Sportswriter Thomas Boswell discussed Laroche in his live chat yesterday. Here is an excerpt, but it’s worth reading in its entirety.
You’re contradicting yourself.
In a report I heard yesterday they said the team actually hadn’t filed the the papers. In an effort to make sure the player didn’t have a change of heart.
Whaaaaat??
This just in:
“According to ESPN Magazine, LaRoche and Milwuakee Brewers pitcher Blaine Boyer spent 10 days in the area wearing hidden cameras and doing undercover work to help rescue underage sex slaves.”
That ESPN article is an abomination. It’s a big old rim-job for LaRoche, and has almost no redeeming features whatsoever.
I have no particular beef with LaRoche himself, but the author of that article seems to have him up for some sort of red-meat, good-old-boy version of sainthood. The whole thing is a sort of mini-hagiography, romanticizing his conservative politics, his penchant for hunting, and his ambivalence about formal education and schooling, and pretending that he’s some sort of iconoclastic folk hero. They describe him as having a “nearly cinematic level of nonconformity” for doing the sorts of things that just about any redneck with a bazillion dollars in his bank account would do.
As for the sex slave thing, there’s painfully little evidence that what he did there actually helped save anyone, and to be honest, while i suspect that “sting” operations can probably do some good in areas like this, the story is just fucking bizarre. The whole scenario reminds of a scene from an NYPD Blue episode, where a guy caught with a bunch of kiddy porn on his computer says that he’s only using it for “research” so that he can help catch the pornographers.
No doubt there are many aspects of LaRoche’s worldview that I strongly disagree with, but a great many MLB players could be fairly described as rednecks with a bazillion dollars in their bank accounts, and they *aren’t *doing these things, so it seems perfectly fair to describe him as a unique character.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to describe spending his offseason working to rescue teenage sex slaves as a legitimately heroic thing to do, and it seems quite churlish to point out that there’s no proof that his efforts actually succeeded in helping any particular person. It’s downright disgusting to suggest that this trip, which AFAICT nobody had known about until he mentioned it in that interview, was somehow an excuse to gratify his own pedophiliac urges.
It’s a blow-job puff piece with no redeeming journalistic value. It could have been crafted by the Adam LaRoche PR Agency. It also falls into the age-old “white guys from the mid-west are the true Americans” bullshit, and is part and parcel of the whole “playing the game properly” and “respecting the traditions” crap we get from aging douchebags like Goose Gossage.
The final sentence was tongue-in-cheek, and i certainly don’t think LaRoche is a pedophile, but i also think that these sorts of rescue operations are sometimes more about the self-righteousness of the rescuers than effecting long-term change. As this Forign Policy article suggests, the rescuers sometimes actually get in the way of more sustained local efforts to help, and the rescuers often march away after their mission is accomplished without doing anything to ensure the long-term safety of the people they’ve rescued, many of which end up in situations just as bad as before the rescue.
I don’t know. Fighting child sex slavery is indeed a noble cause, but it does’t really seem to lend itself to being a job you do while on vacation.
He was making a joke.
La Roche is a sufferer from Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as well as a devout Christian. I don’t know how much those factored into his decision, but who the fuck cares? Its his life, and who knows why he wants to spend so much time with his son? Maybe theres something not being reported here. Since when did a stupid game become more important than family?