CLEVELAND, Ohio – The types of bets Guardians reliever Emmanuel Clase is accused of helping to rig are now far less profitable after Major League Baseball capped bets.
These are bets not on the outcome of a game, but rather minutia such as whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike, or the speed of a particular pitch.
As early as 2023, Cleveland’s ace reliever was intentionally throwing bad pitches or slower than his top speed in exchange for cash from the gambling world, according to a federal indictment released last month in New York.
If convicted of the charges Clase denies, he could be sentenced to 65 years in prison.
The indictment cites specific pitches on specific days in 2023 and 2025 in which authorities said Clase threw first-pitch balls or slower on purpose. The people who knew, made about $450,000 on bets, the indictment says.
But going forward, making such large sums of money will be more difficult. Major League Baseball announced last month that such prop bets will be capped at $200 from now on.
Pitch-level bets, the announcement said, “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.”
Left open, however, is the question of whether gambling problems could run deeper than just single pitches in single games.
Court filings typically lay out only the strongest examples. So it’s a fair question to ask: Could gambling ties have played any role in how the nearly unhittable Clase of the regular season unraveled so dramatically in the 2024 playoffs?
It’s likely that only Clase knows the real answer. But baseball — perhaps the most numbers-driven sport there is — let us dig into the data to discover that his postseason failure was not just a Yankees problem. Nor was it just the case of facing better hitters or late-season fatigue.
Using statistics from baseball-reference.com, cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer analyzed Clase’s performance and found that the pitcher faltered in ways the numbers alone can’t explain.
What happened?
Perhaps the biggest moment came during Game 3 of the American League Championship Series against the Yankees — a series eventually won by New York, 4-1.
With the Guardians clinging to postseason life, Clase — their star closer — surrendered back-to-back home runs after yielding just two home runs during the entire regular season.
The first blast came on what by most accounts was a near-perfect pitch — a 99 mph cut fastball on the outside corner of the plate. Those who watched closely reasoned that it was a case of Aaron Judge — the American League’s eventual MVP — simply winning the battle against the league’s best closer.
“I think there’s one person that could hit that pitch off Emmanuel Clase out of the yard, and he did,” Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt said afterwards. “As a baseball fan, it was really cool. As the opposing manager, it was not.”
Then Giancarlo Stanton, normally not nearly the dangerous threat of Judge but a noted Guardians’ playoff foil, followed with a solo home run. He’s homered in eight of 12 postseason games against Cleveland.
Bad night on the big stage? Plausible. After all, it’s an unpredictable sport.
But for Clase, the postseason was a disaster.
He gave up only five earned runs throughout the entire regular season, but eight earned runs in just seven postseason appearances.
How bad was his falloff?
Yes, the Yankees were the AL’s top scoring team, but Clase did dramatically worse against the Yankees in the postseason than he did in the regular season.
Since the sample size was small in facing the Yankees during the regular season, cleveland.com also looked at how he did against a grouping of the AL’s top-hitting teams. Again, Clase was way worse in the postseason.
Was he getting tired from an incredible 74 appearances during the regular season? He shouldn’t have been, since it was the fourth season in a row in which he appeared in 70-plus games.
And stronger to this point, Clase was lights out in September heading into the postseason, giving up no runs in his 11 appearances that month. There was no sign of the impending October doom. He was on a hot streak.
A batter-by-batter look at first pitches in September versus the postseason shows Clase got off to a nominally worse start on a per-batter basis in the playoffs. But then things went down from there.
The numbers — far beyond just his ERA — show that he was performing worse in the games that mattered most.
If Clase was “tipping” pitches — meaning that he had developed a habit that gave hitters clues on what pitch was to come — that raises two questions. First, how did opposing teams spot it when the Guardians didn’t? And second, is it possible he was tipping pitches intentionally?