For the first time since Pete Rose was kicked out in 1989, a Major League Baseball player has been banned for life for betting on his team’s games.
Aided by tips from gambling companies, MLB found that Tucupita Marcano, a 24-year-old utility player for the San Diego Padres, placed 25 bets last season on the Pittsburgh Pirates as a member of that club — a cardinal sin in the sport, even though he was injured and unavailable to play at the time.
Advertisement
The league said Marcano, a lifetime .217 hitter in three major-league seasons, bet more than $150,000 on baseball from Oct. 16, 2022 through Oct. 23, 2022, and from July 12, 2023 through Nov. 1, 2023. Of the 387 bets Marcano made on the sport, 231 were MLB-related, and $87,319 was directly on MLB-related action. The other wagers were on international play.
In the same announcement Tuesday, the league also said it was suspending four other players for one year because they had placed bets on baseball games they were not directly tied to.
That group includes one current big leaguer, Michael Kelly of the Oakland A’s, and two former big leaguers: Andrew Saalfrank of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who made three appearances in last year’s World Series with Arizona; and José Rodríguez, an infielder in the Philadelphia Phillies’ system who has played in one major-league game, with the Chicago White Sox last year.
Jay Groome of the Padres, who was once the 12th overall pick in baseball’s amateur draft and was at Triple A in San Diego’s system this season, was also suspended for a year.
The four players were all minor leaguers when they violated the rules. While they all bet on a major-league parent club — Groome, for example, bet on the big-league Boston Red Sox when he was a Red Sox minor leaguer — none of the four were found to have bet on the team they were directly playing for, bringing a lesser punishment.
“The strict enforcement of Major League Baseball’s rules and policies governing gambling conduct is a critical component of upholding our most important priority: protecting the integrity of our games for the fans,” commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “The longstanding prohibition against betting on Major League Baseball games by those in the sport has been a bedrock principle for over a century.”
Advertisement
The league banned Marcano and suspended the four others just hours before it put a bow on a separate gambling scandal. Ippei Mizuhara, the fired interpreter of Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, pleaded guilty to fraud Tuesday afternoon. Mizuhara stole almost $17 million from Ohtani as Mizuhara’s gambling debts piled up. MLB promptly announced that an investigation into Mizuhara and Ohtani, whom federal prosecutors determined was not involved in Mizuhara’s betting, was closed.
Now, amidst the rise of sports gambling — a gold rush courted by major sports leagues themselves — baseball has arrived at a reckoning moment that many in the sport have warned was looming: how can it ensure the sanctity of the sport while its own players and people around the team join the action?
“The inevitability of corruption is triggered by the enormous amount of money that’s at stake,” said Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner who took over shortly after Rose was banned, by phone. “When you pour all this gambling money into baseball, or all the professional sports — or for that matter, even amateur sports — that amount of money is so staggering that eventually the players and I think, tragically, the umpires, the regulators, everybody is going to be tempted to see if they can get a million dollars.”
Major League Baseball’s central office declined a request for an interview.
MLB’s department of investigations determined Marcano placed all of his bets on the Pirates after he suffered a season-ending knee injury on July 24, 2023. Although he remained around the team at its stadium, PNC Park, MLB said in its news release Tuesday that it has “no evidence to suggest — and Marcano denies — that any outcomes in the baseball games on which he placed bets were compromised, influenced, or manipulated in any way.”
Advertisement
The league used identical language in its account of the other four players’ bets.
The group of four banned for one year wagered less than $1,000 total on MLB games, far less than Marcano. (Marcano didn’t fare well, winning 4.3 percent of all of his MLB-related wagers.)
Among the league’s findings:
- A’s pitcher Kelly placed 10 bets on MLB in October 2021, when he was a minor leaguer in the Houston Astros’ organization. He bet on three games that included the major-league Astros, but he was playing at a level below the major leagues, on a different club. He wagered $99.22 on MLB games.
- Saalfrank of the Diamondbacks placed four bets on the Diamondbacks’ major-league club when was in their minor-league system. He wagered $444.07 on 28 MLB bets.
- Groome, the pitcher in the Padres’ system, made 24 bets on the Boston Red Sox from July 2020 to July 21, at a time he was playing for a Red Sox farm team. Groome wagered $453.74 on 30 MLB bets.
