Major League Baseball has brought down the toughest hammer in its arsenal. On Tuesday, the league issued a lifetime ban to Tucupita Marcano of the San Diego Padres after an investigation revealed he had repeatedly bet on Pittsburgh Pirates games while a member of that team.
MLB said Marcano placed 387 bets on baseball between 2022 and 2023, totaling more than $150,000 in bets. Twenty-five of those bets were parlay bets, including a bet on his own team to lose. Marcano posted them while he was injured and out of the lineup, and the league and the player both deny he rigged games. But it was all way too close for MLB’s comfort, so the league permanently banned the 24-year-old. MLB four other players suspended one year each for lower level gambling violations. These players wagered smaller amounts on games that did not involve their own teams, although a few of them were minor leaguers betting on their organization’s Major League teams. No one punished Tuesday is a star player, and if MLB has its way, the stories will quickly fade from the spotlight.
The Marcano issue is the most egregious. The league is at pains to point out that the matches have not been compromised, but anyone could reasonably doubt that this is a problem in itself. The sport’s entire business model – from ticket sales to television viewership and certainly partnerships with sportsbooks – is based on the purity of competition on the field. Given Marcano’s bets against his own team, even if he didn’t play, the league had no plausible option but to ban him altogether. But MLB doesn’t take that away. The league’s association with gambling interests is a risky proposition, and Marcano is a simple cautionary tale about the ways in which mingling can go wrong.
In no sport are gambling scandals a more sensitive topic than in baseball, which was the site of two of the most high-profile gambling episodes in American sports history. The genre’s worst moment is the Black Sox scandal, when members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to rig the 1919 World Series. Another black eye is the ban on the sport’s all-time leader, Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds, for his habitual betting on ball games. Nearly every sport has had problems with gambling invading the game. The NBA just banned a fringe player for life. But baseball has lost a championship series and a would-be Hall of Fame player. In that context, the league is fortunate that Marcano has been relegated to the minor leagues this season.
Baseball could also be particularly susceptible to young players getting involved in gambling. Minor league players often didn’t receive a living wage until 2023, when a union made an effort collective agreement kept the clubs’ abuse in check. Most are far from rich. And even for a player’s first three full seasons in the major leagues, he will only make about $700,000, and that’s only if he spends the entire season in the major leagues. Appearing in bits and pieces over three MLB seasons, Marcano had earned less than $2 million, a relatively small amount in a league where stars routinely sign $100 million deals and players’ careers can be short. Did he make an obscenely stupid decision? Absolute. Would it have been less likely if baseball had a higher pay scale for young players? It’s not unfair to ask.
The competition also invites scrutiny through its commercial associations. Ballparks and TV broadcasts are plastered with inescapable gambling ads, all aimed at showing how easy it is to get in on the action. It should It should be quite easy for professional athletes not to gamble on their sport. After all, they are business partners of the leagues they play in, so not gambling is the least they can do.
In fact, the rise of legal betting companies helped MLB intercept Marcano’s poorly made bets. An unregulated bookmaker is not subject to supervision by third party companies. Marcano’s case is very different from that surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter just pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud in a scandal that briefly enveloped the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar early in the season. With Marcano getting caught, MLB can tell a story of being on the front lines of the pursuit of integrity.
However, there is an uncomfortable undercurrent. On the one hand, MLB has imposed a lifetime gambling ban, while also happily taking money from gambling companies. Ballplayers are people too, and they absorb the same advertising that MLB sends to fans about how easy and tempting it is to place a bet. Many of Marcano’s corresponded to what a typical twenty-something might bet on a game: long-range parlays that usually functioned as donations from Marcano to the betting operator. It was no wonder his bets against his own team didn’t pan out. Young men who don’t think about their actions are a target group for sportsbooks. Is it any wonder someone was playing second base instead of watching on TV?