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It hasn’t been a pleasant time to be planted in front of the TV with ESPN on — lots of bad news lately. Of course, we have the tragic news that the Coast Guard has suspended the search for the three remaining football players who were adrift at sea after their boat capsized.

Add on top of that the depressing story of John Odom, a Minor League baseball player who recently was traded for ten bats. From the article on Yahoo! Sports:

“People are like, ‘I’d kill myself’ and stuff,” Odom said at the time, dismissing any such notion.

Three weeks after the trade, he abruptly left the team.

Six months after the trade, he was dead.

The medical examiner said Odom’s death in Georgia on Nov. 5 at age 26 was an accidental overdose from heroin, methamphetamine, the stimulant benzylpiperazine and alcohol.

The AP also quotes Odom’s former manager in Laredo, who mentions that Odom had “some demons chasing him.”

An overdose on heroin, meth, and alcohol is no accident. On top of that, Odom had problems stemming back to high school (including aggravated assault) which were clearly not invisible to anyone working with the Calgary Vipers, the team that traded him for the bats.

Calgary traded him because Odom was unable to cross the border due to the charges on his record. Cash was offered for Odom initially, but Calgary does not like to take cash from other teams because, according to them, it gives fans the impression that the team is “financially unstable.” So Laredo offered bats instead, which the Vipers accepted.

What we have here is a prime example of poor executive decision-making and a failure to know your personnel. A trade of a player for bats would have been at least somewhat acceptable if it involved someone who didn’t have a spotty past as Odom did. You don’t toy around with someone who has a criminal record and problems with drugs and alcohol.

Further, their credo for not accepting cash isn’t logically consistent. By trading the player for ten bats, they caused a frenzy of media attention. If they had simply accepted the cash, it would have been a blurb in size-six font in a couple of local newspapers — that’s it. Hardly anyone would know about it.

One of the more consistent lines of thought in moral theory is that an action is immoral if it causes some kind of unpleasantness for another person. I find it hard to believe that Calgary, which has claimed that the trade wasn’t made as a publicity stunt, thought that Odom would be met with nothing but positive and encouraging responses. The trade essentially said that Odom wasn’t worth another professional baseball player or even a medium-sized wad of cash; he was worth ten processed 34-inch-long pieces of wood.

Oftentimes it takes a tragedy for our error-prone ways to manifest. Dehumanizing athletes, who devote years to perfecting their craft, by trading them for next-to-nothing is a business practice that, hopefully, will now come to an end. It’s a shame it took the suicide of a multi-talented kid to reveal this to us.

More from the Yahoo! Sports article:

On June 5 in Amarillo, the “Batman” theme played while Odom warmed up for Laredo, and he tipped his cap to the sound booth. But he was battered for eight runs in 3 1-3 innings and mercilessly taunted by the crowd. [Manager Dan] Shwam went to the mound.

“The chants, the catcalls, they were terrible. I had to get him out of there for his own good. He was falling apart, right in front of our eyes,” Shwam said.

When Shwam noticed Odom becoming more withdrawn, he called a team meeting. The message: No more talking about the trade or the bats by anyone.

Odom pitched five good innings at San Angelo on June 10 in what turned out to be his third and last start. On the bus after the game, Odom said he needed to speak with Shwam the next day.

“He came in and said, ‘Skip, I’m going home. I just can’t take it. I’ve got some things to take care of. I’ve got to get my life straightened out,”’ Shwam recalled.

And with that, Odom disappeared.

Several baseball people tried calling him, but got no answer.

Shwam obviously recognized a problem, but he did not fulfill his duties as a coach in the least. Besides putting his team in the best possible position to win, a manager is responsible for trying to maintain a very high level of self-esteem and motivation in each of his players.

Did Shwam ever recommend Odom to a psychologist? Did he ever attempt to talk to family members? Did he ever have a one-on-one discussion with Odom about any problems he was having?

To me, it sounds like Shwam saw the problem and wanted to give off the illusion that he’s dealing with it, which is why his attempts to help Shwam were all public in nature. It can be and often is a daunting task to deal with a person who has deep personal problems — maybe this looming responsibility was too much for Shwam.

Obviously, I have never talked to Shwam and anything I know about this situation is from what I’ve read, so a lot of what I’m suggesting is conjecture. But it’s important to ask these questions, as all organizations — not just baseball teams or even sports teams — can learn from the mistakes the Calgary and Laredo teams made in personnel management. It shouldn’t take a suicide for an unprofessional act to fall by the wayside.

Sori4Mvp

Mar 6 2009, 02:25 PM

Jesus, I would say this was all made up but I guess it's not. Dude was traded for 10 bats??? Sad story.