Tuesday, September 09, 2008

BURGOS.

For those who haven’t read the news story yet, I’m talking about this. I’ve used up my Sanity Watcher’s points for the day in reading the comments on some of these stories, so I’ll just stop now and post the following:

• I keep reading that Burgos should be released because “stuff like this” makes the Wilpons angry. Um, okay. Shouldn’t an asshole beating the shit out of his girlfriend make EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE angry? 

• I keep hearing calls for hearing “his side of the story”. There is no side here, unless he didn’t do it. There is no justification, ever, unless you yourself are under attack (and even then a guy who weighs 244 pounds and is a professional athlete can probably protect himself against most women without needing to beat the crap out of her).
• It is very difficult, not to mention arduous, for women in these cases to press charges.  If the situation was totally fabricated, and Burgos did not strike his girlfriend, then there is no issue. He shouldn’t be thrown off the team if he is innocent. But just because she doesn’t press charges doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. It is one thing to press charges if you are Julie Donaldson (and even then, it takes tremendous courage); it is another altogether when you are the anonymous girlfriend of a professional athlete. 
• Every time I see Brett Myers pitching, or see some moron in a MYERS jersey, all I can think is how the Phillies organization put money before doing what was right. In that case, the one incident we know about took place on a public street with at least three witnesses, and while Myers pleaded not guilty, he supposedly went into counseling, and the prosecutors strongly objected to the judge allowing the charges to be dropped.

If he did it, get rid of him.  If he didn’t do it, then there’s no reason to release him. End. But this isn’t just about the Wilpons wanting a squeaky clean image. No one should want anyone like this on the baseball team they follow. And before you bring up Daryl and the 80s (which happened on the subway the other night), there were a lot of things people did wrong back then. It’s the 00’s, we’ve evolved, and it’s not a race for the bottom. This is behavior that cannot be tolerated.