- Rodríguez, the Phillies infielder, placed seven bets involving the White Sox’ big-league team while he was in their farm system. In September 2021, and then from June to July 2022, he placed 28 MLB bets overall, wagering $724.09.
But the smaller bets might speak to the ubiquity of sports gambling, easily available on one’s cell phone in many states, and heavily advertised during telecasts and with various media companies, including The Athletic.
Baseball isn’t alone: The NBA banned a player for life earlier this season, when it found Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors bet on games and also tried to alter his playing time to deliver on related bets.
None of the five players MLB punished are going to appeal the decision, the league said. The outcomes, like virtually all cases in which MLB issues discipline for off-field behavior, were the product of negotiations between MLB and the players’ union. The Players Association declined comment Tuesday.
Marcano, like any player, technically could try to ask the commissioner’s office for reinstatement at any time. The four other players are eligible to be reinstated on June 5, 2025.
Said the Padres, Marcano’s current organization as well as Groome’s, in a statement: “We cannot comment on violations that occurred outside of our organization. We fully support MLB’s sports betting policy and the need to adhere to all provisions of Rule 21. We will continue to educate all members of our organization regarding their obligations under the policy.”
Groome, through his agent, declined to comment. Kelly also declined to comment.
MLB said an unspecified legal sports betting operator told the league in March that the company had “had identified past baseball betting activity from accounts connected to multiple major- and minor-league players.”
Advertisement
“MLB obtained data from that operator and other sportsbooks, including authentication data for bets,” MLB continued in its statement. “None of these players played in any game on which they placed a bet.”
The league’s public report Tuesday discussed bets made from 2020-2023. It’s unclear why it took years for MLB to learn about some of the violations.
“This information came to light as a result of a legal sportsbook’s new proactive measures to enforce their policies,” said a person briefed on the league’s investigation who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
The person declined to specify what the new measures are, or which they had replaced.
Asked generally about gambling investigations last month, Manfred noted MLB receives monitoring tips when bets are made legally. It is illegal bookmakers, however, whom Manfred said the league cannot typically track.
“Some investigations begin as a result of monitoring activities that are not public, and depending on the outcome of those investigations, you may never hear about those,” Manfred said. “We have no way to know what an illegal bookmaker is doing.”
While Tuesday’s news could prove a deterrent to players, then, it also has the potential to push them away from the legal operators whom MLB partners with and instead toward illegal bookies.
Vincent said he believes the way to curtail sports gambling is through Congress.
“There is no solution to this problem that doesn’t involve the federal government,” Vincent said. “But when the public is so enamored of betting and there’s so much money spread around, including to the politicians, what possible hope is there for any Congress taking this on? They would run into a buzzsaw.”
Vincent noted that it was not Congress that allowed sports betting to proliferate in the U.S., but rather, it was a Supreme Court decision in 2018 that opened the floodgates, one that struck down a 1992 federal law that had restricted sports betting to only a few states, such as Nevada.
Advertisement
Manfred referenced that case in his statement Tuesday.
“We have been clear that the privilege of playing in baseball comes with a responsibility to refrain from engaging in certain types of behavior that are legal for other people,” Manfred’s statement continued. “Since the Supreme Court decision opened the door to legalized sports betting, we have worked with licensed sports betting operators and other third parties to put ourselves in a better position from an integrity perspective through the transparency that a regulated sports betting system can provide. MLB will continue to invest heavily in integrity monitoring, educational programming and awareness initiatives with the goal of ensuring strict adherence to this fundamental rule of our game.”
Rose was banned in 1989, and is the last major leaguer who was banned for life for gambling before Marcano. A minor league player, Peter Bayer, was banned indefinitely in 2021 for gambling. His ban was not technically prescribed to be for life, but he has yet to be reinstated, and so it could ultimately function as a lifetime ban if he is never in fact allowed back.
Marcano, from Venezuela, signed with the Padres in 2016 as an international free agent. He has five home runs in 149 big-league games from 2021-23. The Padres dealt him to the Pirates in 2021, before San Diego got him back as a waiver claim in November 2023.
Required reading
(Photo: Zac BonDurant / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)