A gambler buddy of Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase swears that Brooklyn prosecutors have it wrong when they say he conspired with the MLB player to fix pitches — the two were talking about rooster fights, not baseball games, the pal said.
The gambler, identified in the indictment against Clase and fellow Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz as “Bettor-1” made the statement in a sworn affidavit, filed by Clase’s lawyers as part of a motion to force prosecutors to disclose more of the evidence against the baseball duo.
“While I never discussed baseball gambling with Emmanuel in any way, I did discuss betting on rooster fighting with him. In the Dominican Republic, gambling on roosters is completely legal and Emmanuel has a rooster fighting operation,” Bettor-1 said. His name is redacted in the court filing.
“At times, I watched these legal rooster fights on Facebook and placed bets on which rooster would win. At times, I paid money to people associated with Emmanuel in the Dominican Republic who run his rooster operation, either to cover bets or expenses related to the roosters. This money was only related to rooster fighting and had nothing to do with gambling on baseball.”
Clase and Ortiz are accused of taking bribes to throw balls instead of strikes and coordinating with bettors who placed “prop bets” on individual pitches through online gambling platforms.
The indictment makes reference to several fixed pitches, including a May 28, 2025, attempt that was foiled when the batter swung at what supposed to be a ball, the feds allege. Bettor-1 texted Clase a GIF of a man hanging himself with toilet paper right after that pitch, according to the indictment.
Bettor-1 said he moved from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. in 2005, and did jobs painting houses and driving an Uber to make ends meet. He met Clase in 2023 through a mutual acquaintance and the two became friends, he said, and he wound up running errands for the ballplayer’s family in Cleveland, at times getting them authentic Dominican food from New York.
He also described himself as a ardent sports fan who often bet on platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel, using his own experience as a baseball player and analysis from ChatGPT to wager on specific pitches, with mixed success.
“I was more confident betting on Emmanuel than any other player because I knew him well and was able to recognize some of his tendencies and pick up on how he was performing in a given game,” he said in the affidavit. “Emmanuel essentially only throws two pitches, a cut fastball and a slider. This made betting on him more simple and I thought I had a better chance of predicting what would happen.”
Clase and Ortiz are set to go to trial in May in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Clase’s defense team argues that prosecutors haven’t given all the evidence they intend to present at trial, and may be burying information that might help their clients in a mountain of Spanish-language messages — some of which might not be made available until the trial is imminent.
“The government, in the indictment, seems to contend that certain, but not all, references to roosters or horses are coded messages meant to disguise the discussion of baseball-gambling related activities,” Clase’s lawyer Michael Ferrara wrote Friday, adding that without disclosures explaining which messages are supposed to be in code, the defense won’t be able to meaningfully sift through the thousands of messages they get through the discovery process.
Lawyers for Clase and Ortiz didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment Monday, and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
