Major League Baseball has dropped the heaviest hammer in its arsenal. On Tuesday, the championship issued a lifetime ban to Tucupita Marcano of the San Diego Padres after his investigation revealed that he had repeatedly bet on Pittsburgh Pirates games while a member of that team.
Related: Padres’ Tucupita Marcano banned for life from MLB for betting on baseball
MLB said Marcano made 387 baseball bets between 2022 and 2023, totaling more than $150,000 in bets. Twenty-five of these bets were parlay bets that included a bet on your own team to lose. Marcano put them on while injured and out of the lineup, and the league and player deny that he fixed any games. But it was all too close for MLB’s comfort, so the league permanently exiled the 24-year-old. MLB suspended four other players one year each for lower level gaming infractions. These players bet smaller amounts on games that do not involve their own teams, although some of them were minor league players who bet on their organization’s major league teams. No one punished Tuesday is a star player, and if MLB gets its way, the stories will soon disappear from the spotlight.
The Marcano case is the most egregious. The league is keen to point out that the games were not compromised, but that anyone could reasonably doubt this is a problem in itself. The sport’s entire business model – from ticket sales to television audiences and, certainly, its partnerships with sports betting houses – is based on the purity of competition on the field. Given Marcano’s bets against his own team, even when he wasn’t playing, the league had no other plausible option than to ban him outright. But that doesn’t get MLB off the hook. Associating the league with betting interests is a risky proposition, and Marcano is a simple cautionary tale about how the mix can go wrong.
In no sport are gambling scandals a more sensitive issue than in baseball, host to two of the most high-profile betting episodes in American sports history. The worst moment of its kind is the Black Sox scandal, when members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to rig the 1919 World Series. Another problem is the banning of the sport’s all-time leader, Pete Rose, of the Cincinnati Reds, for their usual bets on ball games. Virtually every sport has had problems with gambling intrusion. The NBA just banned a fringe player for life. But baseball lost a series of championships and a Hall of Fame candidate. In this context, the league is fortunate that Marcano was demoted to the minor leagues this season.
Baseball may also be especially susceptible to its young players becoming involved in gambling. Minor league players often did not receive living wages until 2023, when a union organizing effort and collective labor agreement curbed club abuse. Most are still nowhere near rich. And even in a player’s first three full seasons in the majors, he will only make about $700,000, and that’s only if he spends the entire season in the big leagues. Marcano appeared in chunks of three MLB seasons and earned less than $2 million, a relatively small amount in a league where stars routinely sign $100 million contracts and players’ careers can be short. Did he make an obscenely stupid decision? Absolutely. Would it have been less likely if baseball had a higher salary scale for young players? It’s not unfair to ask.
The league also invites scrutiny through its trade associations. Stadiums and TV broadcasts are covered with unavoidable gambling advertisements, all of them aimed at showing how easy it is to get in on the action. This he must It would be quite simple for professional athletes not to bet on their sports. After all, they are business partners of the leagues they play in, so not betting is the least they could do.
In fact, the rise of legal betting operators helped MLB catch Marcano’s botched bets. An unregulated bookie is not subject to monitoring by third-party companies. Marcano’s case is very different from that centered on Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter, who Just pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud in a scandal that briefly engulfed the Los Angeles Dodgers star earlier in the season. With Marcano getting caught, MLB can tell the story that he is on the front lines of a push for integrity.
There is, however, an uncomfortable trend. On one hand, MLB banned gambling for life while also taking money from betting companies. Ballplayers are people too, and they absorb the same hype that MLB puts out to fans about how simple and attractive it is to place a bet. Many of Marcano’s bets were in line with what a typical twenty-something would bet on a game: longshot bets that functioned primarily as donations from Marcano to the betting operator. It was no surprise that his bets against his own team didn’t work out. Young people who don’t think well of his actions are a target demographic for sports betting. Is it any wonder people played second base instead of watching it on TV?
