The Phillies swept the Pirates last weekend in a series I won’t pretend I watched. I’m a Phillies fan, don’t get me wrong - went bananas when they gifted Philadelphia its first major sports championship in forever back in 2008 and happy to see their current late July/early August hot streak - but your thirties tend to run your sports fandom through a Brita filter with only the most vital teams/players/events remaining when you pour yourself a glass. Between work, family, other commitments, and a slavish devotion to other clubs, something eventually gets relegated to the backburner, and for me, it’s usually been the team that plays 946 games a season and hasn’t sniffed the playoffs since Psy was screaming at butts.
Sports apps and social media make it easier than ever to keep tabs on a team, too, even when you're preoccupied with caring for a sick baby or eating a particularly delicious apple. It’s through the former that I was notified nightly of the Phils’ success in the Steel City, and through the latter that I was reminded of the existence of Odubel Herrerra, who knocked in a meaningless run in the final game.
This happens every so often when I watch or read about the Phils, but it’s not that I somehow forgot Odubel was a Phillie. Heck, if you asked me to name the first five 2022 Phillies that came to mind, he’d be in there with Bryce Harper, Zack Wheeler, and the guys who won’t let Canada tell them what they can put in their bodies. Odubel was here forever and been about the same player since the Phils snapped him up in the Rule 5 draft in 2014: a hitter with plenty of talent and not an ounce of plate discipline, an outfielder with great speed and zero tracking ability, like a fighter jet piloted by Malfunctioning Eddie the Car Salesman. I turned on a game over the July 4th weekend and watched him end it by flailing at three pitches in the dirt. It was frustratingly familiar; death, taxes, and Odubel failing to reach base.
No, I was “reminded” of Odubel Herrerra again because I was certain I would never see him play another inning in red pinstripes after May 28, 2019, the day word got out that he’d been arrested for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend Melany Martinez-Angulo at a hotel in Atlantic City. The 20-year old girl “had visible signs of injury to her arms and neck” when police found her, and though charges against Herrerra were eventually dropped - a development that wasn’t all that surprising given the regularity with which domestic violence cases don’t receive a verdict (and the myriad reasons why) - the Phillies and Major League Baseball tried to memory hole him for a while. They suspended him for the rest of the season. They struck him from the All Star Game ballot. They took his picture off the banners hanging in the rafters of Citizens Bank Park.
Considering both the team’s and the league’s respective track records on handling players charged with DV in the past, it was a welcome, if not unexpected change of pace. The cynical calculus that comes into play whenever a professional athlete gets charged with a crime is common knowledge by now: is the player good enough to weather the storm? Is it worthwhile to keep this person around, absorb the bad press and the outrage, and bet on the number of torches and pitchforks dwindling as the incident becomes a speck in the rear-view mirror?
In Herrerra’s case, MLB and the Players Association had agreed on a shiny new domestic violence policy in 2015, and the league was happy to employ it against a player who was, in the grand scheme of things, unessential. The league wasn’t bringing the hammer down on Mike Trout or Mookie Betts; they were bringing it down on a player whose hitting had declined for four straight years and whose inconsistency and disappointing play had made him a lightning rod for criticism. Fans already disliked Odubel for his on-field play; now, they could dislike him on moral grounds, too.
But the Phillies never cut Herrera. Whether that was because they weren’t allowed to until the league concluded its own investigation or because it would have cost them millions of dollars wasn’t totally clear, Instead, they sent him to the minor leagues before the 2020 season. Then, a certain once-in-a-century pandemic happened, turning the 2020 baseball season into a strange three-month exercise in managed expectations, one which didn't involve Herrerra playing major league ball.
Then the 2021 season appeared on the horizon, and hey that’s weird, Odubel Herrerra got invited to Phillies spring training, and that’s odd, they sent him to the minors again instead of trading or releasing him, and what a coincidence, the team happens to have a dearth of playable outfielders, and wouldn’t you know it, the team called Herrerra up to the big leagues again on April 26, 2021, less than two years after he left the Golden Nugget casino in handcuffs, less than two years after team’s then-manager called the allegations “deeply disturbing.” The Phillies had the eventual National League MVP and the Cy Young runner-up on their team and still found it necessary to overlook Odubel’s past and put him in the lineup to be a league-average hitter.*
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My reckoning with Odubel once again last week dovetailed with the news that Deshaun Watson would likely be suspended six games for violating the National Football League’s personal conduct policy. Watson, for those who aren’t aware, has been sued by 24 female massage therapists over the past two years, women who accused the superstar quarterback of all manner of sex crimes ranging from guiding their hands towards his exposed privates during treatment sessions to outright forcing one therapist to perform oral sex on him.
