Less than a year after the Ippei Mizuhara and Tucupita Marcano scandals rocked MLB, the sport has had a major gambling issue arise once more, as the league has fired umpire Pat Hoberg for sharing betting accounts with a friend who bet actively on the sport.
Hoberg was fired after a roughly year-long investigation, including an appeal of an initial termination decision, which found he shared betting accounts with a professional poker player, and also intentionally deleted messages that were central to the probe into his conduct. MLB did not find any activity that Hoberg himself bet on baseball or manipulated the outcomes of games, and he also stridently denies any such activity.
The league, however, still concluded Hoberg failed to “uphold the integrity of the game.”
“His extremely poor judgment … creates at minimum the appearance of impropriety that warrants imposing the most severe discipline,” said MLB commissioner Rob Manfred.
Hoberg can apply for reinstatement upon the start of spring training in 2026. He has been an MLB umpire since 2014, full-time since 2017, and widely regarded as one of the league’s best. Computer tracking even determined Hoberg had an “umpire’s perfect game” during Game 2 of the 2022 World Series, correctly calling balls and strikes on all 129 taken pitches.
“I apologize to Major League Baseball and the entire baseball community for my mistakes,” Hoberg said. “I vow to learn from them and to be a better version of myself.”
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The Hoberg firing represents the third major incidence of gambling-related violations in MLB since last spring. Mizuhara, the former interpreter and friend of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, was found to have stolen more than $16 million from the phenom to fund his gambling addiction. He pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud last June and is now awaiting sentencing.
Marcano was banned for life in June after investigators found that he placed hundreds of bets on MLB games while in the minor leagues.
Across the industry, however, match-fixing continues to drop, thanks in part to improved monitoring and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to flag betting anomalies.
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