Multiple MLB Players Face Long-Term Suspensions For Betting On Baseball
Yet Another Major Betting Scandal In MLB
Another day, another big sports gambling scandal for Major League Baseball to deal with. San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano was assessed a lifetime ban from MLB for placing hundreds of baseball bets in 2022 and 2023, some involving the Pittsburgh Pirates, for whom he was playing at the time (even though most of the bets were placed while he was on the injured list). He was one of five players banned for MLB betting on Monday, with four others suspended for a year while Marcano faced the harsher “death penalty.”
The news broke the day before Ippei Mizuhara — Shohei Ohtani‘s former interpreter with the Angels and Dodgers — pled guilty to various charges in federal court on Tuesday relating to his gambling and subsequent theft of money from Ohtani to pay for said gambling debts. As mobile sports betting continues to become legalized around the country, we’re likely to see more and more of these such stories, like the David Fletcher investigation (which is ongoing by MLB) and the Jontay Porter lifetime ban in the NBA.
In addition to Marcano’s lifetime ban, four other players (some with Major League experience) were assessed year-long bans for betting on baseball. Oakland’s Michael Kelly — who was having a good season out of the Athletics‘ bullpen — Arizona’s Andrew Saalfrank, San Diego’s Jay Groome, and Philadelphia’s José RodrÃguez were suspended for a year. No household names, but Marcano has played in the Majors on and off, Saalfrank was a staple of the Diamondbacks‘ bullpen in 2023 and pitched in the World Series, and Groome was a 1st round pick in 2016.
Marcano Bet Thousands of Dollars
The big headline is Marcano’s lifetime ban, which he got for betting on games involving the Pirates while he was employed by them. MLB’s rules state that players who are caught betting on their own team — even if they don’t play in said games or are on the IL, like Marcano was for most of 2023 after tearing his ACL — face lifetime bans while betting on games involving other teams puts players at risk of year-long suspensions. Four of the players banned for MLB betting bet on the Major League clubs they were in the minor league systems of at the time.
Marcano’s situation was very different. He bet on and against the Pirates mostly while he was recovering from injury. He also wagered on some prop bets involving baseball games and made a lot of parlays. However, he did incredibly poorly with his wagers, losing the vast majority of wagers he placed. For his MLB bets, he won just 4.3% of the time. All in all, Marcano bet over $150,000 on baseball, a huge sum for a player that did not have a lucrative long-term contract and shuffled between Triple-A and the Majors over the past few years.
The DraftKings odds (or whatever platform he wound up using) did not fare well for Marcano, that’s for sure. And, now, he’ll never be able to play in affiliated ball again. He was a mainstay as a utility player for the Pirates over the past two seasons, accumulating 397 plate appearances in 124 games with five home runs and 31 RBIs. It just is not worth it for someone like Marcano, who is only 24 years old, to throw away a career as an MLB player to bet on games, not to mention bets that he lost thousands of dollars on.
Other Players Will Serve As Cautionary Tales
Kelly, Saalfrank, Groome, and RodrÃguez bet much less frequently and for much smaller sums of money than Marcano as the other players banned for MLB betting. Still, MLB made the smart decision to not relent on its rules even though some of those bets were from as far back as 2021 when each player was with a lower-level minor league team. There is also no indication that they — or Marcano, for that matter — influenced or sought to influence the games they bet on but, at the end of the day, that doesn’t matter. If the integrity of games is compromised, then MLB has to act.
It’s just very unfortunate for these four guys that they’ll lose an entire year of their careers over bets that, for each of them, didn’t amount to much more than a couple of hundred dollars and were made years ago. The scores and odds they (mostly) lost on will cost them way more in salary and career progression than these players could have possibly gained even by winning all of their bets. And, for some like Kelly who is in the middle of his best professional season at the highest level in baseball, he may never get this opportunity again.
All-around, it’s just a shame but these punishments have to be enforced so MLB can have some kind of control over what is a rapidly changing legal sports betting marketplace. Unfortunately, players who break the rules, however trivially, will have to face the consequences.
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