Now that Cleveland Guardians All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase has joined teammate Luis Ortiz on paid leave during a Major League Baseball investigation into gambling allegations, it’s probably time to look back at the game’s relationship with betting — both legal and illegal.

Baseball’s stance on gambling was a hard line for the better part of a century, ever since the notorious “Black Sox Scandal.”

Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, allegedly in exchange for $80,000 in payments from a gambling syndicate.

The eight players — including the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson — were eventually acquitted in a 1921 trial, but Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned them from baseball for life. Jackson, who had already put together a Hall of Fame-caliber career, also was barred from enshrinement in Cooperstown.

Landis, a federal judge, was installed as the first commissioner of baseball and wielded the harsh punishment in a move to restore the game’s credibility in the wake of its first major scandal. But organized crime didn’t discover baseball in 1919, and those Black Sox players were neither the first nor the last to be banned for gambling. Several scandals involving players and gambling predated the 1919 World Series and others followed over the years.

Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, is the most notable banned former player. He was investigated for gambling while managing the Cincinnati Reds in 1989 and then-Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti banned Rose for life after the probe showed — despite his denials — that Rose had bet on games involving his team.

But Rose and some past players who were banned were eventually reinstated by current Commissioner Rob Manfred earlier this year. For Rose, the reprieve came too late. He died in 2024.

Charlie Hustle, as Rose was known, lived long enough to see baseball and gambling develop into strange bedfellows, given his lifetime ban and those of Shoeless Joe, his fellow Black Sox players and others.

The explosion of legalized gambling both in casinos and online has resulted in professional and college sports embracing betting in ways we couldn’t have imagined even 20 years ago. You can’t watch baseball, basketball, football or hockey anymore without being bombarded by ads and commercials for gambling. If you can think of a situation that is possible in those sports, you can probably find a way to wager on it.

And if you can do that, it stands to reason that professional athletes — with all kinds of free time and more disposable income than most — might also feel the urge to bet. How about owners and front-office people? They’re human, too.

A smattering of lesser-known players have been caught up in gambling scandals in recent years. Now two members of the Guardians’ pitching staff were sidelined while baseball looks into new allegations.

Is it really plausible that no one involved in the highest echelons of professional and college sports saw this coming? What did Manfred — who is responsible for a good number of silly ideas in baseball since he became commissioner — think was going to happen when baseball cozied up to gambling much the way Astonomer’s CEO did with his HR chief at a Coldplay concert?

Professional sports has reaped what it sowed when it gave in to the temptation of gambling and all the money that comes with it. The questions now are whether that Pandora’s box can be closed and if the credibility of sport at the highest levels can be restored.

History shows us what Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis did when baseball was at a critical point in its existence. Rob Manfred doesn’t appear to be that principled and even if he was, it’s likely too late.