Major League Baseball pitcher Luis Ortiz appeared in a federal courtroom in Boston on Monday, charged with a scheme to rig bets on his pitches.
Ortiz, a pitcher for the Cleveland Guardians, was given a $50,000 secured bond and ordered to surrender his passport. He was arrested at Logan Airport in Boston over the weekend and will have another appearance in a federal courtroom in New York where he was indicted by a grand jury.
Federal prosecutors argue that Ortiz and another Cleveland pitcher, Emmanuel Clase, told co-conspirators how they would pitch in games so the bettors could place wagers on those pitches. That alone would be a violation of Major League Baseball policy, but investigators say text messages show that Clase and Ortiz were pre-planning with co-conspirators in the Dominican Republican and received kickbacks over wire transfer.
Steven Senne / AP 
“The fact that these pitchers are accused of doing it over a period of time, in fact, two years at least with one of them, part of that goes to the difficult aspect of trying to detect it occurring to begin with,” said Mike McCann, the Director of the Sports Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire Law School.
Sports betting has roiled major league sports over the last month with two NBA coaches and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier recently arrested for alleged illegal sports gambling. Massachusetts State Senator John Keenan argues that the industry has gotten out of control and proposed legislation that would ban so-called prop bets which allow people to bet on specific plays and player stats.
“Those are the types of bets that lead people to become problem gamblers and ultimately addicted gamblers and we know that’s where the industry makes most of their money,” Keenan said.
MLB caps wagers on pitches
On Monday afternoon, Major League Baseball announced it is working with sportsbooks to cap wagers on pitches at $200.
The league wrote in a statement, “‘micro-bet’ pitch-level markets (e.g., ball/strike; pitch velocity) present heightened integrity risks because they focus on one-off events that can be determined by a single player and can be inconsequential to the outcome of the game. The risk on these pitch-level markets will be significantly mitigated by this new action targeted at the incentive to engage in misconduct.”
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