Buster Olney (ESPN) described the Astros' acquisition of former Blue Jays closer Roberto Osuna "surprising ... disappointing ... shocking. ... appalling".
Osuna was arrested and charged with assault on May 8. He received a 75-game suspension from MLB, on June 22, retroactive to the date of his arrest. Osuna will appear in court tomorrow, where he plans to plead not guilty.) His suspension ends August 5.
Olney took specific issue with two comments made by Houston's GM Jeff Luhnow. He disagreed with Luhnow's claim that the Astros have a "zero-tolerance policy related to abuse of any kind":
[Y]ou cannot claim a zero-tolerance policy while trading for a player who is serving one of the longest domestic violence-related suspensions since MLB created its policy. That is the definition of tolerance ...He also questioned Luhnow's statement that the Astros were "confident that Osuna is remorseful":
Osuna has done nothing to publicly accept responsibility for what happened. There has been no acknowledgment of his actions, no specific apology, no guilty plea. He hasn't been transparent at all, and at the time his suspension was announced, his lawyer told reporters that his acceptance of the suspension was not an admission of guilt in whatever happened. ...Jenny Dial Creech, Houston Chronicle:
Tolerance and forgiveness in professional sports have long been directly proportional to the talent of the player, and hey, Osuna is a really good pitcher.
[T]he deal is a head scratcher, considering the Astros have a zero-tolerance policy related to abuse of any kind ...Verlander, after the trade was announced:
[R]ather than waiting to see how [the court case] plays out, Luhnow said the Astros will cross that bridge when they get to it. After all, the MLB deadline for non-waiver trades is Tuesday afternoon. ...
After video surfaced of a former Astros prospect beating his girlfriend in March, [Houston] pitchers Justin Verlander and Lance McCullers Jr. took to Twitter to express their distaste.
"(Middle finger emoji) you man," Verlander tweeted. "I hope the rest of your life without baseball is horrible. ..."
Tweeted McCullers: "This is the reality of domestic violence. It's always brutal, always sickening. We must fight for the victims, video or not. He should be in jail. ..." ...
In a text on Monday evening, one Astros player said, "I was surprised to see this move made, and I think it's going to be really uncomfortable. I trust the organization, but this move doesn't make sense to me." ...
Luhnow said he thinks the character of the Astros can help Osuna with a fresh start. Maybe it can, but it's not up to the Astros to rehabilitate Osuna's image.
And if they truly had a zero-tolerance policy for domestic violence, they wouldn't even try.
It's a tough situation. ... We don't know the whole story. Obviously, I've said some pretty inflammatory things about stuff like this in the past, and I stand by my words. ... I think he plans to talk to us when he gets here and we'll go from there and see what happens.John Lott, The Athletic:
But if you're a team [the Blue Jays] constantly craving young and controllable major-league-ready pitching, there is no obvious reason to trade away a 23-year-old fireballer with three-plus years as a reliable closer and two more years of team control.Michael Baumann, The Ringer:
Unless that pitcher has a criminal assault charge hanging over his head. Unless that pitcher chose not to fight the evidence against him gathered by Major League Baseball ... Unless that pitcher accepted a 75-game suspension and loss of $2.5 million in wages ...
"We do feel a responsibility to the fans and we do feel empathy for the fans and we ultimately work for the fans," [Blue Jays GM Ross] Atkins said. ... "[I]t is very difficult for accusations not to influence us in some way. Having said that, this made sense for the organization from a baseball perspective."
The deal made sense because it rid them of an embarrassment, two days before Osuna's next court date, in an era when society at large is at long last denouncing domestic violence instead of winking at it. ...
[Atkins] certainly knows more about what happened on that May morning than the general public. We are left to apply logic to what we do know — the unchallenged suspension, the severity of the penalty, Atkins' telling comment about the "influence" of the allegations on the trade and Luhnow's revealing remarks about Osuna's remorse.
