http://tinyurl.com/d4m92ja
Yovani Gallardo will start for the Brewers against Matt Cain and the Giants
this afternoon. On Monday, I picked that game as one of the best pitching
matchups of the week, but in the wake of Gallardo’s arrest for drunk driving
in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, I’m not sure that matchup should be
happening at all.
There are two schools of thought on this issue, each recently expressed by
colleagues I respect. Back on April 1, my Strike Zone partner Jay Jaffe
included the following in his list of “20 ways to improve baseball right now:
”
Suspend players for DUI and domestic abuse. In contrast to their progress
on the PED front, baseball has done nothing to penalize far more dangerous
and destructive behaviors such as driving under the influence of alcohol or
abusing wives and girlfriends. The league may be content to let law
enforcement handle such offenses, but it could have far more impact if it
took additional action in such cases by suspending guilty players without pay
for similar lengths of time as PED violators, and donating their salaries to
programs oriented towards awareness, treatment and prevention.
Yesterday, over at The Platoon Advantage, my SB Nation colleague Bill Parker
countered (indirectly) with this:
An employer has a right to be concerned about how its employees make it
look in the community at large, but those employees have a competing right to
have their employers stay the hell out of their personal lives, too. The
judicial system exists to catch and punish things like DUIs; by and large, I
don’t think it’s baseball’s responsibility to pile punishments on top of
that (and you might think the judicial system isn’t harsh enough,
particularly on professional athletes, but that’s not a problem that it’s
baseball’s job to fix). I just don’t think a sport can go around meting out
punishments for things that happen outside the sport.
Parker isn’t suggesting in any way that drunk driving isn’t a despicable
act worthy of heavy punishment, he’s just saying that it’s the legal system
’s job to hand down that punishment.
Parker makes a strong point. Having MLB act as morality police can be a
slippery slope, and he does well to argue in favor of consistency by pointing
out that if baseball doesn’t suspend players for drunk driving arrests, then
it shouldn’t suspend them for other recreational drug use. For example,
Astros prospect Jonathan Singleton smoked marijuana too close to a drug test
and has to sit out the first 50 games of this season, one in which he was
expected to make his major league debut, while Gallardo got behind the wheel
while heavily intoxicated (his 0.22 blood-alcohol level was nearly three
times the legal limit), but is pitching in the major leagues two days later.
That’s an indefensible inconsistency, particularly when one considers that
Gallardo’s actions were far more dangerous to himself and others.
Still, as Parker himself allows, there is something lacking in the legal
system’s punishments as they pertain to multi-millionaire professional
athletes. Gallardo, whose DUI was a first-offense, received a $778.80 fine
plus 10 points on his license. The combined financial impact of those
citations, once increased insurance premiums are factored in, would be
devastating to some, myself included, but Gallardo will make $7.75 million
this year, which, if he makes 33 starts as he did in each of the last two
years, works out to nearly $235,000 per start. Simply suspending Gallardo
long enough for him to miss one turn in the rotation would have a far greater
impact on Gallardo both financially and in terms of accenting just how
reckless his behavior was. It would also allow Baseball to hold its head
higher in terms of being a model for the community, showing that it won’t
simply turn a blind eye to the drunk driving that is all too common among its
athletes (Todd Helton and Red Sox minor leaguer Drake Britton were both
arrested for DUIs during spring training) and which claimed the lives of two
of its players — Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart, killed by a drunk driver in
2009, and Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock, who died in 2007 — in the last six
years.
Encouragingly, public pressure seems to be building on this issue. Still, I’
m reminded of the incident in late June 2006 in which the Phillies’ Brett
Myers was arrested and accused of punching his wife in Boston. Myers took the
mound on national television the next day, but outrage over the still-pending
case prompted Myers to take a leave of absence through the All-Star break.
Domestic abuse and drunk driving are not the same thing, but both are
abhorrent, illegal and occur with problematic frequency among professional
baseball players, such that many, including Jaffe above, have lumped them
together as off-field incidents for which baseball should show no tolerance.
The outrage over Myers’ post-incident start and his subsequent leave of
absence provided some hope that a precedent was being set for players to step
away from the game, be it via a suspension or their own conscience, after an
egregious off-field incident.
Sadly, as evidenced by Gallardo’s appearance this afternoon, that proved not
to be the case.