COMMENTARY : This Judge Was Too Ripe for Strawberry

Darryl Strawberry, an admitted tax cheat and a convicted felon, is now allowed to write a check and get himself out of jail. This is what you do in games. Strawberry has always had good luck with those.

U.S. District Judge Barrington D. Parker did everything except ask Strawberry for an autograph when it was all over at the U.S. Courthouse in White Plains, N.Y., on Monday. Parker seemed at least vaguely aware that Strawberry signing his name is what started him toward his courtroom in the first place, even on a day when the judge was as easy for Strawberry as a baseball groupie.

Maybe Strawberry got off easy because he was such a good citizen in other areas of his life during the five years when he systematically cheated the government out of $100,000 in taxes. Strawberry is only a two-time loser with Major League Baseball’s drug policy, and a graduate of rehab facilities on both coasts. His latest after-care violation was in February, and that is why Strawberry officially began serving a 60-day suspension when the baseball season opened Tuesday.

If acting Commissioner Bud Selig ran baseball the way Judge Parker runs his courtroom, Strawberry would be batting cleanup somewhere this week. The judges in the George Foreman-Axel Schulz fight did better work than this.

Strawberry explained to Parker that he has been under a lot of “pressure,” and that’s why he started using drugs again. It must have been the pressure of all that easy card-show money that forced Strawberry to keep stuffing it into his pockets and then lying about it all over the place.

“It is my job here to see that you are punished,” Parker said to Strawberry.

Then Parker really did the opposite. Pete Rose once committed the same tax crime for which Strawberry had entered a guilty plea. Rose went to jail for three months. He just ended up in front of a real judge in Cincinnati.

“I never knew Ohio was this much tougher than New York,” Pete Rose was saying Monday.

He was in Boca Raton, Fla., at his restaurant, getting ready to do his syndicated radio show, saying he was happy that at least Strawberry had stayed out of jail.

“I owed the government $162,000,” Rose said. “Two weeks before I got sentenced, I went in and paid $366,000. The difference was interest and penalties. But in my case, they wanted more.”

Darryl Strawberry gets less. He does not get three months in jail, which is what the U.S. attorneys for the Southern District of New York expected because of their plea-bargain arrangement with him. Strawberry’s attorneys sat around Monday arguing about when Strawberry should start his jail term, and where. Then Parker rolled over for all of them.

We live in an age when people are amazed when someone such as Rose, or Mike Tyson, actually does time. More and more, people believe there is one justice for the rich and famous, and another kind of justice, much less forgiving, for everybody else. It happened again Monday in Parker’s courtroom. Sometimes the criminal-justice system in this country needs a laugh track.

Parker told Strawberry on Monday that he had looked into his family background, where he had come from, which means South Central L.A. He said he had looked into how Strawberry had handled responsibility, and fame.

Parker then spoke about a “puzzling immaturity” from Strawberry. Parker shouldn’t have been puzzled at all. Strawberry, who turned 33 last month, has been immature his whole life. It is the only thing at which he has ever shown any real consistency. But people have always looked the other way, in and out of baseball. Now Strawberry finds a judge who will do the same.

Parker let Strawberry off with six months of house confinement that does not even involve electronic surveillance. There are also 100 hours of community service, and a $350,000 fine that really starts to look like back taxes with interest on the nearly half-a-million in unreported card-show money, personal-appearance money, he made from 1986-90. Strawberry didn’t even have to turn in any of his friends.

When it was over Monday, I called Parker’s office and got his clerk, who said he was busy typing up the sparkling decision Parker handed down in his court.

“The court has no comment,” the clerk said.

There was nothing else for the court to say. Strawberry writes a check and goes home and waits for his suspension to end so he can play baseball again. The check Strawberry writes is for a lot of money. Strawberry makes a lot more to play baseball. Last season, he took home about $5 million from the Dodgers and Giants and didn’t even have to play 30 games.

“All I can say to you is that it’s up to the judge,” Carol Sipperly, the prosecutor who made the case against Strawberry, said from her office Monday afternoon. She had been sandbagged by a soft judge and there was nothing for her to say, either. “Everything else to say is in our pre-sentencing letter.”

The letter also has the name Mary Jo White, U.S. Attorney, on it. Sipperly is the one who signed it. In the letter, Sipperly outlines how Strawberry knew exactly what he was doing over the years when he was cheating the government.

“On the few occasions that promoters wanted to pay by check, both Eric Goldschmidt (Strawberry’s former agent) and Strawberry refused to accept payment by check, even on one occasion when it was a guaranteed check,” Sipperly writes to Parker.

“In sum,” Sipperly said, “during this five-year period (1986-90), Strawberry took advantage of the opportunity provided by the sports memorabilia industry, invariably demanding and accepting cash payments, intentionally avoiding the creation of a paper trail, and intentionally failing to report a substantial portion of the income he earned from autograph-signing shows and personal appearances. . . .

“The recommended sentence sends a message to all taxpayers that the intentional evasion of one’s tax responsibilities will be prosecuted. . . . People will pay their fair share of taxes only if they believe that tax evasion bears a cost to the criminal so high that the potential ill-gotten rewards are simply not worth the risk.”

That is not the way it worked out in White Plains. No-talent left-handed pitchers are tougher on Strawberry than a judge was Monday.