[B]aseball, as an institution, is ill equipped to handle situations like [Aroldis] Chapman's or Osuna's. A zero-tolerance policy would drive victims underground and remove any incentive that teams, players, the union, or the league would have to be transparent. Women would be less likely to speak up if doing so would end their husband's or boyfriend's career at a stroke, and those who did would live in fear of an abuser who, stripped of his livelihood, might look for revenge. ...Diana Moskovitz, Deadspin (October 2016):
Someone was going to give Osuna a job when he returned from suspension — the Astros decided it was going to be them. Wanting to win so badly that you're willing to view a player's domestic violence suspension as a trade opportunity is a choice.
This grandstanding [demanding a zero-tolerance policy for domestic violence], no matter how well-intentioned, hasn't made the complicated and life-threatening problem of domestic violence any less dangerous to the people who live with it. What's more, if leagues were to take up these suggestions, it would almost certainly make the problem worse. What feels good and what is right, especially in cases of domestic violence, are very different things. Zero-tolerance and similar get-tough penalties haven't worked when used in the criminal-justice system. Expecting them to work in sports would be, at best, naive. ...Jeff Passan, Yahoo:
Player-conduct policies are about image control, crisis management, and public relations, with an added dash of labor control. They are not about making players better people.
Acknowledging the dark hypocrisy at their core is crucial to understanding what these policies are. Logically, the spectacle of sports leagues setting up shadow judiciaries to provide ersatz justice having to do with an arbitrary array of offenses makes little sense. Player-conduct regimes have nothing to do with logic, though. They are about letting fans know that they are investing their time, money, and care in something other than amoral branding operations with lines in television and live events; about making sure that an angry public blames labor, not management; and, above all, about making the screaming stop. ...
Does suspending—or firing, or banning—the man who punched his wife or girlfriend actually do anything to make his partner safer?
There is no easy answer about what will do that. Anger management doesn't work. Batterer's intervention programs have had at best mixed results. Banning a player might be necessary at some point if he refuses to learn or grow, but doing so also removes him from the community he respects and can in theory help him. As professor Beth Richie told Jezebel back in 2014, "isolating someone from their meaningful community just means that they displace their violence onto someone else." ...
Getting tough may keep victims from reporting or seeking support; it may do nothing to heal broken families; and it may in some circumstances actively endanger women. It can also, though, put asses back in the seats, with fans cheering like nothing happened, writers calling for still harsher punishments, and management looking strong. ... There's no percentage against saying that you think domestic violence is extremely bad, and doing so loudly, so that everyone can hear your voice.
Certainly Jeff Luhnow heard the same stories as everyone else. The disgusting, abhorrent ones about what happened the night Toronto Blue Jays closer Roberto Osuna was arrested and charged with domestic assault. He heard about the brutality Osuna allegedly inflicted. About the picture of the victim’s face that police officers in Toronto still talk about. He heard the details that have circulated around the game for months ...Passan also reports that when he asked if the Astros' "unprecedented" due diligence of the incident "included seeking out the story of the alleged victim, any of the witnesses or simply someone outside baseball", an Astros senior vice president cut off all questions.
And then Jeff Luhnow, architect of the world champion Houston Astros, traded for Roberto Osuna.
What came next Monday was a clinic in arrogance, tone-deafness and doublespeak, proof that the Astros, like plenty of other professional sports organizations, believe so little in the public's ability to parse their rhetoric that they'll peddle blatant falsehoods to excuse their moral bankruptcy. From a feckless "zero-tolerance policy" to an "unprecedented" level of due diligence that sounded like little more than an exercise in confirmation bias, the attempts by Luhnow to rationalize the trade were amateur-hour spin that couldn't cover up the truth. ...
Conspicuously absent was any discussion of the past. Because the past is difficult and the past is unsightly and the past is wrong and any exploration of the past takes Luhnow to a place where the opacity of his cover stories dissipates to reveal the core of his purpose. ...
The Astros are far from alone [in paying lip service in caring about the mistreatment of women], though this is no time for whataboutism. Because this is fresh, and it felt positively gross. The visceral details, the clumsy deceit, the haphazard explanations. The entire production just a reminder that the sports we watch, the teams we love, are ready to feed a steady diet of nonsense in hopes that allegiance might obfuscate something so obviously wrong.
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