No. 2025.11.09 · Modern Era
Clase and Ortiz Are Indicted
Federal prosecutors charged Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz with rigging pitches for bettors. The indictment alleges the bettors won at least $450,000. Both pitchers had already been placed on leave. The case was not finished when the charges were made public.
Emmanuel Clase pitching for the Guardians at Progressive Field, May 14, 2023. Not related to the indictment.
Erik Drost / CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
The indictment was returned on November 5, 2025, and unsealed on November 9, in federal court in Brooklyn. Prosecutors charged Cleveland pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz with agreeing, in advance, to the speed and type of particular pitches so that bettors could wager on them. The indictment alleges that the arrangement with Clase went back to 2023, that the pitches often went in the dirt, and that Ortiz joined in June 2025. It alleges the bettors won at least $450,000.
Ortiz had been placed on leave on July 3, 2025. Both pitchers were on leave through the summer. A superseding indictment was filed on February 12, 2026. An indictment is a set of charges. It is not a verdict. This entry states the charges and the leave. It does not state a result the court had not reached.
What the catalog can file, on the date the charges were unsealed, is that two major-league pitchers were accused of selling the shape of a pitch. The pitches named in the indictment were not alleged to have decided a pennant. They were alleged to have been decided before they were thrown.
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