According to a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting published by Sports Illustrated, Pittsburgh Pirates starter Jeff Locke was suspected of involvement in a game-fixing scheme in 2012, but ultimately found guilty of nothing more than a little social-media rudeness.

The story doesn’t skimp on details, and it’s well worth reading in full. But essentially, a small-time sports handicapper named Kris Barr started bragging that his “best friend,” Locke, was intentionally throwing games.

All over the country, people who bet on baseball in the fall of 2012 began hearing that Locke and a mysterious handicapper were fixing Pirates games. Like Congero, some complained. Those reports sent shivers through Major League Baseball, prompting a probe of unusual scope and intensity: MLB’s own investigators and organized-crime detectives from the New York City Police Department were deployed to learn the handicapper’s identity and unravel the plot….

Burnham never found evidence of recent contact between the pitcher and the gambler, and nothing to suggest that anyone served as a go-between to relay inside information about Locke to Barr. Nor was there unusual betting activity, as would be expected if games were being fixed. “We went to Vegas and spoke to people out there,” Burnham says. “We had many informants who looked into it from the back end, and none of it checked out.”

The only clear contact Locke had with Barr or any of the gambler’s associates came when Barr’s older brother Don reached out to the pitcher via Facebook — claiming, as both Barrs do, that they were close childhood friends in New Hampshire. Locke wrote back, “All you want is to be my friend because I play for the Pirates.”

That message bothered Kris Barr, who then made it a point to bet against Locke.

Beyond that, there’s not really a ton of big news in the story — unless you didn’t already know that Major League Baseball will go to extreme and occasionally shady lengths to investigate those suspected of breaking its rules.

In this case, it’s hard to blame the league for its thorough pursuit. Though performance-enhancing drug use in baseball grabs more headlines, game-fixing presents a way bigger threat to the game’s integrity. PED users, for better or worse, are still doing everything they can to help their teams win.