As long as Roberto Osuna is able to close games, some team will be willing to employ him. (Getty)

Certainly Jeff Luhnow heard the same stories as everyone else. The disgusting, abhorrent ones about what happened the night Toronto Blue Jays closer Roberto Osuna was arrested and charged with domestic assault. He heard about the brutality Osuna allegedly inflicted. About the picture of the victim’s face that police officers in Toronto still talk about. He heard the details that have circulated around the game for months, details that prosecutors in Canada have not confirmed but are so ugly, so off-putting that anyone with a conscience could not, in good faith, place him on a major league roster.

And then Jeff Luhnow, architect of the world champion Houston Astros, traded for Roberto Osuna.

What came next Monday was a clinic in arrogance, tone-deafness and doublespeak, proof that the Astros, like plenty of other professional sports organizations, believe so little in the public’s ability to parse their rhetoric that they’ll peddle blatant falsehoods to excuse their moral bankruptcy. From a feckless “zero-tolerance policy” to an “unprecedented” level of due diligence that sounded like little more than an exercise in confirmation bias, the attempts by Luhnow to rationalize the trade were amateur-hour spin that couldn’t cover up the truth. He didn’t just deal Ken Giles, David Paulino and Hector Perez for Roberto Osuna. He traded the goodwill built up by a clubhouse full of likable players who soon will be sharing a uniform, field and dugout with one currently standing trial for beating a woman.

Osuna is due in court Thursday for his latest hearing, then is expected back on the field Saturday when his 75-game suspension ends. That Major League Baseball levied such a significant suspension – the third-longest in the nearly three years of its domestic-violence policy – supports the idea that even without the case’s facts public, the severity of the incident disturbed the league.

Like the Blue Jays, who themselves revoltingly held on to Osuna in hopes of extracting trade value rather than simply releasing him, Luhnow, the Astros’ president and general manager, was unmoved. In trying to explain the team’s motivations, he addressed the obvious duplicity of the so-called “zero-tolerance policy.” For an organization as wedded to objective data as the Astros, you’d think they could tell the difference between zero arrests for domestic assault and one arrest for domestic assault. But no. That’s not what the Astros’ zero-tolerance policy means. It’s zero tolerance for those in the Astros’ organization and plenty of tolerance for those arrested elsewhere.

“Quite frankly,” Luhnow said, “I believe that you can have a zero-tolerance policy and also have an opportunity to give people second chances when they have made mistakes in the past in other organizations. That’s kind of how we put those two things together.”

Quite frankly, that is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.

Luhnow essentially said the Astros’ willingness to look past a man allegedly abusing a woman depends on his employer. If it is one of 29 other baseball teams, the Astros will welcome him. If he already plays for the Astros, the player is persona non grata. Luhnow invoked the 2016 case of Danry Vasquez, a former Houston prospect who was released after he viciously beat his girlfriend in a stairwell at a Double-A stadium. This was a proper decision by the Astros, and when the video of the incident came out four months ago, two Astros pitchers tweeted their feelings about it.

“I hope the rest of your life without baseball is horrible,” Justin Verlander said.

🖕🏻 you man. I hope the rest of your life without baseball is horrible. You deserve all that is coming your way! https://t.co/e8nJ8urUAJ — Justin Verlander (@JustinVerlander) March 15, 2018





“We must fight for the victims,” Lance McCullers Jr. said, “video or not.”

The issue here is no one cared as much until a video was leaked & now everyone is outraged!? This is the reality of domestic violence. It’s always brutal, always sickening. We must fight for the victims, video or not. He should be in jail. If you need help, find it. People care. https://t.co/1ZhHnJlX3o — Lance McCullers Jr. (@LMcCullers43) March 15, 2018





Not once in his statement nor in the 15 minutes he spoke in English during a teleconference did Luhnow mention the victim. Before an Astros senior vice president cut off questioning, I had asked if the team’s “unprecedented” due diligence included seeking out the story of the alleged victim, any of the witnesses or simply someone outside baseball.

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