Active pitcher turned down offer to fix games: club

An active baseball pitcher has acknowledged he turned down an offer from a gambler to join in match-fixing schemes, the player’s club said Wednesday, as match-rigging rumors snowball across all local professional leagues.

Moon Sung-hyun, a right-hander for the Nexen Heroes in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), told team officials he turned away an operator of an illegal sports betting site, who approached the pitcher through a mutual friend.

The Heroes are in Arizona for offseason training.

According to team officials, Moon himself didn’t know the Web site operator and didn’t hear anything about financial compensation for his participation in schemes.

The Heroes conducted their own internal inquiry in Arizona, after allegations of potential match fixing in baseball emerged earlier.

“It is not as if Moon reported himself,” a Nexen official said.

“We were in the process of trying to verify rumors and then learned of his situation.”

Moon, 20, is entering his third season with the Seoul-based Heroes. He has gone 6-17 with a 4.55 earned run average (ERA) in 62 career KBO games.

On Tuesday, prosecutors widened their match-fixing investigation into baseball after a gambling broker, arrested for his alleged ties to volleyball fixing, claimed his connection with baseball players.

The broker testified that two starting pitchers for two different Seoul-based teams agreed to issue walks in the first inning of games last year and he and the pitchers split the winnings from betting Web sites.

Illegal sites offer the so-called “proposition bets,” or prop bets. They place odds on minute and seemingly inconsequential plays, such as the number of first-inning walks issued by a starter in baseball, usually with no limits on the amount of wager. Sports Toto, the only authorized sports lottery in the country, only places odds on wins, ties, losses and the combined scores between teams. A bettor can only wager 100,000 won (US$88.90) each on Sports Toto.

The KBO has said it will try to verify allegations and has asked individual teams to carry out their own investigations.

The nation’s top football and volleyball leagues have already seen players, active and retired, arrested and indicted for their match-fixing ties. But confirmed match-fixing attempts in baseball would be even more devastating.

In 2011, the KBO set a single-season attendance record for the third straight year. It is widely expected to break the record again in 2012, as two former Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Star pitchers, Park Chan-ho and Kim Byung-hyun, are set to make their KBO debuts, and sluggers Lee Seung-yeop and Kim Tae-kyun have returned from stints in Japan. (Yonhap News)