THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, November 11, 2011

Redsox, before Penn State

Going back in time:

Never mind that the negligence dated back to 1971. One victim, according to a complaint filed by his lawyer two decades later, told Red Sox home clubhouse manager Vince Orlando that Fitzpatrick had abused him for the previous three seasons. Orlando fired the boy. Two sources, who asked not to be identified, said a Red Sox player caught Fitzpatrick sodomizing a boy in the shower, much like then-Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary did Sandusky. The player reported the incident to the team but not police. Fitzpatrick kept his job anyway.
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Save two years in the military, Fitzpatrick never left the Red Sox organization. When Yawkey died in 1976 after 44 tumultuous years of owning the franchise—charges of racism chased him all the way through his Hall of Fame induction in 1980 and to today—his wife’s continued employment of Fitzpatrick concerned some Red Sox workers. Players for years had told young boys—especially African-Americans—to stay away from Fitzpatrick. Higher-ups in the organization tried to isolate him from any possible social setting. Jean Yawkey just wouldn’t fire him.
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Fitzpatrick would say that to the kids in Winter Haven, too, and the players saw his predilection toward young, black boys as odd. Just not odd enough to look deeper. So finding witnesses to corroborate the Winter Haven seven’s stories was near-impossible. Whether it was players’ willful ignorance or health—Ted Williams was asked to talk with police but was too ill and died soon thereafter—nobody from the Red Sox claimed to know what happened.

“You heard things through the grapevine,” longtime Boston third baseman Wade Boggs told the Tampa Tribune in 2001, “but I knew nothing specifically of any incidents while I was in Boston.”
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Toward the end of batting practice before an Aug. 25, 1991 game in Anaheim, Calif., a man leaned over the Red Sox dugout and held up a sign:

Donald Fitzpatrick Sexually Assaulted Me

The first victim to stand up to Fitzpatrick remains anonymous today. His bravery and boldness single-handedly ended Fitzpatrick’s career. Steven August, the Red Sox’s traveling secretary, told the Boston Globe that Fitzpatrick returned to the clubhouse that afternoon and “was basically cowering in a corner.” He left the team four days later and never returned. The Red Sox paid the victim $100,000 in an out-of-court settlement.
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So he promises them things he can’t promise like a book deal for “Major League Addiction.” He says it’s got good dirt. Something about a cabal of child molesters in clubhouse whose names he doesn’t remember and a full accounting of the steroid users he saw working in Fitzpatrick’s clubhouse and how Major League Baseball failed by letting a sexual deviant run rampant for 20 years.