A VETTING DEBACLE: CLEVINGER WAS SLEEPING WITH BAUER’S ACCUSER

The White Sox and their notorious owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, can claim they didn’t know about a domestic violence probe of their new pitcher, but they were negligent in not knowing about his sex history

     Would it interest Jerry Reinsdorf and Rick Hahn, the chairman and general manager of the Chicago White Sox, that the woman who accused Trevor Bauer of assault during rough sex was sleeping with Mike Clevinger in the same time period? Would it interest them that she testified in Los Angeles Superior Court, more than 18 months ago, about her sexual relationship with Clevinger in October 2020?

     “Trevor is a wackadoodle like Clev,” she had written in a text message to a friend, a reference that came out in a Bauer-related court proceeding. When Bauer’s attorney pressed for information, the woman said, “He doesn’t need to be brought into this,” before acknowledging hookups with Clevinger when she was beginning sobriety after years of alcohol problems.

     Might it interest Reinsdorf and Hahn that just several months after Clevinger started sleeping with Bauer’s accuser, he impregnated another woman, Olivia Finestead, who now is accusing the pitcher of multiple incidents of physical, verbal and emotional abuse against her and their now-10-month-old daughter?

     All of this should have interested and alarmed the White Sox — a desperate franchise trying to bury a succession of scandalous lawsuits and craving any sort of success after only one World Series championship in 105 seasons — when they weighed whether to sign Clevinger in December. The information was available online with a few strokes of a keyboard. The court documents were easily accessible, as were stories about her wide-ranging testimony in USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. With some simple research, they would have realized she also was having sex with Clevinger’s high-profile teammate on the San Diego Padres, the since-PED-disgraced Fernando Tatis Jr., and that Clevinger was as irresponsible as he was the night in August 2020 when he violated COVID-19 protocols — in Chicago, of all places — and went out on the town with a teammate before the Cleveland Guardians, suitably disgusted by his behavior, traded him to the Padres.

     But though I knew about Clevinger’s role in this revolving sex party, as did thousands of newspaper readers who surely included Major League Baseball insiders, the men who run the White Sox either didn’t know or disregarded the information. Whichever is true, Hahn is guilty of gross negligence in a vetting debacle. And Reinsdorf — in his latest blunder in a fifth decade of two-team ownership — is guilty of continuing to employ Hahn. The Sox are engulfed in their usual stench a day after Clevinger reported to camp in Arizona, while a months-long domestic violence investigation by MLB allows him to remain in uniform until further notice.

     It’s possible, though equally as clueless and/or reckless, that the White Sox didn’t know about the MLB investigation when they signed Clevinger to a one-year, $12 million contract. But there is no excuse not to know about the sleaze in his private life, if not the domestic violence allegations, which means Hahn looks even worse when he says, “There was no indication of anything close to anything that has been alleged in (Clevinger’s) background.”

     No indication? Is he serious? Clevinger was sleeping around with a woman who accused Bauer of sexual assault after she text-messaged requests to him for rough sex, a woman whose accusations led MLB to suspend him for a record 324 games and, after the ban was reduced to 194 games in December, convinced the Los Angeles Dodgers to release him. That wasn’t enough to give Hahn — and, by extension, Reinsdorf — some measure of pause before signing him? The White Sox can say they didn’t know about the investigation, though I’ve caught this organization in lies and don’t trust a word that comes out of that place. Said Hahn: “If Rick Hahn’s reputation, if the confidence in me and the front office is adversely affected by this because there needs to be confidentiality in these investigations, that’s OK in the end, frankly. The overall good and need and effectiveness of the policy is more important than me necessarily making fully informed decisions. That’s reality. But I’m certainly going to take whatever slings and arrows come our way, understandably.”

     He should take them and leave them inserted where they belong, in his hide. Because he later admitted, as he answered media questions Wednesday, to an organizational strategy of “taking calculated risks on players that have had, let’s say, immaturity issues with other organizations, bringing them in here and making them part of our environment, giving them a new opportunity to fulfill their potential.”

     Was he dipping his toe into a mea culpa? Was he trying to explain to diehard Sox fans, dwindling by the day, why he’d take a chance on Clevinger at age 32? “We probably don’t have that ring in ’05 without taking chances like that,” said Hahn, referring to a problem child or two on the World Series title club. “That said, you try to do everything in your power to cover everything you can and make a decision based upon the risk of what you’re bringing in. That’s a big part of my job. A big part of the front office’s job is managing risk.”

     In fairness, Clevinger is caught in the storm of an accuser trying to bring him down. Finestead, who has said he choked her and threw tobacco chew on their child, accused him of being high on LSD while driving a car with their child as a passenger. She appeared on a Chicago radio station this week and called him a “liar” and a drug abuser. He is allowed due process, though it’s odd he is getting his day in MLB court — actually, months — when Bauer was suspended in quick order, though he never was charged criminally. If baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is doing a favor for the influential Reinsdorf by extending the probe, or if he was ceding to the Dodgers in his Bauer ban so they could recoup millions, then he’s a bigger sham than I thought.

     “It’s really embarrassing,” Clevinger said. “It’s not who I am. And now I need to sit here and answer questions like I am one of those people. I’m here to answer to the bell and excited to see when the facts come out. … I would never harm a woman. I love my kids more than anything.

     “I’m pretty disappointed we have to start off this way. This is pretty devastating to me and my family and I know I feel terrible for my teammates having to answer questions from you, and for you to have to ask them a bunch of questions about this. I trust the process from MLB, I really do. I think there’s a reason I’m sitting in front of you today. I’m just asking everyone to wait before they rush to judgment. Wait until the actual facts are out there.”

     Know this: There is no bigger sleazebag than the man who owns the White Sox. Reinsdorf’s arrogance, combined with Mr. Magoo moments in his advanced years, trickles down to his baseball operation. It’s no surprise the Clevinger case comes not long after a lawsuit was filed by a longtime Sox trainer, who said he was fired because he’s gay. And after an autistic batboy won a confidential settlement, having accused the organization’s fast-tracking minor-league manager, Omar Vizquel, of hideous sexual harassment acts in the clubhouse of the team’s Class AA affiliate, the Birmingham Barons.

     For now, the daily focus isn’t on new manager Pedro Grifol, or the young stars who are growing older by the day, or the team’s chances in a closing window of American League opportunity. The primary focus is on Olivia Finestead’s Instagram account. “The White Sox can allow him at spring training, that doesn’t mean Mike is off the hook with the MLB or that he didn’t do what I’ve said he has,” she posted after Clevinger’s media session.

     As usual, Reinsdorf only brought this on himself. His 87th birthday is a week from Saturday. It’s time to blow out the candles on his wretched ownership run.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.