Punishments meted out by professional sports leagues for actual crimes always draw comparisons to those handed out for “league” offenses, though it’s understandable why the NFL is appealing to at least double Watson’s suspension:, if the six-game ban holds up, Watson will be suspended for fewer games than Falcons star Calvin Ridley was for basically playing Draftkings for a week, fewer games than countless players received in the past for using marijuana.** But if “justice” is a questionable idea in our actual system of law and order, it’s a completely foreign concept in athletics. Sports leagues are not justice systems just because they conduct their own “investigations'' and issue their own “rulings'' any more than Tom Brady is this generation’s George Patton just because he gets called a “field general.” How could you ever map a number of football games to a DUI or sexual assault or domestic violence without it feeling wrong?
Besides, the NFL as a collection of teams, owners, executives and coaches made its own ruling on Watson months ago. With the aforementioned lawsuits still pending, a Texas grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against the then-Houston Texans quarterback on March 11, 2022. With the prospect of jail time no longer on the table, the Deshaun Watson Sweepstakes was on. Exactly one week later, after being wined and dined by nearly every team in the league, Watson had a fully-guaranteed $230 million deal with the Cleveland Browns, a contract structured to minimize the financial hit Watson would take when he was inevitably suspended.
In a league that rarely fully guarantees a contract to anyone (besides coaches, executives, and maybe the military), the Browns hadn’t just backed the Brinks truck up to Watson’s front door: they’d done everything short of replacing Ben Franklin’s portrait with Deshaun Watson's face saying "I never disrespected any woman" on every hundred dollar bill. There’s the Court of Public Opinion, then there’s the Court of Public Opinion Among People Who Sign the Checks.***
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Much ink has been and should be spilled on the subject of what the Watson suspension means for relations between pro sports leagues and their players unions, and on what the adjudication of the case says about pro sports leagues’ relationships with victims of domestic violence. I want to address a far less consequential issue, so if you were expecting me to solve labor unions or sexism in one post, you might be barking up the wrong blog. (though if you have any questions about the NFL’s relationship with its female fans, I have a few thousand pink caps and visors to sell you)
But I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult thinking about exactly how much compartmentalizing I’m willing to do watching sports. The Eagles were among the many, many teams rumored to be interested in trading for Deshaun Watson even after the laundry list of lawsuits were filed. I’m under no illusion that every person who ever played a down of football in midnight green was worthy of canonization, but the stories frustrated me just the same. Every few weeks, the rumors would resurface, and I’d get upset all over again, nervous that the persistence of this trade scuttlebutt was a sign that a deal was right around the corner rather than just being further proof that attaching the Eagles to any player on the market will get me and many other fans to spend days going “But should they???”
There are certainly folks who don’t have that same moral quandary. They don’t seem to be as vast in number as I would fear, but they undoubtedly exist. I remember talking with a friend a little under a year ago about Watson, just before 2021 football season, who said he made a point to try and separate a player’s on-field prowess from his off-field life. Sports are a form of entertainment, a distraction, a gift for getting to the end of another day/week of work, and having to wrestle with social, moral, ethical, or political dilemmas while you’re just trying to enjoy your free time seems unfair, makes it seem like you can’t ever escape.
Setting aside the fact that social, moral, ethical and political dilemmas are inextricably connected to pro sports in the same way they’re connected to the economy or education or art or really any institute of day-to-day life, I can empathize with this perspective to an extent. Humans are complicated, all of us, and just because someone didn’t break the law or social mores doesn’t mean they aren’t a scoundrel or a bad person. Do you want to spend precious sports-consuming time evaluating the terrifying truth of every athlete you root for, or do you just want to see them sock a few dingers?
Besides, in Watson’s case, he’s since settled all but one of his lawsuits and was never charged with a crime, and if it’s good enough for the justice system, it’s good enough for many sports fans appealing to that authority, looking for any reason to wipe their brow and go “phew, glad that’s over with” before getting back to discussing defensive schemes and three-team parlays. There’s no doubt many share that sentiment regardless of what team they root for, all but confirmed by the fact that the Browns just made a $230 million dollar bet on just that.
