San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano has been declared permanently ineligible for violating MLB’s sports betting rules. He becomes the first MLB player since Pete Rose in 1989 to be banned under the league’s rules and policies. As sports leagues have become tightly integrated with the gaming industry, betting scandals are going to become the norm.

According to MLB, Marcano placed 387 baseball bets, including 231 MLB-related bets, as well as bets on international baseball play over the course of a week in October of 2022 and from July 12, 2023 through November 1, 2023. All told, he wagered more than $150,000 on baseball, with $87,319 of that on MLB-related bets. During that time he was with the Pittsburgh Pirates. According to the league, he consistently wagered on parlays, some of which were the Pirates. Marcano lost all of his parlays involving the Pirates and only won 4.3% of all of his MLB-related bets overall.

The league states that – and Marcano denies – that he influenced play to alter game outcomes.

On top of Marcano, MLB announced that other players, Michael Kelly (Oakland Athletics pitcher); and Minor League players Jay Groome (Padres pitcher), José Rodríguez (Philadelphia Phillies infielder) and Andrew Saalfrank (Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher) declared ineligible for one year for violating MLB’s sports betting rules and policies.

All bets were made through a legal sports betting operator.

Major League Baseball has had strict rules and policies around players wagering on baseball and other sports since the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal that centered on eight players that, to one level or another, were deemed to be altering game outcomes by an investigation by the first commissioner for Major League Baseball, Kennesaw “Mountain” Landis. Since then, Rule 21 has been in place which states that any MLB player found to have gambled on baseball can face lifetime banishment from the sport.

In 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal law that prohibited sports betting, it opened the floodgates for all the major sports leagues to reach lucrative partnerships with the gaming industry. With media outlets becoming integrated, the stage was set for sports betting scandals to flourish.

As part of Major League Baseball’s statement on Marcano and the other players involved in betting, they placed the onus on the players saying “requires its personnel to participate annually in sports betting education programs that reiterate the policies applicable to respective groups” and went onto to say that players must attend in-person sessions that are in both English and Spanish that specify the requirements of Major League Rule 21 and MLB’s Sports Betting Policy as well as other best practices.

With players being often young and impressionable, the ease of wagering via smartphones, and the bombardment of sports wagering opportunities across all forms of media, the sports leagues have opened Pandora’s Box. Beyond today’s MLB discipline, the following has either occurred or is in the midst of investigation within roughly the past year:

• In June of last year, the NFL indefinitely suspended Isaiah Rodgers and Rashod Berry of the Indianapolis Colts and free agent Demetrius Taylor for wagering on NFL games. In addition, Tennessee Titans offensive tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere was suspended six games for betting on other sports at the workplace.
• In April, the NBA banned Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter for being in violation of the league’s gambling policy. He was found to have disclosed confidential information to sports bettors, as well as altered game outcome by limiting participation in some games.
• Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for MLB superstar Shohei Ohtani, is expected to plead guilty to stealing more than $17 million from Ohtani as part of wagering on sports through an illegal bookmaker.
• MLB is still investigating David Fletcher, Ohtani’s former teammate on the Los Angeles Angels, on whether he wagered on sports through the same illegal bookmaker.

The first professional player in North American sports to be banned permanently for sports betting since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2018 was Josh Shaw of the Arizona Cardinals. While he was the first in this new era of making sports betting so vastly available, he is just the beginning of what will be more scandals.

While today’s news of Tucupita Marcano banishment is the latest, at what point will the 1919 Black Sox scandal be revisited? Could the Super Bowl, or NBA Finals, or the Stanley Cup Finals be jeopardized in the future due to sports wagering becoming foisted on not just fans, but the players? When the major sports leagues opted to take the revenues from the sports wagering industry, the dance with the devil was part of that calculus. That dance appears to have the tempo increasing.