Through 2001, Roberto Alomar had been an 12-time All-Star, had collected 10 Gold Gloves and was well within sight of 3000 hits. Alomar’s 2001 acquisition by the New York Mets was meant to be the coda on a Hall Of Fame career, but as any fan from that period could tell you, the second-baseman’s lethargic performances seemed more in character for a player 10-15 years older.
On Tuesday, Alomar was hit with a $15 million lawsuit by a former girlfriend who claims she and the ballplayer had unprotected sex while the latter was aware he was HIV positive. The Daily News item linked above has no shortage of gruesome details, as does this morning’s entry from The Smoking Gun. Without making any guesses about the validity of the aforementioned lawsuit, if the reports concerning Alomar’s physical condition (including a suggestion the Tampa Rays had reason to suspect HIV infection in 2005) are true, this might put an entirely different spin on his unwatchable final 3 seasons in the big leagues.
(UPDATE, 8:30pm : calling the rift with former girlfriend Ilya Dall “a very private, personal matter”, Alomar insists “I am in very good health and I ask that you respect my privacy during this time.”)
Oh man, I’d just finished writing my headline for a post on this. The woman’s suit, at least as the Daily News describes it, sounds ultra-frivolous and extortionate. It may well be that the guy is sick, but it’s more like the Curry lawsuit — over-the-top in depth and breadth, with little rococo flourishes all over, like the woman’s suggestion that Alomar contracted the disease after being raped by “two Mexican men” after a fall game in Arizona when he was 17 — than anything else, it seems like. Athlete-bilking lawsuits have officially entered their baroque phase.
yeah, sorry to blog-block you on this one, David. If anyone wants to read the Daily News piece, they can certainly do so. Whether the public’s right to know is served by so many references to Alomar’s (alleged) physical degeneration is certainly open to interpretation. They’ve been yucking it up over this one in the comments section of a rather prominent sports site, and while the publishers advise, “we’re looking for comments that are interesting, substantial or highly amusing”, they’d do well to add, “and AIDS jokes. We’re totally ok with those.”
Those comments are hilarious!!1!
So is the fact that there’s a factual error in the first clause of the first sentence of the story (“weird story out of Brooklyn,” which is true only in the sense that Queens, where all of this takes place, is indeed outside of Brooklyn). What clowns.
In the woman’s defense, she said Alomar had told her about the rape:
“In April 2005, Alomar told Dall he was suffering from erectile dysfunction and confided “he was raped by two Mexican men after playing a ballgame in New Mexico or a Southwestern state when he was 17,” the suit says.”
While this might be more opportunistic than she’s admitting, it seems this is a far cry from an ex-con chauffeur suing over alleged inappropriate sexual advances.