blow a save, you don’t come through, and you get it all. You stink — you cost me all of this money.”

Other pro sports, notably the National Basketball Association, has also suffered an invasion of gamblers. In baseball, it’s not just the end result — the final score — that matters but even pieces of the game: how many runs will be scored? will a pitcher deliberately throw a bad pitch after accepting an advance bribe? how many hits will a batter get or pitcher yield?

Those incidents, called “prop” (for proposition) betting, are easier to hide than outright bets on wins or losses. And they’re the root of the charges against Clase and Ortiz, both of whom face a potential 65 years in jail if convicted.

Manfred, in his infinite wisdom, has now limited each prop bet to $200. Which is like telling the street burglar it’s okay to stage a stick-up if he “only” takes $200 when he rounds the Monopoly board and passes GO.

In the meantime, players, fans, and media members are wondering how much deeper this disease goes. If Manfred really wants his tenure to mean something positive — something more than two lockouts and a myriad of sometimes-ridiculous rules changes — he needs to wipe the slate clean and divest the game of the stench of gambling.

Now would be a good time to start.

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HtP weekend editor Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ has covered the game since 1969. He longs for the day the steroids and gambling are consigned to the dustbin of history.