I love baseball, but...

...sometimes, some of the things that take place in the "business of baseball" just wouldn't make any sense in the real world. Allow me to explain...

Buried deep within the legalese of Major League Baseball's labor agreement with the MLBPA is a section labeled "discipline." It allows a team or the commissioner's office to suspend a player, so long as there is "just cause."

Apparently, an alleged threat to kill your wife and children does not fall under such auspices, because neither baseball nor the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have levied any kind of penalty on Elijah Dukes, who recently whispered these sweet nothings on a voicemail for his estranged spouse: "You dead, dawg." Wow, this guy's a family man, eh? Even when I was the most angry with my ex-wife, I didn't wish her dead...and I sure as hell wouldn't say something stupid like that.

Dukes, in fact, is still playing center field for the Devil Rays, getting paid more than $2,000 a day, traveling on chartered jets and staying in luxury hotels while the baseball establishment sits on its hands knowing that within the past month, two more players had allegedly struck their wives, only to have grievances filed on their behalf by the players' association when they were suspended or demoted. Am I the only one who finds this utterly ridiculous? Hello? Bueller? In fact, this rocket scientist has been arrested six times since he turned 13, including for marijuana possession in January (isn't this a violation of the MLBPA drug treatment policy?). Furthermore, the Devil Rays have suspended him again and again for fighting with managers, teammates and umpires in the minor leagues.

Proving "just cause," however, is so difficult – any team would struggle to tie lost advertising or ticket sales to a single incident, and monetary losses are the only way to truly quantify this. So, the Rays punish him by writing his name into the leadoff spot every night. And that just turns my stomach. In baseball's world, a pitcher who goes head hunting gets suspended. A guy who regularly brushes with the law gets paid. And unfortunately, the Devil Rays are the proverbial monkey in the middle here. The team's owner, Stuart Sternberg, wanted to release this guy...but was afraid of the consequences (both to his team and to Dukes' distant wife). Oh, and before anyone goes off on my about innocent until proven guilty, I know...NiShea Gilbert has declined to press charges. But isn't that the case more often than not?

MLB and our old pal, Bud Selig, has enabled Dukes, just as it recently enabled Seattle pitcher Julio Mateo and Arizona utilityman Alberto Callaspo. And MLB, in the past, enabled Brett Myers when he allegedly punched his wife on a Boston street last year, not to mention incidents in previous years with Dwight Gooden and Wil Cordero, Dmitri Young, Julio Lugo and Bryan Rekar.

This stance by all involved essentially tells us that abusing a woman is tolerated, so long as she doesn't press charges. That's nuts.

That is where baseball players differ from others in society who knock around women: Players are public figures, recognized as such, paid as such and thus held to a higher standard. To strive for the omnipresence that baseball does and follow that by asking to hold its players to the same threshold as any other person is an exercise in hypocrisy. Baseball should know that its public perception is only as good as its ability to mete out discipline (see: steroid problems, circa 1998 to present). With as many players on the police blotter as the transaction wire, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell asserted himself as the league's law marshal. He makes the laws, he enforces them and if anyone wants to argue, Goodell’s word is final. Imagine if Bud Selig actually tried to take a stand on this...he'd be laughed out of every clubhouse in the country!

In the next agreement with the MLBPA, the commissioner's office needs to address players' interaction with law enforcement. He needs to have a policy similar to the NFL's. And why not? Players need to understand that they are not above the law. If I get stopped for speeding, I get a ticket. If a player get stopped for speeding, he offers tickets! Having a boat load of money should not allow you to break the laws of polite society. Alas, it does...we've been allowing the "beautiful people" (read that the people with the riches) to get away with just about anything...even, in some cases, murder (see: Orenthal James Simpson).

So, what should we, as fans, do about this? Commissioner Bud Selig wants us to forget about it. To that end, I disagree. But I'm not really sure what can be done. Contacting the MLBPA, MLB, the Commissioner's Office, etc. will do no good...each of those offices are notoriously unwilling to listen to the common rock. But at least we can hope that something is done about this. Granted, bad guys and abusers are everywhere...but this is outrageous.

Please allow me to now step off my soap box. Thank you.