But in Philadelphia, sports fans (myself included) spent the past year excoriating Ben Simmons, a now-former 76er, for refusing to show up to work, refusing to work on his shooting, throwing his teammates under the bus, and basically acting like a loser. A few years ago, my wife and I attended a Sixers-Pelicans game in New Orleans, and the few NOLA fans that showed up occupied themselves for most of the game by booing the Pelicans’ star big man Anthony Davis, who had recently requested a trade because he was sick of playing for an organization that had steadfastly refused to build a winning team around him.
Fans hated watching Chad Johnson and Terrell Owens play football because they were flashy showboaters, prima donnas, divas, and all sorts of other coded insults. They hate Tom Brady and LeBron James for being cornballs who win all the time. They’ve threatened to boycott the NFL for being too woke, for being too violent, for players being paid too much, for all the commercials, for playing an extra song before the game.****
Sports fans will find the most trivial reasons to despise an athlete or a sport, and for the most part, that’s within their right. It’s sports. But if it’s fair game to consider all these extraneous factors when judging an athlete or a team, why would the line be drawn at the player’s off-field transgressions? If it’s okay to boo and despise John Rocker for ripping the New York Mets, how could you not expand that to the bile he spewed about everyone in the city who isn’t a straight white male? If you hated Pete Rose because he was a tryhard pest on the baseball diamond or a compulsive gambler off it, why wouldn't you also factor in his boorish, predatory behavior when considering whether to put the man on a pedestal? And if a player's charity and community service enhances our fandom, why wouldn’t the moments that they detract from the community do the opposite?
It didn’t matter to me - and still doesn’t - that Odubel Herrerra hasn’t spent a day in jail and is innocent in the eyes of the law. I’m not the law. I’m not required to like an athlete or pay money to watch them play sports because a judge or jury didn’t throw the book at them. I’m a Phillies fan, and I know how I felt about him. It bothered me to see him out there again. It made things less fun. I’m glad I don’t have to make the value judgment that my favorite football team trading for a remorseless creep and naming him their franchise quarterback would have forced, because it would have been awful difficult to justify enjoying the team knowing what kind of person he is or what his presence communicates to women and abuse survivors who *also* just want to sit down and watch a damn game sometimes.
I don’t know if there’s a blanket answer to the question of whether to separate the art from the artist in all fields, but I think it’s something worth engaging with, if only as a bit of a measuring stick for your own values. I can’t separate it with sports any longer, but I know many either don’t agree with the conclusion or don’t care enough to bother with the question. Maybe they answer enough tough questions during their day jobs and just want to watch the sports guys do sports when they punch out at day’s end. Or maybe they just love their team and the game so much that the threshold of what they’re willing to accept character-wise from the men and women they cheer for is fairly low.
I get that, I truly do. At the end of the day, it’s just people playing with a ball or a puck or a bat within a set of very clearly-defined lines. It’s just sports. It’s not the most important thing. But for me, at least, looking at the full picture and leaving the "art" and the "artist" connected helps me remember what is.
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*-Coincidentally, Herrerra was released by the Phillies on Tuesday after they traded for another outfielder that finally made him expendable. They also released pitcher Jeurys Familia, who also had a domestic violence misdemeanor charged and dropped in 2016; the Phillies signed him as a free agent this year.
**-Some of these suspension lengths are dictated by the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the player’s union, but just because something gets agreed upon during a labor agreement doesn’t make it look any better in execution. (I’m also aware that marijuana possession, use, etc. is still an “actual crime” in many states)
***-I’m simplifying the Watson situation a bit for brevity. A few weeks before Watson was first accused of sexual assault in March 2021, he requested a trade from the Texans. The team decided to deactivate him for the entire 2021 season, which started in September of that year; how much of the decision was due to the trade request vs. the pending lawsuits he’d racked up between March and September isn’t really clear. It’s just worth noting that on top of everything else, the Browns decided to pay a ton of draft picks and an unprecedented sum of guaranteed money for a player (admittedly an elite one) who hasn’t played a snap of meaningful football in over a year and a half.
****-The correct number of songs, patriotic or otherwise, that should be played before a sporting event is zero, unless the song is "Dreams and Nightmares" by Meek Mill or “Sandstorm” by Darude.
