Moose Stuff
Active Member
so you are saying that a team worth hundreds of millions of dollars and part of an organization worth billions in total - and is considering drafting a guy in the first round and thus sign a contract obligating them to pay him millions in signing bonuses and salary - and thus opening themselves up to a huge PR, fiduciary, and oversight risk/liability because of their future employee:
would not bother to run a $500 background check that takes about 48 hours and would easily uncover the fact that he is a convicted felon even as a youth?
You are right - I find that hard to believe if there is a single Risk/Compliance attorney associated with the club in any capacity.
You can't get a job at McDonald's without them running the basic $75 background check that would actually uncover the conviction.
If MLB teams are not doing that minimum level of due diligence, then frankly the deserve the multi-million dollar lawsuit that eventually one of them will incur when the wife, girlfriend, drunk girl in bar, female fan gets attacked by one of their players while playing out of town and it comes out he had a past history but they try to use the "we were not aware" statement.
Professional sports teams are corporations with extreme liability concerns and compliance requirements - much more so than Universities and we run background checks on athletes at TCU. So it would be a compliance and risk failure of gargantuan proportions for an MLB team to not do the same - because I would bet they have done one on every person in their back office/operations areas.
I told you you'd be surprised. Do some teams do them? Sure. But it is FAR from every team and every potential high pick. And just for the record, this kid wasn't gonna be a first round pick.