The police report, obtained and posted online by Yahoo Sports on Monday night, is reportedly the reason Chapman was not traded earlier in the day from the rebuilding Reds to the Dodgers, and with Chapman now facing investigation by Major League Baseball — which can punish players for domestic incidents outside the legal system — it is an open question whether he will be dealt at all. That obviously only matters in a baseball framework, as the human story is much more important.
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According to the police report, Chapman’s girlfriend
The inconsistency can be seen through the reports of the different police officers on the scene that night, but the report filed by Abel Rivas sheds particular light on the gun becoming involved.
“Chapman said he got up and exited the residence,” Rivas wrote in his report. “He wanted to drive away but friends would not let him. He got in the passenger seat of his car and his friend got in the driver’s seat. He then punched the passenger side window with his left fist, creating a laceration to his left pinky knuckle. He then retrieved his pistol from the glove compartment, exited his vehicle and went (and) locked himself in the garage alone. He then shot several shots inside the garage and threw his pistol away inside the garage.”
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As a baseball fan, it immediately jumps out that Chapman punched a window and cut his throwing hand. Again, though he could have done career-ending damage with that action, the real concern is human: this is a man who was firing a gun out of anger inside his garage. Thankfully, nobody was injured, but it’s easy to see where this story could have taken a very different turn.
Chapman’s attorney, Jay Reisinger, denied the allegations to Yahoo, but it is clear that something happened to get a dozen police officers to the pitcher’s house. As with Rockies shortstop Jose Reyes’ arrest the same weekend on domestic violence charges, putting Major League Baseball into this kind of light should be enough for discipline — the behavior is reckless and irresponsible, regardless of possible guilt of an actual crime. That is the point of MLB’s new domestic violence policy, after all, to establish the sport as a place where athletes are held to a higher standard in the public eye.
News of Reyes’ arrest took nearly a week to come out, but it was inevitable that it would happen once there was a criminal case against him. Chapman’s incident very well could have vanished into the ether had it not, as Yahoo reported, held up his trade to the Dodgers.
That is troubling on a different level — that a dangerous situation for both Chapman and those around him might merely be brushed aside as if it never happened. Regardless of what happens with him on the field, in Cincinnati, Los Angeles or wherever he winds up, all involved can only hope that the incident in October serves as a call to take a hard look at how something like this would happen and how to prevent it — or something far worse — from happening in the future.
