Developing Week One of the Clase Trial Put DraftKings' Own Investigator on the Stand. The Market He Was Watching Stayed Open for Two Years.

Three things happened in Judge Kiyo Matsumoto's Brooklyn courtroom this week that have nothing to do with whether Emmanuel Clase is guilty, and they matter more to this industry than the verdict will.

A DraftKings investigator testified about what his company's systems saw. A cooperating witness described, in dollar terms, how small a bet on a single pitch needs to be to make an insider scheme work. And a catcher who was behind the plate for seven of the 18 pitches the government says were rigged told the jury he saw ordinary sliders. Put the three together and the case for the pitch-level market, as it existed from May 2023 to May 2025, does not survive, whatever the jury does in early December.

What the government says, and what the defence says back

Assistant US Attorney Rebecca Urquiola opened on Wednesday, November 4, by calling Clase and Luis Ortiz "cheaters" who "sold their pitches." The theory, per the AP's Larry Neumeister: Clase befriended a bettor in the Dominican Republic in early 2023 over dominoes and cockfighting, agreed to tell him what he would throw in certain games, then, seeing the gamblers profit, asked for kickbacks. Bettors won at least $460,000. Ortiz was recruited in 2025. The texts used "chicken" and "rooster" as code.

The defence's version is specific and worth taking seriously. Clase's lawyer Michael Bronson described a 25-year-old All-Star who met a 41-year-old gambler named Enoc Pena in spring 2023, a man who placed more than 7,000 bets between 2023 and 2025, told other gamblers he had inside information he did not have, and lost more than 200 bets on Clase's pitches. "He didn't see a peer, a friend. He saw a mark." Ortiz's lawyer Samuel Landes said only two pitches are at issue for his client, both balls: "That's not a conspiracy. That's just baseball." Why, he asked, would a man who had received $1.7 million in advances on future contracts throw it away for $5,000? Prosecutors said last week they will not call Pena. The chicken talk, the defence says, was about actual cockfighting, which is legal in the Dominican Republic.

Matsumoto has said the trial is expected to run to December 3. Clase, 28, and Ortiz, 27, have been on non-disciplinary leave without pay since July 2025 and have not pitched since. A third defendant, Robinson Vásquez Germosén, is on trial with them; the alleged middleman, Luis Arismendy Paca Méndez, was extradited from the Dominican Republic on October 19 and is being prosecuted separately.

The $600 bet

The witness who mattered most to the market question was Edward Canario, who testified Thursday afternoon through an interpreter under a cooperation agreement. Per ESPN's David Purdum, Canario said Paca Méndez, who was living with Clase in Cleveland, told him when to bet on the first pitch of the ninth inning in selected games in May and June 2023. The batter did not matter. Government records showed bets of up to $600 per wager on the pitch being slower than 94.5 mph, or resulting in a ball or a hit batsman. Canario paid Paca Méndez half of his winnings and ate all of the losses. "I had inside information on these pitches," he said. On cross, he conceded Paca Méndez never used those words; he called them "for-sure bets."

Six hundred dollars. That is the number to hold onto. A scheme that the government says ran for two years and cleared at least $460,000 did not need a whale. It needed many accounts making bets that sat inside every limit a sportsbook had set for a market nobody at the book thought was a problem. Friday's witness, Luis Alberto de Aza Baez, described the other half of the method, per Los Angeles Magazine's Lauren Conlin: DraftKings accounts, including one in his wife's name, and parlays, which combine the pitch outcome with other legs and multiply a small stake. He said he won nearly every time he bet on the tips. He owes $69,000 in restitution or forfeiture under his own deal.

What DraftKings saw

Joel Trella, director of DraftKings' special investigations unit, testified Thursday that the company identified 160 geolocation pings from DraftKings accounts used at Clase's house. A government attorney later said 14 people were geolocated there. Trella also said the data does not establish who placed the bets, which is true and is the point.

