Quiet guys like Marcano screw up, too; it isn’t just the Pete Rose types who bet on their own teams

By Jeff Kallman

[Editor’s Note: Earlier this week, Major League Baseball officially absolved Dodgers DH Shohei Ohtani of gambling infractions after his interpreter allegedly stole $16 million from the slugger’s account to pay for bad bets on baseball.]

It took 35 years before a second major-leaguer in the modern era received a lifetime ban for betting on baseball and his own team while he was at it. The first, of course, was a man who’d have gone into Cooperstown — no questions asked — otherwise. The second is a utility infielder who couldn’t be more opposite the first if he’d trained for it.

Tucupita Marcano has been banned for life for gambling.Photo byCNN

Tucupita Marcano is described in numerous places as a soft-spoken, hard working, drama-free young man who came from Venezuela with his drafting team hoping he’d grow into himself, as The Athletic’s Sam Blum phrases it. The kind of person you’d sooner see at a quiet spot than in the middle of a scandal.

Pete Rose, of course, was a hard-working Cincinnati kid, and that’s where any comparison to Marcano ends. On the surface, Rose had to grow into himself, too, in the beginning. But nobody ever accused him of being soft spoken or drama free. Dive deep into Rose’s history and you might swear his most quiet moments were when he was sound asleep.

The Padres drafted Marcano in 2016, dealt him to the Pirates at the 2021 trade deadline for Adam Frazier (who’s since played for the Mariners, the Orioles, and now the Royals), and took him back off the waiver wire last November. He wasn’t all that much of a hitter, but he seemed to have a future as a defensive standout whose best position according to his range factors and runs saved above his league average (16) was second base.

That’s where Rose began his career, too, though he went on to become a multiple-position player whose actual best position (and the only one he played to a positive runs-saved outcome) was left field. And Rose from almost the outset was about 50 or more times the hitter Marcano has appeared to be thus far.

Now the pair has something disgraceful in common: permanent banishment from baseball for betting on their own teams. Rose stood alone when the hammer dropped in 1989 but Marcano is one of five players disciplined Tuesday for betting on baseball.

The other four—Athletics relief pitcher Michael Kelly, Padres minor-league pitcher Jay Groome, Phillies minor-league infielder José Rodríguez, and Diamondbacks pitcher Andrew Saalfrank (who had three appearances in last year’s World Series)—were clipped for a year each for betting on the sport while in the minors.

Rule 21(d) prohibits players, coaches, managers, and other team personnel from betting on the sport at all. It prescribed a year’s banishment for betting on games other than their own teams and a permanent banishment for betting on games involving their own teams.

Because Kelly, Groome, Rodríguez, and Saalfrank were playing on different teams in the minors when they were exposed, their bets on their parent clubs weren’t considered bets on their own teams.

Blum says that quartet never bet more than $750 total on baseball games and Kelly bet under $100, but that’s actually as irrelevant as Marcano’s reportedly dropping $150,000 on baseball bets while he was still with the Pirates—including bets on and against the Pirates—after a season-ending knee injury.

But Rule 21(d) also doesn’t make exceptions for the dollar total of bets, any more than it makes exceptions for Hall of Fame-qualifying players above mere regulars or spare parts.

Those who think baseball’s promotional trucking with such legal sports betting operations as FanDuel or DraftKings mean banishing Marcano or keeping Rose in the Phantom Zone equal hypocrisy should remember that those promo deals were aimed purely toward fans placing bets on baseball games.

Baseball players can gamble on anything they like where it’s legal—except baseball itself. They can have all the high-stakes clubhouse card games they wish; all the basketball, hockey, and football pools they desire; bet the horse races as often as they crave. But they can’t bet on baseball.

If you think that, too, might be a little hypocritical, picture the distillery worker. You can’t show up at the Jack Daniels facility bombed out of your trees or get drunk while on the job without risking your prompt unemployment.

If anything, baseball having promotional ties to legal gambling helped the sport uncover Marcano, Groome, Kelly, Rodríguez, and Saalfrank. MLB receives regular tips from assorted legal sports books, which is how the sport learned of the foregoing quintet in the first place, apparently.

Marcano is 24, and his taste for betting on his own team has killed his baseball career after it took him parts of three seasons to play almost a full season’s worth of major league games. Rose was twice Marcano’s age when he was banished, with a resumé of 24 seasons as a major league player and seven as a manager, in three of which he was a player-manager.

Rule 21(d) can kill your career either when it’s still partially in the crib or when you’ve had a quarter century plus in the game behind you. Marcano barely had time to accumulate memories of the game. But he has the rest of a long life to come to remake it. Maybe that’s the one way in which he gets off lucky.

The Hall of Fame has yet to rescind its rule barring those on the permanently-ineligible list from appearing on any Hall ballot. Rose still has almost three decades of baseball achievement and memories to haunt him for having been squandered the way he did it, and without a plaque in Cooperstown to show for it.

Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.