so you know how players just throw the ball around after innings?
anthony volpe threw the ball to aaron judge at the end of the fourth inning and judge wasn’t looking and it beaned him in the face. Judge had a cut and needed a bandage and stayed in the game or else volpe probably would’ve been murdered by a yankee fan running onto the field.
Damn, this sucks. Everyone in the south side loved Bobby.
And I guess his home burned down in the Palisades fire which is why they were in Portugal. Ugh
Washington Nationals clean house firing GM and manager
if only DC could do the same thing
pirates lose 1-0 2 games in a row
bonus points for being a skenes start where he gives up 0 runs and strikes out 10 in 5 innings.
woodruff has a good outing for his first appearance since 2023. Good for him.
His arm was pretty fresh after 12 years off.
pirates first team in mlb history to win 3 games by shutout then lose 3 by shutout.
Juan Soto will not be in the all star game
2 players traded for Juan Soto on the Nationals are going to be in the all star game
Let’s go M’s!
Ridiculous.
They gotta give up the minimum one player per team thing. Causes too many snubs.
Nah, the one player per team thing is fun. The Brewers were terrible during most of my childhood and one of the few things I could enjoy each season was seeing my one player introduced during the All-Star game (sometimes they didn’t play, so that was it).
From the Milwaukee Brewers…Ricky Bones!
(I just looked it up - I wasn’t even a “kid” when he made the AS team)
The Blue Jays being up 3 in the division for consecutive days sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, because I knew that was a very rare occurrence for this team.
Since their last World Series win in 1993 – 31.5 seasons, just under 5,000 games played – the Jays have spent a total of 44 days in first place by 3 games or more. By contrast, the Tigers have spent 54 days with a 3+ game lead this season alone.
It could be worse, though – the Pirates have only had eight such days in that time span.
I’m not sure this year anyone actually got snubbed. The Rockies catcher actually is deserving of being an all star.
that’s eight more days than I would’ve guessed for the pirates, they haven’t won a division since 92 and only a wild card a few times.
Ridiculous? It’s the All-Star game, it really couldn’t matter any less. Making sure each team is represented makes a lot of sense to me.
So the Ortiz gambling investigation apparently centers around two specific pitches he threw in June to start innings which received “unusual“ number of wagers.
I’m not sure exactly what monetary upside these players see in these schemes. There’s no way books are allowing you to put much down on first pitch of inning props before limiting you severely. I know the guy basically makes league minimum but that’s still $750K.
If he was throwing the market to ensure a ball on the pitches, he nearly could’ve screwed up that first one, as it certainly could’ve induced a swing.
I don’t know why you quoted unusual. If they’re looking into it, they definitely were unusual amounts and wagers involved.
Throwaway pitches do happen even on pitch 1 though.
For players probably just get a little bit of money from someone who can get significant money down somehow.
Tennis they did it for only a few k, got flagged because too much money got bet by somebody on it all they had to do was throw a game or a set and win anyway, stuff that doesn’t matter at all like that first pitch of an inning they’re not gonna think about it too hard. Risking a lifetime ban though for peanuts, not smart but you’re talking a league of over a thousand players, someone is going to be a massive idiot.
ortiz was coming off a 3 WAR season and the pirates traded him and two minor leaguers for spencer horwitz. (currently -.2 WAR) ortiz is only a 4 ERA guy this year but god the pirates are dumb at times.
He could be in debt to gamblers or mobsters. Jontay Porter had run up debt to the gamblers he conspired with and they basically made him manipulate his over/under.
Is the resolution of bets all they have on him? Seems like some stats nerds could look at his history and get an idea of his tendencies one way or the other?
Also possible it’s a family member and that was the gambler/mobster idea to get out of it so who knows but we got internet sleuths on the case.
“the one pitch is damning for how bad it is” We’ve seen major league pitchers throw awful pitches like that before. It’s just worth looking into when you have so much money unusually thrown on “guy is going to throw an awful pitch” side.
I don’t know who got banned in tennis, but my understanding is there are a lot of tour players who are basically barely making a living. I get them throwing matches for a few K. Very different IMO from a guy who plays for a league min of 3/4 of a million and is decent enough that he’s probably going to start making a few million soon in arbitration.
To the point others are making, I agree it wasn’t necessarily him placing wagers (and probably wasn’t - I don’t think you can make pre-game bets on individual pitches for later innings) and maybe family or people he was indebted to. My point was that seeing people comment on the tendencies of books to immediately limit people, I’d be real curious to see how much money one or more people could get down on such a specific prop.
Knowing no other info, what’s a sufficiently large amount of money he would owe that his $800K salary and $2.2M lifetime earnings wouldn’t be sufficient to cover, but would also be an amount that you could get down on this prop? I have trouble threading the needle of those two.