sorrowful news: Due to domestic violence, the all-time favorite player of Seattle Mariners has been fired.

sorrowful news: Due to domestic violence, the all-time favorite player of the Seattle Mariners has been fired.

Sadly, the Seattle Mariners‘ all-time favorite player has been let go because of domestic abuse.

Not unexpectedly, Josh Lueke was included in the prospect package the Mariners obtained for Cliff Lee, along with Justin Smoak.

As I mentioned two days ago, Lueke was playing Class A+ ball in Bakersfield when he was charged with rape last spring, so he missed the most of the 2009 season. He was sentenced to 40 days in jail, which he had previously served, after entering a no-contest plea to a charge of wrongful imprisonment with violence.

Before learning Josh Lueke was part of the Cliff Lee deal, I had never heard of him. I first believed he had an ailment of some type because, according to his minor league statistics, he had missed nearly the whole 2009 season. But as soon as I typed Lueke into Google, Bakersfield news headlines about his arrest and plea agreement appeared.

Josh Lueke wasn’t apparently Googled by the Mariners’ executive office. Once more, I find nothing surprising. After acquiring Blake Beavan, a former first-round draft pick and pitching prospect, to replace Lee, the M’s really wanted Justin Smoak. Lueke and Matt Lawson, the last two players added, were an afterthought.

This year, Lueke turns 25, not 24, as I wrote in error in the first post. He has excellent ratios, though (Ks/BBs, Ks/9 IP), so I’m sure the Mariners considered Lueke’s strikeout numbers when the Rangers offered to include him in the deal (we now know why) and determined he was a solid bottom-of-the-deal, player-to-be-named-later candidate to complete the package.

Ironically, Lueke is the last man the Mariners would have wanted as a throw-in to sour the deal for Cliff Lee because the franchise has publicly opposed violence against women. This Seattle Times piece by Mariners beat reporter Geoff Baker goes into great depth on the problems.

The Mariners brass is quoted as claiming they knew of the allegations against Lueke and believed that the issue was resolved last year, which meant Lueke had been “cleared.” This is quite incriminating. It seems incredibly sloppy and irresponsible because a more accurate photo was just a Google search away.

Though I would understand it if the M’s opted to release him given their previous position on domestic violence, I believe Lueke should be allowed to continue pitching professionally for anybody. He is entitled to resume his professional baseball career for someone after serving his term.

Having said that, Lueke will have to deal with the fallout from the truly poor choices he made on the night in issue because his conviction is a matter of public record. The public is free to debate, and teams are free to choose whether or not to hire a player who has been found guilty of that specific offense. Professional sports are essentially entertainment that depends only on the goodwill of the audience to survive.

For no other reason than that, the story serves as a strong illustration of the basic idea that young athletes—or any young guy, for that matter—should not behave like douchebags.

As long as they are given the opportunity, many young women are drawn to professional athletes and will make themselves available to meet their requirements.

If Lueke and his roommate hadn’t gotten the young woman so wasted that she passed out, the news reports indicate that she might have been open to a little harmless sleeze.

Every woman has an unqualified right to be given the chance to make that decision, no matter what she may or may not have been prepared to do if given a reasonably informed choice.

Apparently, Lueke denied this young woman this chance, and he has deservedly suffered the consequences. No matter how much he drank that night, at 24, he was undoubtedly old enough to know better.

I wonder if teams give their young players a canned speech explaining that while many women will be only too pleased to satisfy a ballplayer’s fancy, some women will not and that such refusals must be respected.

Players in basketball and football typically move straight from college to the major leagues, where they can receive lectures on life lessons and appropriate behavior from other players, the players’ organization, and their individual agents. But minor leaguers in baseball start off extremely young and are frequently left to their own devices when it comes to making decisions about their off-field behavior.

Baseball does not, however, have a monopoly on bad behavior. Examples are the most recent incident involving Ben Rothlisberger and the rape claim made against Kobe Bryant a few years ago.