For more than two years, one of Major League Baseball’s most feared pitchers would alert sports bettors to his strategy on the mound, allowing them to illicitly rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars with the inside information, according to federal prosecutors.
But in court documents made public on Friday, one of the people who bet on Emmanuel Clase’s pitches made an unusual claim. He said he had talked about rooster fighting, not baseball, with Mr. Clase.
Mr. Clase, a relief pitcher for the Cleveland Guardians, ran a well-known rooster-fighting operation in the Dominican Republic, where the practice is legal, and their conversations centered around gambling on those fights, rather than on baseball, said the bettor, who was not named in the court documents.
The statement was included in a joint legal filing made by lawyers representing Mr. Clase and Luis Ortiz, another Guardians pitcher who was indicted in November in the gambling scheme.
In the indictment, prosecutors seemed to interpret messages about roosters and horses as coded messages about gambling on baseball, the defense lawyers wrote. It is in the players’ interest to come up with an alternative explanation for the messages and transactions that prosecutors say are incriminating and betrayed baseball.
The man, a self-professed “big sports fan,” gambled on Mr. Clase’s pitches, he said, because he recognized his tendencies as a pitcher, including the fact that Mr. Clase threw only two pitches, a cut fastball and a slider. But he said he had not discussed the pitches with Mr. Clase.
The bettor’s statement suggests how both players might defend themselves at a trial, scheduled for May, in a federal case that is one of several that have rocked the world of professional sports in recent months and have heightened concerns about leagues’ ties to gambling companies.
Mr. Clase is “a well-publicized breeder and participant in rooster fighting activities,” their lawyers wrote, and both players are “horse enthusiasts” who care for horses and other livestock in the Dominican Republic.
In October, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn brought charges against more than 30 defendants in two criminal cases, including an N.B.A. insider-trading scheme in which sports bettors are accused of using nonpublic information about the availability of players to make wagers on player and team underperformance.
Mr. Clase and Mr. Ortiz’s case has also shed light on the world of prop bets and microbets, which have emerged as a core business for gambling companies. In contrast to bets on the outcome of a game, prop bets are based on an event or a player performance not directly tied to the game’s outcome. Microbets are prop bets whose outcome can be resolved in seconds, like bets on pitches.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York declined to comment. Lawyers for Mr. Clase and Mr. Ortiz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Clase, according to federal prosecutors, started working with bettors in May 2023 to fix certain pitches in forthcoming games. Mr. Ortiz joined the scheme in 2025, prosecutors said, and together, bettors made around $450,000 from betting on their pitches. Prosecutors pointed to messages exchanged between the pitchers and individual gamblers as evidence of that coordination. In one such example, from April 12, 2025, after Mr. Clase informed the bettors of a forthcoming pitch, they won $15,000 by wagering that it would be a ball thrown slower than 98.5 miles per hour.
The next day, Mr. Clase texted the unnamed bettor and asked whether the bettor had been able to “wager anything,” according to prosecutors. After the bettor responded affirmatively, Mr. Clase told the bettor to “send some of it to the DR,” or the Dominican Republic.
Yet the money the bettor sent back to the Dominican Republic, he said, was intended for people who ran Mr. Clase’s rooster operation. The bettor, a citizen of the Dominican Republic who now lives in Boston, has known Mr. Clase since 2023, according to the affidavit. He also wrote about being a prolific gambler who used ChatGPT to inform wagers. Rooster fighting is illegal in the United States, but it remains wildly popular in the Dominican Republic. In 2008, the Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez courted controversy in the United States when a video surfaced of him attending a cockfight in the Dominican Republic.
The two pitchers are due back in court on Thursday.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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