Gambling Suspensions -- But Not Ohtani
PLUS: MENDOZA LINE DIVIDES GOOD HITTERS FROM BAD
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
The San Diego Padres set several team records with 11 hits and nine runs in one inning at Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium last weekend . . .
Atlanta southpaw Chris Sale enjoyed the best month of his career in May with a 5-0 record and 0.56 ERA . . .
Another lefty, two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell, hasn’t been so fortunate, with a myriad of injuries (left abductor strain, groin) since signing a two-year, $62 million deal (including an opt-out after 2024) with the Giants just before the end of a spring training . . .
Amazing but true: Seth Lugo, now with Kansas City, has vaulted from journeyman reliever to Cy Young contender since leaving the Mets bullpen . . .
Baltimore’s new ownership group, headed by David Rubenstein, includes Cal Ripken, Jr., Grant Hill, and former mayors Michael Bloomberg (New York) and Kurt Schmoke (Baltimore) . . .
Had the Yankees signed Blake Snell, they would have become the first team with two current Cy Young Award winners since the 1990 Royals had Bret Saberhagen and Mark Davis.
Leading Off
Quiet guys like Marcano screw up, too
It isn’t just the Pete Rose types who bet on their own teams
By Jeff Kallman
[Editor’s Note: Earlier this week, Major League Baseball officially absolved Dodgers DH Shohei Ohtani of gambling infractions after his interpreter allegedly stole $16 million from the slugger’s account to pay for bad bets on baseball.]
It took 35 years before a second major-leaguer in the modern era received a lifetime ban for betting on baseball and his own team while he was at it. The first, of course, was a man who’d have gone into Cooperstown — no questions asked — otherwise. The second is a utility infielder who couldn’t be more opposite the first if he’d trained for it.
Tucupita Marcano is described in numerous places as a soft-spoken, hard working, drama-free young man who came from Venezuela with his drafting team hoping he’d grow into himself, as The Athletic’s Sam Blum phrases it. The kind of person you’d sooner see at a quiet spot than in the middle of a scandal.
Pete Rose, of course, was a hard-working Cincinnati kid, and that’s where any comparison to Marcano ends. On the surface, Rose had to grow into himself, too, in the beginning. But nobody ever accused him of being soft spoken or drama free. Dive deep into Rose’s history and you might swear his most quiet moments were when he was sound asleep.
The Padres drafted Marcano in 2016, dealt him to the Pirates at the 2021 trade deadline for Adam Frazier (who’s since played for the Mariners, the Orioles, and now the Royals), and took him back off the waiver wire last November. He wasn’t all that much of a hitter, but he seemed to have a future as a defensive standout whose best position according to his range factors and runs saved above his league average (16) was second base.
That’s where Rose began his career, too, though he went on to become a multiple-position player whose actual best position (and the only one he played to a positive runs-saved outcome) was left field. And Rose from almost the outset was about 50 or more times the hitter Marcano has appeared to be thus far.
Now the pair has something disgraceful in common: permanent banishment from baseball for betting on their own teams. Rose stood alone when the hammer dropped in 1989 but Marcano is one of five players disciplined Tuesday for betting on baseball.
The other four—Athletics relief pitcher Michael Kelly, Padres minor-league pitcher Jay Groome, Phillies minor-league infielder José Rodríguez, and Diamondbacks pitcher Andrew Saalfrank (who had three appearances in last year’s World Series)—were clipped for a year each for betting on the sport while in the minors.
Rule 21(d) prohibits players, coaches, managers, and other team personnel from betting on the sport at all. It prescribed a year’s banishment for betting on games other than their own teams and a permanent banishment for betting on games involving their own teams.
Because Kelly, Groome, Rodríguez, and Saalfrank were playing on different teams in the minors when they were exposed, their bets on their parent clubs weren’t considered bets on their own teams.
Blum says that quartet never bet more than $750 total on baseball games and Kelly bet under $100, but that’s actually as irrelevant as Marcano’s reportedly dropping $150,000 on baseball bets while he was still with the Pirates—including bets on and against the Pirates—after a season-ending knee injury.
But Rule 21(d) also doesn’t make exceptions for the dollar total of bets, any more than it makes exceptions for Hall of Fame-qualifying players above mere regulars or spare parts.
Those who think baseball’s promotional trucking with such legal sports betting operations as FanDuel or DraftKings mean banishing Marcano or keeping Rose in the Phantom Zone equal hypocrisy should remember that those promo deals were aimed purely toward fans placing bets on baseball games.
Baseball players can gamble on anything they like where it’s legal—except baseball itself. They can have all the high-stakes clubhouse card games they wish; all the basketball, hockey, and football pools they desire; bet the horse races as often as they crave. But they can’t bet on baseball.
If you think that, too, might be a little hypocritical, picture the distillery worker. You can’t show up at the Jack Daniels facility bombed out of your trees or get drunk while on the job without risking your prompt unemployment.
