MLB draft: Luke Heimlich, convicted child molester, likely to be selected (UPDATE)

The draft was held not long after this article appeared, Heimlich was not drafted.

For more than a year now, teams have grappled with the idea of Heimlich. He is Oregon State’s ace and one of the best college pitchers in the nation; he is the signatory of a guilty plea to molesting a 6-year-old female relative when he was 15. He is a left-hander whose fastball tops out at 97 mph; he is an endless supply of bad headlines, treacherous questions and awful publicity. He is worthy of a second chance, with low recidivism rates for the crime to which he admitted; he now says that despite the guilty plea, he didn’t commit that crime, which only confuses the matter more.

Sports so often stumbles as it tries to strike the balance between talent and principle, and Heimlich’s case is no exception. His eventual signing will represent a clear value judgment: that his ability as a baseball player outweighs the moral quagmire of his actions and serves as an admission that the organization will embrace someone who in his guilty plea wrote “I admit that I had sexual contact” with a little girl.

It presents a litmus test that the Baltimore Orioles took last year, when they engaged in conversations with Heimlich about signing him as a non-drafted free agent, three sources familiar with the conversations told Yahoo Sports. While the sides did not strike a deal, the discussions with the Orioles showed Heimlich that even a few months after the disclosure of his case by The Oregonian, he was not entirely toxic to teams.

MLB draft: Luke Heimlich, convicted child molester, likely to be selected

See also::  Portland Tribune's look at the history and background of Heimlich's juvenile case