Every home Thursday is Ladies Night at Comiskey Park. A distaff discount. We get in for a buck. I was amazed, when I arrived in Chicago two years ago, to find that this quaint custom persisted.
Politically incorrect? Probably. But I’m all for anything that makes the ballpark more accessible to common as opposed to corporate folk.
I can’t muster a lot of enthusiasm for it this season, when every day will be Batterer’s Day.
Did you notice how quickly the fireworks died down after Wil Cordero signed with the White Sox? I think it’s because people are in shock–the same kind of shock a woman experiences when she has been struck by someone she loves. She wants to believe the whole thing was a bad dream.
A lot of Sox fans are sick over the fact that rooting for their team now means, by extension, supporting this guy. I have to wonder how many people in the organization feel boxed in by the situation as well.
Manager Jerry Manuel underscored the dilemma in his pep talk after Cordero came on board. Although he considers Cordero’s transgressions serious, Manuel said, he doesn’t want him to be isolated. If one of us gets booed, it’s all of us getting booed.
By all accounts, Manuel is a man of deep religious faith who sincerely believes he can make a difference in the lives of his players. And in the moral vacuum that is much of professional athletics, his words make perfect sense. It would be untenable, team-wise, if the players who happen to find wife-beating repugnant refused to take the field with Cordero. You wear the uniform, you give up some independent thought.
But I would like to think there were a few players who felt nauseated that week, who went home and told their wives and girlfriends and were met by indignant, disbelieving stares.
They signed who? They said what? Is this organization going to have the nerve to use the word family?
But they, and we, have fallen silent. In shock, maybe, anesthetized by the mounting number of admitted abusers roaming pro sports rosters these days. Or perhaps just wondering what to tell the kids.
In the days since the Jonesboro tragedy, there has been a lot of talk about helping children distinguish between action movie shoot-’em-ups and real violence. I can just see parents wrestling with this challenging little dichotomy. Yes, sweetheart, the man on the baseball card is the same man who pleaded guilty in a Massachusetts courtroom last year.
We hope Daddy never does that to Mommy. If he did, he’d be punished. But since Mr. Cordero is a baseball player, he gets a love-tap from the legal system and a million-dollar contract.
Maybe Sox ownership needs a refresher course on the fact that, unlike cartoon characters, not all women get back up after they’ve been slugged. But then, when you’ve embraced a left-fielder who threatens reporters and tries to run a kid down with his car, it’s just one more small step to throw a life preserver to Wil Cordero.
To all those in the front office and elsewhere who maintain that Cordero deserves another chance, I ask, why?
Why, after not one but three women have stated publicly that he assaulted them? Why, after he sat and snuggled with his now-estranged wife, Ana, last summer and smirked into an ESPN camera and said there was no problem?
The idea that Cordero, or anyone else with his track record, could redeem himself on a baseball diamond is an insult to our intelligence. Cordero sought redemption in one place and one place only: his back pocket, inside a flat leather accessory called a wallet. It was only after the Red Sox released him and two dozen other teams passed on his services that he began oozing remorse.
I was horrified to see the local head of the National Organization for Women state publicly that Cordero should have the opportunity to make a living, just like anyone else. Since when is a major-league baseball team the proper environment to rehabilitate violent, antisocial, misogynistic behavior? There are other places Cordero could have made a living this season, workplaces where people don’t carry your bags and do your laundry and put you up in luxury hotels.
I am not urging anyone to protest on Ladies Night, although it might be a good setting for such a gesture. It did cross my mind that the Sox might do well to donate the proceeds of those home Thursdays to a battered-women’s shelter.
All I am asking, as the weeks go by and the box scores obscure last year’s news, is that we don’t get numb and we don’t forget. If we do, we all will have been beaten into submission.
