After 19 months, the federal Ninth Circuit court of appeals cleared the way for the case against former Major League outfielder Yasiel Puig to go to trial after determining the factual basis of an inoperative plea agreement that prosecutors reached with Puig will not be admissible as evidence.
No trial date has yet been set, according to court records.
In November 2022, Puig was charged in federal court in Los Angeles with a single count of lying to federal agents from Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service who were investigating a California-based illegal sports gambling ring run by former minor leaguer Wayne Nix. The Cuban-born outfielder reached a plea agreement with prosecutors, but then changed his mind and declined to plead guilty to the count of making a false statement.
After Puig declined to plead guilty, the government charged Puig with a second count of making false statements as well as obstruction of justice and quickly moved to declare Puig in breach of the plea agreement, which contained a waiver of Puig’s right to not have the factual basis of his plea agreement admitted as evidence at a subsequent trial. The district court ruled that the facts of the plea agreement were not admissible because of a provision of the federal rules of evidence, and the government appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in Puig’s favor in late May.
Each count of making a false statement carries up to five years in prison, while the obstruction of justice charge carries up to a 10-year term of imprisonment.
Puig’s case stems from federal investigations into southern California-based illegal sports gambling rings run by Nix and others that ensnared Ippei Mizuhara, a Japanese-American who worked for the Los Angeles Angels and Dodgers as a translator for superstar player Shohei Ohtani. According to a press release issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Nix, who played in the Oakland Athletics’ organization from 1995 to 2001, ran an illegal gambling operations for nearly 20 years.
Charging documents in Puig’s case indicate that by June 2019, the former Los Angeles Dodgers’ outfielder had accrued nearly $300,000 in gambling losses with Nix’s bookmaking operation by making wagers through an middle man identified only as “Agent 1”. Agent 1 and another person referred to in court papers as “Individual B” allegedly told Puig to pay $200,000 to a client of Nix’s business that was owed gambling winnings. Puig then allegedly paid with two cashier’s checks each worth $100,000, and subsequently, Nix gave Puig access to a website he ran to place further bets.
According to a Justice Department press release, in January 2022, as federal authorities turned up the heat on Nix’s illicit operation, they interviewed Puig in the presence of his attorney. During the interview, Puig denied having discussed sports betting with Agent 1, despite the two allegedly discussing wagers hundreds of times via phone and text message. When agents showed Puig copies of the cashier’s checks, he claimed he didn’t know Individual B, who had instructed him to send the payments, and claimed he made $200,000 of losing wagers online with unknown persons. Puig was not alleged to have wagered on baseball.
The Justice Department release further notes that in March 2022, two months after Puig was interviewed by investigators, “Puig sent Individual B an audio message via WhatsApp in which he admitted to lying to federal agents during the interview two months earlier.”
Federal evidentiary rules bar the introduction of withdrawn guilty pleas, though the government argued that Puig’s plea agreement was a binding contract and language in the agreement waived his right to not have the prior plea agreement used against him as evidence. The district court ruled that because the plea agreement had never been accepted by the court, its terms were unenforceable.
On appeal, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit found in a 32-page opinion that, “[B]ecause the plea agreement was… requiring the district court’s approval, and because that approval never occurred, the agreement was not enforceable by the court under our precedent.”
The case against Puig has dragged on, at least partially, because Puig no longer plays professionally in the United States. When the case against him was first filed in August 2022, Puig played for the Kiwoom Heroes of South Korea’s KBO League. He’s since played winter ball for the Estrellas Orientales of LIDOM, the Tiburones de La Guaira in the Liga Venezolana de Beisbol Profesional, played part of the summer of 2024 for Veracruz in the Liga Mexicana de Beisbol and returned to the Kiwoom Heroes for the summer of 2025 before his season was cut short by a knee injury in May. During the 2023-24 winter ball season, Puig was rumored to have drawn significant interest from several Major League Baseball clubs, but ultimately never signed a contract and has not returned to MLB.
During the takedown of Nix’s illicit gambling operation, another federal sports gambling charge ensnared Shohei Ohtani’s translator Ippei Mizuhara, just as the 2024 season was about to begin. Mizuhara pleaded guilty to federal charges of bank and tax fraud for stealing nearly $17 million from Ohtani to pay off gambling debts he incurred betting with Mathew Bowyer, who pled guilty to federal charges of operating an unlawful gambling business, money laundering, and filing a false tax return in 2024.
Nix is currently incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp in Morgantown, West Virginia, with a release date of May 18, 2027, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator website, though his sentencing has been continued six times and was most recently scheduled for March 26, 2025, and the docket report for his case shows no entry for that date nor a record of a sentence.
Sports betting has taken on a prominent role in the American sports landscape following the 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, which paved the way for individual states to enact legislation legalizing wagering on sporting events. Currently, 38 states and the District of Columbia have some form of legalized sports gambling, while 11 states and five territories, including California and Texas, do not.
Puig’s case, which is before Judge Dolly M. Gee in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is No. 22-cr-00394.
Photo: Outfielder Yasiel Puig of the Kiwoom Heroes reacts in the top of the eighth inning during the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) League opening game between Kiwoom Heroes and Lotte Giants at Gocheok Skydome on April 02, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
