Ex-Guardians catcher Bo Naylor testifies that he didnt know gamblers bet on singular pitches
Catcher Bo Naylor, a former teammate of Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, testified Thursday at their New York sports betting trial that he didn’t know gamblers could place bets on individual pitches until the criminal case arose.Naylor, called as a defense witness out of turn because he is heading to his wedding, made the revelation under cross-examination by Assistant U.S.Attorney James Simmons, who asked if he knew such bets occurred at the time of 2025 baseball game recordings shown to a Brooklyn jury.“I didn’t know that before,” he said.
“I didn’t know that until the situation.”“You didn’t know people bet tens of thousands of dollars on pitches?” the prosecutor asked him, though Naylor was stopped from answering when an objection by defense lawyers was sustained.The testimony reflected how quickly sports-betting possibilities have blossomed in recent years.Legal sports betting has spread to 39 states in a steady expansion since the U.S.
Supreme Court cleared the way for it in 2018.Betting on whether a pitch will be a ball or strike is a form of prop betting, a popular type of wager often focused on individual players — like achieving a certain number of strikeouts in baseball, or points and rebounds in basketball or surpassing a particular passing yardage in football.Naylor, who was traded by Cleveland to the Milwaukee Brewers in August just weeks before his new team won the World Series, was shown dozens of clips of pitches thrown by Clase and Ortiz in 2025 when he was questioned first by defense lawyers for the pitchers.The lawyers elicited from Naylor that catchers notify pitchers what pitches they should throw and where they should aim them before each pitch.Naylor said catchers and pitchers develop a strategy during pregame meetings of how to best pitch to each opponent to get an out based on an analysis of the weak spots in the hitting habits of each batter.He also acknowledged that pitchers, even the best...