Image credit: © Ken Blaze-Imagn Images
Cleveland Guardians placed RHP Emmanuel Clase on administrative leave.
Here’s a sentence that I never imagined typing: Major League Baseball investigating Luis L. Ortiz for gambling is not even the month of July’s most depressing such case involving a Guardians right-handed pitcher.
Details thus far are limited, but the most that has been reported is that Clase’s name came up during the Ortiz investigation. The Guardians were recently informed that something was afoot with their closer and on Sunday, the team learned of Clase’s upcoming administrative leave on Sunday. He was told not to report to the ballpark for yesterday’s game against Colorado, and at minimum, he will be on leave until August 31.
Stephen Vogt’s second year as Cleveland skipper has been much bumpier than the smashing success of year one, but it’d be one thing if it was merely chock-full of on-field struggles. The fact that two of his prominent pitchers have been tied to gambling clearly weighed on him in his Monday pregame comments (as relayed by The Athletic):
“It makes it hard. I’m not happy. This stinks. It’s a different part of our game that we’re now dealing with because it’s legal. You don’t know what’s going on. There have been a number of stories over the last year and a half related to this. Two of our guys are being investigated. And that hurts.”
We can’t exactly describe it as a powerless feeling because Vogt does hold power as the players’ boss. But everyone who walks into a big league clubhouse knows about the rules around gambling on baseball, and it’s not as though the Guardians hid them. Even if the modern world—and indeed the league itself through partnerships—adds shades of gray with the unrelenting pervasiveness of sports gambling ads*, it’s playing with fire whenever you come close to indulging it. The microbetting nature of Ortiz’s particular investigation is another flag to provoke questions about integrity on plays that simply look like terrible pitches upon first glance.
*Hours after releasing its statement about Clase’s investigation, the Guardians tweeted their lineup for Monday night, presented by … an online sportsbook.
As for Clase, many fans will be tempted to think back to some of his doomed pitches last October, when Vogt had Cleveland just a few wins away from a pennant despite Clase’s terrible follow-up to his dazzling regular season. The sad thing is that it’s not like there’s hard public evidence that he was throwing games or anything remotely like that—Kerry Carpenter, Giancarlo Stanton, and Aaron Judge are all power bats capable of taking anyone out, while ALCS Game 4 was a garden-variety soft contact/single-led loss—but if some fans are still (unfairly) raising eyebrows at Shohei Ohtani, then you can, well, bet that the stink is going to stick to Clase, even if nothing nefarious was afoot back then. If something similar to Ortiz is discovered with Clase, then the suspicions will only be amplified, with his actions providing the megaphone.
This story would stink regardless, but it gets uglier. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Clase was the “star attraction” of a fan player investment company called Finlete. It is exactly what it sounds like: if you invest in one of their clients, then you can earn part of his career earnings. If the worst does come to pass on the Clase investigation, then a combined $315,000 could be lost. That definitely doesn’t create alarming motives at all! And some folks are just so reasonable when it comes to players affecting their own financial choices.
In a separate timeline, the Guardians could’ve held onto Clase, and even if they fell short this year, they would still have one of the league’s best closers under contract for possible future seasons of contention. In another, they could’ve sold high on an active relief market and received a nice return for Clase while handing the closer’s job over to Cade Smith.
Instead, we’re in just about the most miserable scenario. Clase’s not getting traded, his future in baseball is murky, and we have a rotting onion of another gambling scandal on our hands—one that just grows increasingly wretched the more you peel back. And it’s almost certainly going to get even worse before it gets better.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.