'Institutional arrogance' should not be an excuse

For better or worse, millions of us attach ourselves to sports teams.

If we extend that audience worldwide, it’s billions.

It seems to me that these organizations, who actively seek our loyalty and often our money, have an obligation that goes beyond just winning things.

After all, they have a massive platform in society.

Most of the truly big-dollar sports involve men competing, and the clubs are run primarily by men.

That’s just a fact.

The majority of males, at least in Western culture, are not involved in domestic abuse, nor shrug it off as the equivalent of jaywalking.

No, we get it.

Any kind of sexism, violent or otherwise, should never be tolerated.

Which brings us back to the world of sports, and the matter of how teams handle the issue of domestic abuse.

Looking the other way just to win games is just plain wrong.

So is lying to protect yourself.

SADLY, the Houston Astros have been guilty on both counts before and during the World Series.

First, they acquired closer Roberto Osuna from Toronto in 2018, getting him at a discount rate because Osuna was serving a 75-game suspension for allegedly beating the mother of his 3-year-old child.

The charges were dropped because the woman moved to Mexico, but obviously Major League Baseball investigated deeply enough to suspend Osuna.

Fans, media, women’s groups and even some Astros employees objected to the trade, but GM Jeff Luhnow justified it with some bizarre logic.

“I believe you can have a zero-tolerance policy and also have the opportunity to give people second chances.” Luhnow said.

Does the man not know the meaning of “zero”?

Next, we come to the Astros winning the American League pennant by defeating the Yankees.

In the victorious clubhouse after the final game, Luhnow’s assistant general manager, Brandon Taubman, approached three female reporters and repeatedly hollered: “Thank God we got Osuna. I’m so (effing) glad we got Osuna!”

Taubman was particularly targeting a reporter who was wearing a purple bracelet to signify opposition to domestic abuse.

A WRITER from Sports Illustrated, Stephanie Apstein, was one of the journalists victimized by Taubman’s tirade.

She attempted to get some rationale from Taubman, but the Astros would not make him available — nor offer any response at all.

Apstein then wrote a story for the magazine in which she described the incident and called it “frightening.”

Now placed on the defensive, the Astros produced a written statement just five sentences long.

It contained lies from beginning to end.

There was a phony defense of Taubman (that he actually was talking to Osuna), but the statement also contained an attack on Apstein’s credibility.

The statement ended with the charge that Apstein was “fabricating a story where one does not exist.”

Longtime ESPN baseball writer Jeff Passan was not surprised, because he has written that the Astros indulge in “institutional arrogance.”

We know now that several members of the Astros front office approved or contributed to a statement that was really a slanderous accusation.

That says plenty.

Unfortunately for the Astros in this case, several witnesses came forward and corroborated Apstein’s account.

That left Luhnow to stumble through a media gathering and insist that, no, the club did not have a sexist culture but, yes, he did see the totally false statement before it was released.

That was prior to Game 3 of the World Series and by then, the Astros had fired Taubman.

NO DOUBT the Astros assumed that throwing Taubman under the bus would end the matter, especially in the middle of the World Series.

Luhnow and Astros owner Jim Crane almost surely believed that other clubs with similar issues would be sympathetic to Houston’s problem.

After all, the Cubs won a World Series in 2016 while using closer Aroldis Chapman, who had served a suspension for allegedly choking his girlfriend and firing a gun into a garage wall to frighten her.

But maybe the Astros’ blatant lies and attempt to discredit a reporter were just too much.

Major League Baseball looked past all the excitement on the field and made it clear the Astros organization would be held accountable.

“There are a variety of issues,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said, when discussing the scope of the investigation.

“I’m not going to narrow it to the statement or any of those things. We’re going to continue to review the situation, and we’ll have communication with (Crane).”

Good.

This isn’t just a cautionary tale for professionals, by the way.

Every sports organization — high school, college, amateur, whatever — must own up to bad behavior toward women and halt it.

Here we are in 2019, a point where we shouldn’t even need to have this conversation.

Sadly, the Astros have proven otherwise.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Steve also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball once monthly during the offseason. The weekly edition will begin next Tuesday.