eagle eye
04-17-2014, 11:39 AM
The recent talk about the terrifying odyssey of LA Dodger's player Yasiel Puig's journey to defect from his home country of Cuba to the USA so he can play baseball is certainly a compelling story. There's a detailed article coming out in ESPN the Magazine about his journey via Mexico that was being handled by a Mexican drug cartel for a per centage of his MLB earnings. It seems a rival cartel group actually helped Puig to complete his trip to the US and the cartel people who were standing with their hand out when Puig signed his $42 mm contract. It a lot more complicated than that, I just simplified GREATLY so this post wouldn't be a book. My point is Puig is not the first cartel assisted defection from Cuba. Is something like this that could result in problems with gambling on baseball with cartels influencing outcomes of games by blackmailing certain players into doing their bidding because of threat to family these players may have left behind? Are known associations with drug cartels something that compromises the integrity of the game? I'm not sure how I feel about this issue. The ordeal of Puig and others is nothing short of human trafficking and to have players associated to these cartel people sort of makes me sick. I don't like it one bit. The PED thing is bad enough but this looks and smells bad all the way through. Player acquisition via drug cartels is just unfathomable to me.