Meet the domestic violence apologists
When the Mets brought their former star shortstop Jose Reyes “home” last week, they joined the hottest trend in New York sports: snatching up, on the cheap, athletes accused of violence toward women.
The Yankees got there first, acquiring Aroldis Chapman, the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game, from the Cincinnati Reds last December. That was weeks after he pushed his girlfriend against a wall in his house and put his hands around her neck before she ran outside, hiding in the bushes to call police while their 4-month-old daughter remained inside, according to a police report.
Chapman then went into his garage by himself, firing eight gunshots there. Prosecutors declined to charge him, citing conflicting reports, and the Yankees scooped up his 106-mph-throwing left arm for a song.
After he sat for 30 games — the first person suspended under MLB’s new policy covering domestic assault, sex assault and child abuse — he’s picked up 15 saves in 16 opportunities in pinstripes.
Reyes, the second player suspended, was in a Maui hotel with his wife when, as reported in a 911 call, he grabbed her from the bed, shoved her, held her by her throat and pushed her into a glass balcony door. Prosecutors dropped that case after his wife declined to cooperate and, after a 52-game suspension, the Mets picked him up for a song, with the Colorado Rockies paying almost all of his $38 million salary for the next two seasons to get him off that team.
That Chapman and Reyes paid a professional price at all is new. Between 2010 and 2014, nine MLB players were accused of domestic assault or sexual violence and one player, Milton Bradley, was convicted of abusing his wife. Not one of them was punished by the league or their teams.
Speaking of sexual violence accusations, the Knicks last week traded for former NBA most valuable player Derrick Rose. Listening to sports talk, you’d know that he’s been injured a lot — but not that his ex-girlfriend has sued him, alleging gang rape.
She claims that at the end of their relationship Rose and two friends drugged her drink while she was at his Beverly Hills house and that, after she then managed to leave with a friend, the three men broke into her apartment and raped her. Rose has said that the sex was consensual. His civil trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 4 — the first day of the NBA pre-season.
Back to baseball. The only prominent New Yorker to publicly object to the Chapman and Reyes signings was City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who called the Yankees acquisition “very disturbing,” and then said the Mets “should be ashamed.” More broadly, she said, “It’s outrageous how little women’s lives seem to matter when someone can throw a baseball really hard, win Super Bowls or has a good jump shot.”
Ironically enough, Mark-Viverito also was a force behind the law passed last year banning the box in which job applicants had to disclose early on if they’d ever been convicted of a crime, since people deserve second chances.
This is complicated in some ways. No one outside the firsttime-caller-long-time-listener sports radio set seriously wants sports executives pinch-hitting for the justice system. Every case really is different, and there’s no simple formula for weighing sins in life against abilities on the diamond.
But it’s fundamentally simple. We need to raise the price of violence toward women, so that signing a player who has roughed up Mystique or Aura inevitably damages a team’s bottom line.
My own bottom line: Even if they just made a “terrible mistake,” as Reyes has said in the course of repeated and sincere-sounding apologies, I can’t root for these guys. Or for the teams that sign them.
Mets & Yanks indulge the intolerable