Yahoo Sports Senior MLB Analyst Jake Mintz and Senior MLB Analyst Jordan Shusterman react to the news of Tucupita Marcano’s lifetime ban from MLB and the one-year suspensions of four other minor league players for gambling in baseball. Listen to the full conversation on the “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” podcast — and subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Video transcript
Tuca Pita Marano, an injured mediocre utility player currently employed by San Diego.
Padres have officially received a lifetime ban from major league baseball for betting on major league baseball games.
In this ad, four other players, Andrews Frank, who is a pitcher for the Diamondbacks, Michael Kelly, a pitcher for the Oakland A’s Jose Rodriguez, an infielder for the Philadelphia Phillies, and Jay Groom, a pitcher for the San Diego Padres.
All received one-year suspensions for betting on MLB games.
Their suspensions were, were, were shorter because they bet on these MLB games while they were in the minor leagues.
That’s the main distinction here.
Another important distinction between Marca’s action and the actions of the other four players is that Marcão was betting much more money on the games.
Many more times that totaled around 100 and 50,000.
All the other guys were, I believe, under $500 in total bets.
Now that, as we all know, llB has these very close gaming partners, these partners, uh, clearly part of this deal was, hey, um, so we’re going to have all these deals and we’re all going to make a bunch of money and it’s going to be great.
But should you realize that someone with an account on your site where you can bet your money is associated with a baseball player?
You need to inform us as soon as possible.
And that’s what happened here.
No gaming activity was impacting play on the field other than the integrity of wins and losses performance on the diamond.
None of this was influenced by these bets because the four minor leaguers were not in the major leagues when they made these bets.
ET Capito Marano was in the AL MLB and is taking a very strong stance here because they need to keep Church and State separate.
The game on the field cannot be influenced by all the gambling going on around it.
It’s very difficult for MLB to keep these two things separate because they have embraced the gaming world because it makes them a lot of money.
And so trying to thread the needle will be difficult for the league moving forward.
And I think part of Manfred’s statement is that we’ve made it clear that the privilege of playing baseball comes with the responsibility to refrain from engaging in certain types of behavior that are cool with other people.
It’s really the only thing that’s non-negotiable and, and, and that’s why we got here
