In the top of the third inning during a July 6, 2025 game against the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians pitcher Luis Ortiz spiked a slider in the dirt for a ball. It was one pitch. Ortiz carries a 1.38 WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched)—a solid indicator of a pitcher’s control. That is higher than the 1.30 benchmark generally thought to be good. He is not a renowned control pitcher—no big deal.
Nevertheless, a hullaballoo ensued because a betting integrity company called IC360 detected an unusual amount of money bet on that single pitch regarding whether it would be a ball or strike. Like a coin toss, it is a 50-50 proposition, but most of the money bet said it would be a ball. If you knew Ortiz would throw a ball, and you bet big, it was winner, winner, chicken dinner.
This is the inside baseball: An automated surveillance system must have spotted the anomaly. An analyst followed up on the alert, saw Ortiz spike the pitch, looked for a pattern of similar activity, found it and reported it. Ortiz is now suspended from baseball, and there is increased attention being paid to “spot-fixing,” a phenomenon where a singular event in a game, like a single pitch, is “fixed” to ensure the outcome of a prop bet—a wager on a particular event within the game.
Kudos to IC360 for “catching” the pitch. The public has no special insight into their tools, but anyone who has worked in anti-money laundering (AML) compliance at a bank has a pretty good guess what happened: The real credit goes to an analyst, who turned an automated surveillance system alert into a much-needed solid hit.
U.S. banks and other financial institutions (FIs), like casinos, are required to have AML programs built to identify and report suspicious activity. To accomplish this, they spend billions annually on automated transaction surveillance tools, and if they fail to report a suspicious transaction the monetary penalties regulators may impose can be astronomical.
In baseball, you are great if you bat .300, meaning that you get a hit three out of ten times at bat. A 70% fail rate can get you in the Hall of Fame. Bank automated transaction systems are estimated to maintain a 95% fail rate. That is a batting average of around .050. Did I mention that banks (who are not renowned for wasting money) spend billions on that return? A 2020 report estimated that U.S. FIs spent $35.2 billion on AML compliance for that .050 average; if their failure rate scaled linearly with that expenditure, they would have to spend over $210 billion annually to bat .300.
Was it luck that Ortiz’s pitch drew attention? Maybe. We rightly complain about the huge numbers of worthless alerts produced by automated surveillance systems. Many times, they are implemented to appease unrealistic regulatory expectations, and resolving millions of pointless alerts in the name of “doing something” can distract us from finding real suspicious activity. But here, the system was set up to ask a simple and valuable question—why was there so much more money bet on this single pitch?—and it did its job. This is by no means an ode to automated surveillance systems. But Yogi Berra had a point: “You can observe a lot just by watching.” If casinos use their AML tools to monitor for betting anomalies they will not only protect their bottom line from cheaters engaged in “spot-fixing,” but also improve the batting average of their AML automated transaction monitoring systems.
Arthur D. Middlemiss, managing partner, Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss PLLC, New York, NY, USA, Arthur.Middlemiss@LBKMLAW.com, 