If anything, baseball having promotional ties to legal gambling helped the sport uncover Marcano, Groome, Kelly, Rodríguez, and Saalfrank. MLB receives regular tips from assorted legal sports books, which is how the sport learned of the foregoing quintet in the first place, apparently.
Marcano is 24, and his taste for betting on his own team has killed his baseball career after it took him parts of three seasons to play almost a full season’s worth of major league games. Rose was twice Marcano’s age when he was banished, with a resumé of 24 seasons as a major league player and seven as a manager, in three of which he was a player-manager.
Rule 21(d) can kill your career either when it’s still partially in the crib or when you’ve had a quarter century plus in the game behind you. Marcano barely had time to accumulate memories of the game. But he has the rest of a long life to come to remake it. Maybe that’s the one way in which he gets off lucky.
The Hall of Fame has yet to rescind its rule barring those on the permanently-ineligible list from appearing on any Hall ballot. Rose still has almost three decades of baseball achievement and memories to haunt him for having been squandered the way he did it, and without a plaque in Cooperstown to show for it.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
Many Good Hitters Still Stuck Under Mendoza Line
By Dan Schlossberg
Quick! What do Corbin Carroll, Cedric Mullins, Randy Arozarena, and D.J. Stewart have in common?
Answer: they all limped through the first two months of the 2024 season with batting averages below the Mendoza Line.
And they weren’t alone.
Throw in George Springer, Daniel Vogelbach, Chris Vasquez, Chris Taylor, Hunter Renfroe, Vaughn Grissom, and Yan Gomes, among others.
Even Aaron Judge and Matt Olson struggled mightily well into May before righting their ships.
What gives?
Named after Mario Mendoza, a good-field, no-hit shortstop who’s been out of the majors for 36 years, the Mendoza Line refers to players with batting averages above or below .200.
In five of his nine major-league season, the 5-11, 170-pound Mexican hit less than .200, bottoming out with a .118 average for Texas in 1982.
But at least he wasn’t Luis Pujols, a third-string catcher who hit .193 over nine seasons.
Like Mendoza, he stayed afloat solely because of his glovework.
Mendoza, the 28th Mexican native to reach the majors, is actually a member of the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame. He was a minor-league manager and coach for years after he left the big leagues.
But Mexicans remember the bespectacled infielder as Manos des Seda — SilkHands in English. The guy could really pick it at short.
He even helped thwart George Brett’s quest for a .400 season late in the 1980 season by making three tough plays against the Kansas City superstar during a series in Seattle.
Ironically, it was the brainy Brett who gets the credit for creating the “Mendoza Line” tag. He once told Kansas City writers that “the first thing I look for in the Sunday papers is who is below the Mendoza Line.”
Mendoza argues that Bruce Bochte and Tom Paciorek, his teammates in Seattle, were the originators, one year earlier. “They were giving George a hard time because he had a slow start and told him, ‘Hey man, you’re going to sink down below the Mendoza Line if you’re not careful.’”
Then Brett mentioned it to Chris Berman, Mendoza said, and the new nickname stuck.
For Mendoza, the appelation was well deserved: he had four home runs in 1415 plate appearances. Plenty of pitchers hit more, with Rick Wise hitting a pair and pitching a no-hitter in the same game.
Mendoza played for the Pirates, Mariners, and Rangers, hitting a combined .215 with a .245 on-base percentage. Outfielders came in when he came up to bat.
But teams loved his defense. The M’s even used him in 148 games in a single season.
He never made the All-Star team — not even as a defensive replacement — but Mario Mendoza’s name lives in baseball history.
Former AP newsman Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ covers the game for forbes.com, Memories & Dreams, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, Sports Collectors Digest, MLB Report, and Here’s The Pitch, among others. He also finds time to write baseball books, including the new Home Run King: the Remarkable Record of Hank Aaron. Dan’s email is ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia: Shortstops Often Prove Versatile
"He's elite. He's a game-changer. That's the reason he made the team. It wasn't the offense, it was his defense. He can play shortstop because he's a great athlete, but in center field, that's natural for him."
— Red Sox manager Alex Cora on rookie Ceddanne Rafaela
Boston had hoped its 2024 infield would feature the double-play tandem of Trevor Story at short and newly-acquired Vaughn Grissom at second but injuries intervened, with Story lost for months after hurting his shoulder and Grissom the victim of persistent hamstring problems . . .
Former Boston shortstop Xander Bogaerts, will miss most of this season with a shoulder injury. Now with the Padres, Bogaerts shifted to second earlier this year after switching spots with Ha-seong Kim as the team tried to upgrade its defense . . .
Last year, the San Diego middle infield rated ninth in turning grounders into outs but sank to 12th this spring . . .
The same team already moved one shortstop to third base (Manny Machado), another to first base (Jake Cronenworth), and a third to right field (Fernando Tatis Jr.), then moved another shortstop (pre-season No. 12 overall prospect Jackson Merrill) to center field, filling the outfield void created by the trade that sent Juan Soto and Trent Grisham to the Yankees.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.