Hashtag Free Lainer Bueno!

Headlines are a funny thing. They are designed to get your attention, or the attention of a search engine somewhere, while summing up the contents in a pithy way. Often they contain internet memes or SEO-optimization key words. Sometimes, like today, they contain both. /header #MLB #baseball

Over the years we’ve had some fun with the “Free Person X” internet meme, which most probably spawned from Free Mumia, but has since gone a little crzazlebeans, if you know what I mean, and baseball has taken the saying under it’s wing. Whether it’s Kila Ka’aihue that must be #freed from the clutches of the incompetent Royals, or Brandon Allen that must fight the good fight against the spaced invaders that wish to take his playing time, we’ve used that sentence construction to encourage young men to go against what’s wrong. Having been guilty of capriciously throwing the phrase around just last week, this is no finger-wagging piece, though.

Instead, call this piece the anthropological wanderings inspired by the title and subject of a serious piece by Larry Behrendt at It’s About the Money Stupid. In his latest, Larry examines the fate of young Lainer Bueno. The Venezuelan shortstop may not have a future in baseball, but attribute that mostly to a fateful combination of a lack of major-league talent (228/.336/.239 in Venezuelan Summer League) and the possibly unfortunate positive test for clenbuterol. The combination has him a free agent, and Larry thinks it’s an injustice.

Read the whole thing, do it. Afterwards, you may feel that our entry point to this article was all wrong today. Behrendt’s piece is a serious uncovering of the holes in MLB’s drug testing policy as it relates to Venezuelans and clenbuterol in particular. It looks like there’s a real reason the league may want to look at the fact that, according to “Scorecasting” by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, Venezuelan baseball players are about 4 times more likely to test positive for drugs than their American counterparts. It may not just be about skeezy agents in Latin America. The beef may be the real meat to the story.

But the title, and even the article, can make a mind wander to other “Free” movements in baseball. The parallels may seem stretched, and its continued use may even seem to cheapen the phrase. On the other hand, injustice exists. And whether the injustice at hand is an unequal appropriation of playing time, an unfair exclusion from the sport, or an incarceration surrounded by real questions, it doesn’t deserve to continue. And if it takes a hashtag, a slogan, a link and a few re-tweets to uncover and document that injustice, that’s about the least we can do.

Scratch that, it’s the very least we can do.