Rant #3,164: Bad

So it happens again … and again … and again.

Jimmy Cordero of the New York Yankees was suspended for the remainder of the 2023 baseball season due to domestic violence.

This is just a terrible thing, and although the details of what exactly Cordero did to be given such a suspension have not yet been released, he had to have done something pretty bad for him to be suspended.

Cordero is the 18th payer suspended for domestic violence since 1997, and the third player with Yankees connections to be banned from the sport for what he did.

Aroldis Chapman was not a Yankee when he did what he did to his girlfriend, but the Yankees later dealt for him, knowing about his past.

Domingo German was a member of the team when he lost his mind and took it out on his then-girlfriend at a charity event in 2020, and he lost 81 games because of his stupidity.

The two later married, so I guess German and his wife put this heinous episode behind them.

And now we have Cordero, whose problems evidently flew completely under the radar with his Yankees teammates, if you believe what they say, and yes, what goes on behind closed doors sometimes doesn’t get out to anyone other than the participants.

This type of behavior is just so out of bounds … and on the higher profile plane that professional athletes reside on, while it is as wrong as if your next door neighbor participates in this type of behavior, few will know about it; when actors and singers and political people and professional athletes start throwing punches and slaps and what have you at another person—a person they supposedly have feelings for--it makes it to the grand stage, that everyone knows about it.

And that is what is going to now happen to Cordero, who is going to have to complete several tasks that MLB will require him to take before he is reinstated, with all of these tasks related to healing and understanding that what he did was not only wrong, but wrong, wrong, wrong.

Domestic violence goes on in every city and town in America, and it seems that each case that makes the news share only one thing, and that is rage from one partner to another.

Each case is seemingly so different, to a level and degree of who the participants were and what they did leading up to what eventually happened … and then, what exactly happened.

As an example, the highest profile baseball-related domestic violence case thus far has been that of Trevor Bauer, the former Cy Young Award winner, who was originally suspended for more than 300 games—later reduced to about 200 games—when word came out that he had violently assaulted his partner more than once during a series of sexual encounters.

While Bauer’s suspension is over, no team in MLB wants to have anything to do with the pitcher, and I believe he is playing overseas now … and that leads me to another point.

Violence against your partner is never right, and it is never right whether you are in the United States or elsewhere around the world.

But it does appear that other parts of the world do not look at domestic violence as seriously as we do in this country, and Bauer getting a job somewhere else in spite of his behavior—a behavior that, by the way, he was never fully convicted of here in the U.S., where much of what he did was eventually considered to be consensual—demonstrates the inconsistencies about how such acts are handled both here and around the world.

And that leads me to the next thing I have to say, which is something that will be controversial.

Of the 18 players who have been suspended by MLB for domestic violence episodes, 13 of them—72 percent—are of Hispanic origin—including Cordero--with almost all of them born overseas.

That is an important fact, and again, I do believe it can be attributed to different social norms overseas as opposed to here.

We take domestic violence very seriously in the United States, but although I do believe the world is changing and moving slowly to our thinking on this, I don’t think the movement has been fast enough.

This type of heinous behavior has been tolerated for too long elsewhere—just like it was tolerated too long here--and I think MLB will not be doing its full duty to watch over this behavior of its players if it does not acknowledge that Hispanic players are more apt to participate in these horrible acts that others—the evidence proves it.

I realize that MLB has a tough job on its hands if it actually acknowledges this, because the presence of Hispanic players in today’s game is enormous … and labeling one group more apt to do this is putting a mark on all Hispanic players, which of course is wrong.

But MLB has not done its full job in policing its players against PED use, and again, the preponderance of players found to use these drugs in recent times after the so-called “PED era” is from Hispanic players, who can buy many of the PEDs in their own home countries right over the counter.

MLB, and baseball’s Hispanic community, must address this problem, and unless the two factions do so, whatever progress it makes will be dulled because the actual facts are not being addressed.

MLB does not want to offend a large segment of its players by doing this—whether for domestic violence or for PEDs—but the time has come to do so.

As for Cordero, I hope he gets the help that he needs, I hope his family also gets the help it needs to heal … but MLB needs to be more realistic, too, about this problem, because it evidently is not going away so quickly.