A sportsbook's surveillance is built to catch a customer, not a market. It knows where a phone was and what the phone bet. It is not built to notice that the first pitch of the ninth inning in Cleveland is drawing correlated money from a cluster of accounts, because until November 2025 nobody had told it that market was different from any other. The 160 pings are evidence that the data existed the whole time. They are also evidence that data is not detection.

Major League Baseball understood this the day after the indictment. On November 10, 2025, the league announced that every authorized operator, a group it said covers more than 98% of the US market, would cap pitch-level wagers at $200 and exclude them from parlays, with Rob Manfred calling the markets "particularly vulnerable to integrity concerns." That is a market-design fix, not a surveillance fix, and it addresses both of the methods the two cooperators described: the stake and the parlay. It took a federal indictment to produce it. Nothing in the first week of testimony suggests it would have come any other way.

The catcher

Bo Naylor, who caught 14 of Ortiz's 16 starts in 2025 and seven of Clase's 18 alleged pitches, testified for the defence on Thursday, out of order, because he is travelling to be married. Shown the video, he said the pitches looked like common sliders outside the zone, and that the scouting report on the hitters Ortiz faced on June 27, 2025, including Pedro Pages, said "slider low and away" was a weapon. He said he did not know pitch-by-pitch betting existed until the case became public. He agreed that sharing information outside the team would be a "betrayal," and said he did not suspect either pitcher.

This is the strongest thing the defence has, and it should be stated at its strongest: a pitch thrown deliberately outside the strike zone is indistinguishable, on video and to the man catching it, from a pitch thrown outside the strike zone on purpose for baseball reasons. Pitchers waste pitches. Sliders miss low and away by design. If the jury is asked to find manipulation from the pitches alone, it cannot. The government knows this, which is why its case is texts, a video call, kickbacks and two cooperators, not velocity charts. The defence plans to call three former Guardians catchers; Naylor was the first.

Here is why that argument, if it wins, indicts the market rather than clearing it. A betting market on an event whose manipulated and unmanipulated outcomes look identical from the outside is a market in which the only possible integrity check is the one the DraftKings investigator described: after the fact, from account data, once someone has told you where to look. A first-pitch-of-the-ninth ball-or-strike market has no price discovery to protect, no public information to aggregate, and a single person who decides the outcome. "That's just baseball" is a complete defence to the criminal charge and a complete description of why the product should not have been on the board at $600 a click with parlays attached.

The case for the market, and the courthouse down the hall

The counterargument from the operators has always been that a legal market with surveillance beats an illegal one without it, and that pitch-level bets were a tiny share of handle that let the legal books compete on product. The first part is right in general and wrong here. The surveillance did not stop a two-year scheme; the league's cap did, after the fact. The second part has been settled by the operators themselves, who agreed to the cap in a day. If the product were worth defending, someone would have.

We do not know how the jury will see Canario, who admitted on cross that his source never claimed inside information, or Baez, whose direct examination was still running Friday afternoon. We do not know what the three catchers will say about the 2023 pitches. We do know that Enoc Pena, the man both sides describe as the origin of the scheme, will not testify, which means the jury will hear about him only from people with deals.

The same courthouse told the week's second story. On Friday, former NBA forward Ed Davis signalled through a docket entry that he will change his plea to guilty in the Brooklyn case alleging he and Malik Beasley worked to fix at least four games in 2023-24, per ESPN's Tom Schad. Beasley's plea hearing is December 9. The text the government quotes from Davis, from December 2023, reads: "Only way you can beat Vegas is sports betting." The NBA schemes, as alleged, ran on single-player unders in parlays; the league's October 16 letter told its sportsbooks to stop offering them, per InGame, citing a Jontay Porter bettor who turned $7,000 into $33,250 that way. The baseball scheme, as alleged, ran on single-pitch outcomes in parlays; the league capped them the day after the indictment. In both sports the market structure that made the scheme workable was removed by the league, after a prosecutor found it. That sequence, repeated twice inside a year, is the finding of the week, and it did not need a jury.