Thoughts on Eugenio Velez's turn to a life of crime
A sad next chapter for a Giants legend
It was a perfectly fine Sunday when we all heard about it. The tweet had been sent early in the morning, so it was a matter of time before some brave soul found it. It was just a matter of time until one of the greatest heroes in the history of Very Online Giants Fans would fall from grace:
Boy, this is a complex issue. On the one hand, it’s tough for ex-players to find a new purpose post-baseball. You spend your life dedicated to a game, and play it at the highest level for a relatively short time, and then suddenly it’s over, and you don’t have a place anymore. Who, in this situation, wouldn’t end up casting about wildly for a new purpose? Who wouldn’t be desperate enough to get caught up in some illegal scheme?
On the other hand, he shouldn’t have done all that arms trafficking.
As of that article in March 2020, Velez was sentenced to a month in jail for arms trafficking. In 2021, he was sentenced to almost a year in prison after police found a 5.6mm rifle and an M15 in his car, and claimed they had spent almost a year investigating an arms trafficking network in which Velez (and his companion, Other Guy Who We Don’t Care About) would resell the weapons.
The Dominican Public Ministry also reported it was investigating him for the David Ortiz shooting in 2019, though I haven’t been able to find any more information on that.
Now, it’s possible this is all a big misunderstanding. Sure, Velez had two illegal guns in his car when he went shopping at the supermarket, but as every American knows, that’s not that many guns. Sure, this led to another raid at the home of the gardener — no, I don’t know the significance of that — where they found another gun, but that’s still not that many guns. I mean, most Texans store more guns than that in their kids’ rooms.
I also don’t know why there haven’t been any updates in the last year and a half. Did the case go nowhere? Was it all a setup? Was Velez a perfectly nice young man who the authorities decided should offer them a healthy bribe to make this all go away? Was Velez a perfectly villanous young man who decided he should offer the authorities a bribe to make this all go away? No idea! And, from what I could find, no one is reporting on it.
From a pure Giants fan perspective, it’s a shame. Fortunately, since Velez is not (as far as I could find) accused of killing anyone himself, I only have to feel kind of gross for saying that. And yet, it’s true. Very few players in my lifetime could match Velez’s ratio of Entertainment Value to WAR. He was not a good player for a major leaguer, but he has been wildly, wildly entertaining as a meme.
I mean, “I had to be focused. I was focused. The thing is, it happened” is brilliant. That GIF of him dancing after the 2010 team won the World Series is spectacular. His then-major league record hitless streak that came mostly with the 2011 Dodgers is delightful and will remain so for the foreseeable future. And the way he was just kind of a weird baseball player, with a funny stance who was talented but not particularly good at anything? Outstanding. Twitter’s GIF thing doesn’t have even one Eugenio Velez GIF, and that is an outrage, and presumably that’s Elon Musk’s next big project.
So I will miss Eugenio Velez, not as he is, but as a wacky memory. This is a good reminder that wacky memories don’t exist in a vacuum, though. Velez was always a complicated person with an inner life that we couldn’t touch and didn’t really want to. It was easier to look at the 25th guy on the roster, who if we’re being honest probably shouldn’t have been on the roster at all, and see comic relief.
He was a guy, not in the scouting sense (“Marco Luciano is a GUY”), but in an everyday sense. He’s presumably still a guy. Something about life was hard for him, or should have been hard but wasn’t, or used to be easy but then wasn’t. He spent years playing baseball after 2011, first as a AAA player (once an All-Star) who never got called up, and then in the Mexican League.
Did he turn to criminal activity out of frustration? Anger? Self-righteousness? Or was it just a thing someone told him he could do? I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. Eugenio Velez is not an important enough baseball player for the coverage he’s already gotten, much less possible future coverage that would be much more psychologically probing and get us answers. All we know is this: Velez was fun as a player, if not good. Then he had his time in the wilderness. Seems like he never came out of it.
I read somewhere (in 2011) that Eugenio was on 2B (no doubt pinch-running), and mowed down the 3B ump on a subsequent hit. Vince Scully pipes up, "And Eugenio Velez FINALLY gets a hit for the Dodgers!" :o)
He was so entertaining. It would have been just a bonus if he were also good.