Tucupita Marcano’s ban puts fine point on MLB’s alliance with gambling

Major League Baseball has brought down the heaviest hammer in its arsenal. On Tuesday, the league issued a lifetime ban to the San Diego Padres’ Tucupita Marcano after its investigation revealed he had repeatedly bet on Pittsburgh Pirates games while a member of that team.

MLB said that Marcano placed 387 bets on baseball between 2022 and 2023, totaling more than $150,000 in wagers. Twenty-five of those bets were parlay wagers that included a bet on his own team to lose. Marcano placed them while he was injured and out of the lineup, and the league and player both deny that he manipulated any games. But it was all much too close for MLB’s comfort, so the league permanently exiled the 24-year-old. MLB suspended four other players one year apiece for lower-tier gambling infractions. Those players bet smaller amounts on games not involving their own teams, though a few of them were minor leaguers who bet on their organization’s major league teams. Nobody punished on Tuesday is a star player, and if MLB has its way, the stories will soon fade from the limelight.

The Marcano matter is the most egregious. The league takes pains to point out that games weren’t compromised, but that anyone could reasonably doubt it is a problem unto itself. The sport’s entire business model – from ticket sales to television viewership to, certainly, its partnerships with sportsbooks – is predicated on the purity of on-field competition. Given Marcano’s bets against his own team, even when he was not playing, the league had no plausible option but to banish him altogether. But that doesn’t get MLB off the hook. The league’s association with betting interests is a dicey proposition, and Marcano is a simple cautionary tale about the ways that intermingling can go awry.

In no sport are gambling scandals a touchier matter than in baseball, the host of two of the highest-profile betting episodes in American sports history. The genre’s worst moment is the Black Sox Scandal, when members of the Chicago White Sox colluded with bettors to rig the 1919 World Series. Another black eye is the banning of the sport’s all-time hits leader, the Cincinnati Reds’ Pete Rose, for his habitual betting on ballgames. Virtually every sport has had problems with gambling intruding on play. 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 was relegated to the minor leagues this season.

Baseball could also be uniquely susceptible to its young players mixing themselves up with betting. Minor league players were often not paid living wages until 2023, when a union organizing effort and collective bargaining agreement reined in clubs’ abuses. Most are still nowhere near wealthy. And even for a player’s first three full seasons in the major leagues, he will only make about $700,000, and that is only if he spends the entire season in the big leagues. Marcano appeared in bits and pieces of three MLB seasons and had made less than $2m, a relatively small amount in a league where stars routinely sign $100m deals 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 wage scale for young players? It’s not unfair to ask.

The league also invites scrutiny through its commercial associations. Ballparks and TV broadcasts are wallpapered with inescapable gambling advertisements, all of them geared toward showing how easy it is to get in on the action. It should be quite simple for pro athletes not to gamble on their sports. They are, after all, business partners with the leagues in which they play, so not betting is the least they could do.

In fact, the rise of legal betting operators helped MLB catch Marcano’s ill-made bets. An unregulated bookie is not subject to monitoring by third-party firms. Marcano’s case is much different than the one centered around Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter, who just pled guilty to bank and tax fraud in a scandal that briefly enveloped the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar at the beginning of the season. With Marcano getting caught, MLB can tell a story that it’s on the frontlines of a push for integrity.

There is, however, an uncomfortable undercurrent. On one hand, MLB handed down a lifetime ban for gambling, while also happily taking money from betting companies. Ballplayers are people too, and they absorb the same advertising that MLB pumps out to fans about how simple and enticing it is to place a bet. Many of Marcano’s were in line with what a typical twentysomething might wager on a game: long-shot parlays that mostly 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 through their actions are a target demographic for sportsbooks. Is it any wonder that one played second base instead of watching on TV?