When Cleveland Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz spiked a slider in the dirt to begin the third inning of his most recent outing, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Ortiz has thrown more than 1,500 pitches this season, and a third of them have been balls out of the strike zone. There was no reason to think twice about one that slipped.
But within the gambling industry, alarms were blaring. A betting integrity firm had identified unusual wagering activity on that specific pitch being a ball—a pitch Ortiz had just hurled so wildly that it couldn’t have been hit with a tree branch.
