That Bet365 sign on Progressive Field’s right field wall isn’t a license for players or team personnel to bet on baseball against their sport’s rules. (Neither is or was Fanatics Betting and Gaming’s sports book stand inside the ballpark.) It’s for fans only, folks, in the Prog and all ballparks.

Whoops. The microbet scandal plaguing baseball now has turned at least one worm. The government is accusing Guardians pitcher Emmanuel Clase with pitch rigging for microbettors in 48 games. You may be forgiven if you can’t help asking yourself, “And counting?”

That came forth in hand with news that co-conspiring Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz’s attorney, Christos N. Georgalis, wrote in a court filing of Clase being accused of such rigging in “dozens of games.”

The filing also asks that, since the two pitchers have “markedly different levels of culpability,” Ortiz’s case should be separated on grounds he couldn’t get a fair trial otherwise, according to ESPN’s David Purdum.

It almost makes perfect sense for Georgalis to make the request. It would make sense for the government to grant it. If you take the government’s own word for it, Ortiz is the anchovy in this case, accused of rigging pitches in a measly two June 2025 games. Clase is the big blue whale, accused of swimming in criminal waters from 2023-2025 and possibly rigging pitches in a quarter of the 197 regular season games in which he pitched over that span.

Georgalis’s filing argues that twenty-six months worth of Clase’s alleged rigging, “including suspect pitches during 48 games, dozens of communications with [a bettor], cash transfers and coordination of illegal wagers,” might get Ortiz found “guilty by association.”

The two pitchers have already pleaded not guilty to wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and conspiracy to influence sports events by bribery, Purdom reminds us. Perhaps regardless of who rigged in how many games, prosecutors charge the pair with accepting bribes from two unnamed bettors from their native Dominican Republic who won $460,000 at minimum in bets “on the speed and outcome of their pitches.”

Clase and Ortiz are set to stand trial starting on 4 May. Georgalis has also asked for additional time before his client goes on trial.

By no means are Clase and Ortiz the only athletes involved in criminal gambling cases. Since the Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law limiting legal betting mostly to Nevada for slightly over a quarter century, it’s probably no shock that athletes in assorted sports might find themselves on the wrong sides of the action. Athletes or, in the case of Dodgers gigastar Shohei Ohtani, their interpeters or other aides.

Two years ago, Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano was “declared permanently ineligible” for betting on baseball, after baseball government learned the hard way he’d been betting on Pirates games while he was a member of that team. Don’t bet on a certain president demanding his reinstatement any time soon. Apparently, said president’s favour confers solely upon otherwise Hall of Fame-eligible miscreants who went to their rewards without reinstatement and without honest admission until or unless it’s needed to sell books.

Even those who achieve perfection on the field can get clipped if they’re at the wrong betting windows. Just ask Pat Hoberg, former umpire, who earned the praise usually afforded perfect game pitchers when he called a perfect game in Game Two of the 2022 World Series. (What’s an umpire’s perfect game? In Hoberg’s case, calling all 129 pitches that were taken at the plate correctly.)

A little over two years later, Hoberg was investigated for breaking baseball’s gambling rules. Investigated and fired. He protested he’d never bet on baseball, but it turned out that the ump shared betting accounts with a friend who did bet on baseball and that he “deleted evidence pertaining to the league’s investigation.”

Hoberg can apply for reinstatement this year. Any bets on whether the aforementioned president is in a big hurry to demand baseball reinstate an umpire or else?

There’ve been arguments since the Clase and Ortiz cases began on behalf of banning sports microbetting because it just might erase any prospect of players being on the take. Whether it’s pitchers rigging certain pitches or hitters tanking on certain pitches. Whether it’s kickers taking how many steps before their feet launch field goal balls or how many blade strokes before Sniper D’Slapshot launches that puck to the nets on a penalty shot.

Remember: Ad partnerships between sports leagues and legal sports books did not mean those leagues’ players or personnel were suddenly granted immunity from their rules against their betting on their sports or their teams. (Do you think illegal bookies are going to be buying ballpark ad space any time soon?) That Bet365 sign on the right field wall at Progressive Field didn’t hand Clase and Ortiz licenses to rig pitches for fun and profit, their own and/or their reputed partners’ profit.

Much as the late Pete Rose’s partisans would like you to believe otherwise, the ads were for fans only. They did not mean players, coaches, managers, umpires, trainers, team doctors, video room operators, scoreboard operators, general managers and their aides, presidents of baseball operations and their aides, or owners were immunized from the game’s formal no-betting rules.

But don’t waste your valuable intellectual time trying to figure out how and why young men of vast means such as Clase and Ortiz needed additional income at all, never mind the kind yielded by a little pitch rigging. It is easier to pass the proverbial camel through the proverbial eye of the proverbial needle. Whether or not someone has bets down on the passage.