May 1, 2008
Sox Leave Their Cuban At Home
The White Sox head to Toronto for a four-game series with the Blue Jays tomorrow, minus one if their players. Because of visa issues, they left Cuban national Alexei Ramirez behind in Chicago.
Ramirez defected to the Dominican Republic eight months ago, before signing with the Sox. While team officials were working on getting his paperwork in order, the early trip north of the border worked against them as they were unable to get him the proper visas to enter and leave Canada. Chicagoist has never understood why MLB doesn't have some sort of priority access at the State Department to get all these players' visa issues resolved more easily. Every year, guys show up late to spring training because of issues with visa -- and now this?
Without Ramirez available, the Sox intend to make a short-term roster move. Expect either Josh Fields or Jerry Owens to appear in Canada in his stead.
|
And the MLB should have special privileges
why exactly??
sounds like Ramirez should have attended the May Day demonstrations today
I THINK WE SHOULD JAME THE SWITCHBOARDS
CALL THE STATE DEPTARTMENT
Why couldn't MLB have some sort of go-to point person for dealing with player visas? Given that most are needing the same sort of documents and coming from the same handful of countries, the requests should be fairly standardized. And it's not like these foreign ball players are likely to be terrorists or drug runners, etc. I'm not saying there can't be some sort of added fee for this service, but there should be some way that visas aren't an issue every single year for the same guys.
I agree with mepps -- why should baseball players and MLB be given any special privileges regarding visas and immigration? Should privileged H1B status to developers coming from overseas also be given? Should migrant farm workers be given priority at/around harvest season? Or that Mexican fellow who can't get married to his wife in Chicago -- should he be given special dispensation? Conversely, should citizenship or a visa be taken from someone, like Rev. Wright or Oprah or Dave Letterman? Where does it end? Discuss.
Yeah, I get that. But why not for international corporations too? There are a lot of companies who have a lot more foreign nationals working for them, coming in and out of the country, than the MLB, shouldn't they have dibs on that program before MLB??
Why is MLB so special is what I'm asking. They already get months of attention in Congress and waste taxpayer dollars with untangling lies about stupid injections.
CLEAR is a priority access service you can pay for to get through airport security in some airports. You have to be cleared ahead of time by the firm, but it reduces wait time to pretty much nothing.
Why not have the same for visa services? Charge an extra fee for expediting the process, the MLB can afford it.