Keidel: When It Comes To Domestic Violence, A Lot Of People Are Lost
By Jason Keidel
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I'm not sure if sports are in crisis or at a crossroads, but there is a rancid cloud covering professional athletics.
Large, strong and famous American men are assaulting women while their respective leagues and employers are in a collective slumber. While the people who run our pro sports don't condone the behavior, they surely haven't done enough to condemn it.
The latest stroke in this bloody montage comes from Mets pitcher Jeurys Familia, who was arrested this week in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and charged with causing bodily injury to an unidentified person.
Familia isn't just a pitcher, of course. He's the closer, the best the Mets have had in years, and an essential cog in their enchanted October ride to last year's World Series.
And he's hardly been a garden-variety thug. As The New York Times asserted, Familia was "perceived as a pillar of the team, a solid and reliable player popular among his teammates for his consistently cheerful attitude."
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So this isn't just a problem among football players, who are paid to be violent but don't respect the lines between the field and the home. Our pastime, considered the more genteel, gentlemen's game, is also forming a conga line of miscreants.
And there's much local flavor to this scourge, a growing number of bad apples in the Big Apple. We're close to forming and fielding our own domestic violence ballclub, starting with Jose Reyes, who was cut by the Colorado Rockies and suspended by Major League Baseball. The Mets, of course, had no problem with it and gobbled up the shortstop posthaste.
We have Aroldis Chapman, a smug, unrepentant target of baseball's domestic violence policy. The Yankees were fine with his suspension and the notion that Chapman allegedly fired off eight gunshots after his altercation with a woman. The Yankees traded Chapman to the Cubs, but only because it made for good business, not because the Bombers developed a conscience. And now Chapman will be rewarded with a World Series ring.
And then we have Familia, who, depending on his legal case, may not be the Mets' closer in 2017. At least not for a while.
Maybe MLB has a better handle on players and punishment than the NFL does -- which isn't saying a whole lot -- but there's a growing sense that the power brokers of these billion-dollar businesses are well behind the times.
We're trying to put a price on domestic violence. Literally monetizing women. The punishments, when they're occasionally administered, seem as random as the men who break the rules.
If he hits her once, it's X games. Twice and it's Y games. Third time, he's gone for the season. Josh Brown, the disgraced former kicker for the Giants, got one game for abusing his wife, who claimed he did so on at least 20 other occasions. One game. The NFL was appallingly lazy in its investigation of Brown, and only once documents were leaked to other sources did the Giants finally jettison him.
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I'm not sure which part is more disturbing, the crimes, the sport's reaction or how fast fans would love to jam all of it under the rug.
The worst part about the Brown disgrace was not his removal from the team and the sport, but rather the fact that the Giants and John Mara apparently already knew Brown assaulted his wife before the PR firestorm and still offered him a two-year contract.
It's this kind of moral relativism that's got the masses in mounting rage. Yet for all the infuriated folks who've had enough of this Wild West coda in pro sports, there are a disturbing number of fans who see this as a blip on the cultural screen, a small distraction before he nestles into his man cave, brew in one hand, remote in the other.
Browse social media, even WFAN's Facebook page, and you'll see the thread of sentiments regarding domestic violence and those who perpetrate it. And while most sane folks view this in a linear and logical manner, there are just enough eyes rolling to bother you, me, us.
Take this recent post:
"Can't we just move past Josh Brown?? We can't convict Familia before we know everything!"
Another fella implied that the definition of domestic violence is too wide and vague, and that "You yell at a chick and u in handcuffs #ThanksOJ"
He really said that.
Here's another remark on WFAN's Facebook page, which got nearly 100 thumbs-up: "And here we were thinking (Familia) could never beat anyone in October."
This particular fan was carried off the field on virtual shoulders, and told he "wins the internet for the day."
People really think this. It's all abstract to them. They drop their paychecks on tickets, televisions, jerseys, hats, sweats, chips, dip and beer, all to celebrate people they've never met. But when their heroes batter a woman, it's not real. And if it is, it's horribly inconvenient. Let's move on, please, to something more important, like the point spread.
Is there a chance Familia is innocent, that this is all a woeful mistake? I guess. More likely, however, is that Familia isn't the fun family man we thought, the sunshine inside a dark dugout.
Domestic violence isn't a simple issue or problem. There's no algorithm, or stat, like WAR or OPS or QBR, that defines or solves it. But what makes it worse is that there are too many fans, Americans, humans who don't even think this is an issue.
We have to fix that, first and fast, before we can move forward, before we can address or even prevent another moment of domestic violence. Or else we will all fall into that caveman stereotype -- men who don't have the sense, guts or decency to protect women.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
