If you are a member of Generation X or above, you are probably aware that sports betting apps exist, and you might even be aware that they are causing a wave of bankruptcies and financial hardship nationwide, particularly for young men.
But you are most likely unaware of just how different sports app gambling is from traditional sports wagering. The latest federal indictment of Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz is an eye-opener.
Clase is a three-time All-Star closer for the Cleveland Guardians. Ortiz is a bit more of a journeyman starter who played for the Pirates before coming to Cleveland this past season. Neither player is accused of rigging a single game or trying to lose. What they have been charged with is far stranger.
Anyone who has placed a sports bet in Las Vegas is familiar with the concept of a parlay. A parlay bet is when you combine two (or more) separate bets into one single wager, and you only get paid if you correctly pick every “leg” of the parlay. So if you combine a bet on the Yankees to beat the White Sox with a bet on the Dodgers to beat the Rockies, you get one higher-risk, higher-reward bet. These bets are as old as time.
What is more recent, particularly in terms of granularity, are the proposition, or “prop,” bets made during a game. You have most likely participated in a form of this at a Super Bowl party when everyone pays $5, is assigned a player, and the person whose player scores first in the game wins.
Prop bets long predated gambling apps. People have been wagering on things like how many hits a player will get or how many first downs a football team will make for decades. But with real-time remote betting, the possibilities have exploded. Gamblers can now bet on whether individual pitches in a Major League Baseball game will be balls or strikes. Combine those ball-and-strike wagers into a parlay, and the payouts can be substantial. That, apparently, is exactly what Clase and Ortiz did.
From 2023 until they were suspended this year, Clase and Ortiz received text messages from co-conspirators during games telling them which specific pitches needed to be balls and not strikes. Clase and Ortiz’s co-conspirators allegedly won more than $450,000 through this scheme, with Clase and Ortiz being paid about $12,000. To put that into perspective, Clase made $5,000,000 in 2025 and was set to make $10,000,000 in 2027. He was willing to risk all of that for just $12,000.
Major League Baseball has since announced that it is working with its gambling app partners to regulate the prop betting market more tightly.
“The legal sports betting market was designed to be collaborative with regulators, leagues, and lawmakers in order to provide a safe betting experience for sports fans,” Fanatics Sportsbook said in a statement. “At Fanatics, we believe that addressing pitch-level markets with Major League Baseball is a way to show that the legal market is working, as well as a prudent step to protect the integrity of our national pastime.”
Do we really need a working legal pitch-level prop bet market? What does such an enterprise actually accomplish? Have we really become so degenerate as a nation that we desperately need the extra adrenaline high of hitting a five-leg individual pitch parlay? Is this what baseball has become?
THERE IS NO IMMIGRATION HAWK WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
The scope of possible corruption created by sports app gambling is infinite. Law enforcement will always be playing catch-up, the results of games will forever be in doubt, and, as Clase proved, there will never be an income level high enough for some players not to accept a payoff to alter their performance. Pretending this monstrosity can be regulated is either dangerously naive or, more likely, infinitely cynical.
Sports leagues are too addicted to gambling cash to recognize the threat that gambling apps present to their industry. Some politician somewhere needs to step up and make this a matter for Congress.
