Taking Him Back: Why A Baseball Wife Forgives A Cheating Spouse

Lost in the recent saga surrounding former Mets general manager and now former ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips and his unfaithfulness to his spouse was one small detail: He'd done it before. 

When the story first came out, much of the focus was on the woman, Brooke Hundley.  She had a Fatal Attraction-style obsession with Phillips, who is 25 years her senior.  She'd stalked one of his sons on Facebook.  She called and texted Marni Phillips, the wife.  She went to the Phillips house in Connecticut and crashed into a stone column in retreat upon Marni's arrival home.  Plus, she'd committed the crime of looking plain and being overweight; not looking like a beautiful, thin object of attraction that could make men say, "Well, if you're gonna ruin your life, she's the one to ruin it with." 

Steve Phillips has ruined both his personal and private lives.  He's been fired from ESPN.  He's checked himself into a treatment facility for sex addiction.  And his wife has filed for divorce.  As per Hundley, she also is no longer with ESPN.  Add in the four children Steve and Marni Phillips had together and that's seven lives touched forever by this one mistake.

Only it wasn't one mistake.  Back in the fall of 1998, public allegations and admissions first struck Phillips when a Mets team employee sued for sexual harassment.  Phillips and the Mets settled out of court with the woman, but not before he took an 8-day leave of absence and admitted to the relationship as well as other affairs.  The public largely forgot about these indiscretions when the Mets made it to the NLCS the following season and the World Series in 2000.  By 2001, Phillips Gate version 1.0 was a footnote gathering dust.

The real question is this:  Why does any baseball wife forgive a cheating spouse and take him back?

Alcides Escobar is one of those "can't miss" prospects in the Milwaukee Brewers organization.  He's so highly thought of, MLB.com ranked him as baseball's #8 prospect overall.  By the end of the 2009 season, he had supplanted veteran J.J. Hardy at shortstop.

In a recent interview at Jimmy Scott's HIgh & Tight, his wife, Leury, talked about her husband's cheating.  The couple was married in May, 2008.  She was pregnant, but they stuck together during the baseball season as Alcides was promoted from AA Huntsville to the big club in September.  They traveled on road trips together, bought "baby stuff," and, according to Leury, were excited to "be a family."

After the 2008 season ended, the Venezuelan-born Alcides was scheduled to travel to his home country and play winter ball.  The plan was for him to visit Leury in Panama, where she would stay with her parents, when the baby was born. 

"He went to Venezuela and I never heard from him again," Leury said. 

She soon found out Alcides was seeing another woman in Venezuela.  As Leury's pregnancy hit a rough spell (she developed gestational diabetes), she tried to get in touch with her husband. She went through her husband's agents asking for help.  Her mother-in-law said Alcides would call.  "But he never did," said Leury.

Leury did finally get Alcides on the phone, but instead of talking to his estranged wife, he handed the phone to his girlfriend, who told Leury her marriage was over.  Then, similar to what happened to Marni Phillips, the phone calls and texting began.  Alcides Escobar's mistress would insult Leury.  Alcides would call and "tell me had had chosen to be with someone prettier and (who) wasn't fat."  To make matters worse, Leury found out $1,500 had been taken from their joint bank account, earmarked for the delivery of their baby in the hospital, to pay for the Venezuelan girlfriend's "boob job."

Alcides Escobar was contacted directly via email and also through his agent.  He did not respond to requests for comment.

In December, Leury had an emergency c-section.  She was only at the seven month mark in her pregnancy.  The baby, Gabriela, was healthy.  "My daughter was born and he never called."

Omar Moreno, who stole 96 bases while playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1980 (he was the team's center fielder when they won the 1979 World Series, a 7-game series in which he hit .333), is Leury Escobar's father.  He hired a private detective to find Alcides and get to the bottom of his extramarital affair.  The detective returned with photos of Alcides and the woman.  Leury recognized her as a groupie who had followed Alcides around before he and Leury even started dating.

By Christmas, Leury had had enough of being a victim.  In an email to Brewers General Manager Doug Melvin, she explained how Alcides wasn't present for the birth of Gabriela.  "I wouldn't be writing you this email if I wasn't in desperate need of your help," she wrote.  "Alcides seriously needs psychiatric help. He has been acting crazy in Venezuela in many different aspects on and off the field. I just found out this morning that he had a terrible car accident and his car was a total loss, he lost control while driving and fighting with the person on the passenger's seat and drove into a deep hill where he had to be rescued and he spent the night at the hospital." 

Melvin responded that the team would send someone to Venezuela after the Christmas break to sit down and spend some time with him.  " I know players can go astray very easily and we will do everything we can to help," he wrote.

While Doug Melvin's intentions may have been in the right place, nothing was resolved.  Leury says the Brewers eventually denied the accident took place.  The team and the agents representing Alcides "turned their backs" to her.

She went on the offensive, writing a blog titled The Truth Behind Milwaukee Brewers Top Prospect Alcides Escobar and posted it on various sites.  She made herself available for interviews, even as the 2009 baseball season started and Alcides began to have a strong season in AAA Nashville.  Then, she got a call from him.  He told her he loved her and wanted to get back together.  He asked her to fly to the States and meet him.  "I fell for it," she says.

Thinking a reconciliation was possible, Leury and Gabriela left Panama and met with Alcides.  Only there was no reconciliation.  "As soon as I went to the hotel, I was getting served with divorce papers."  She'd made a mistake and now come to realize that her marriage was broken beyond repair.

Recently, I asked her through Gmail Chat if she'd followed the Steve Phillips story.  There were some parallels to hers.  She said she had read about it, but "the difference is that I WOULD NEVER TAKE BACK ALCIDES!" (caps hers).  She was asked why she flew to meet him if she wouldn't take him back.  She said she would have taken him back "If he gave me a public apology.  That was my one condition.  An apology to me, my family and Gaby."  Wasn't that unrealistic?  "Unrealistic to many, yes, but that's how I think."

Cassidy Dover, a frequent contributor to Jimmy Scott's High & Tight, was asked why a baseball wife would take back a cheating spouse.  "When your husband, who you love with all your heart, says, 'I'm sorry, our family is the most important thing in the world to me,' you want to believe him wholeheartedly because family is the most important thing in the world to you.  That's why you never cheated.  You want some stability for yourself and your child in the chaotic world you live.  Divorce would only going to add to the chaos.  Your love, sometimes, helps you through that dark place that even angels fear to tread."

It's obviously a very personal decision, as it was for Marni Phillips back in 1998.

An ex-wife of a retired MLB veteran offered various reasons why women take their husbands back, including fear of abandonment/being alone and denial that there's really anything wrong with the marriage and the husband "will eventually 'Get it out of his system.'"  (Go HERE to read her full response.)

There's always the "gold digger" mentality.  It's the player making the big bucks.  What woman wouldn't want to be married to a man earning from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars each year, even if he strays a little?

Leury Escobar has been accused of this.  "But Alcides only signed for $30,000."  She married him before he was called up to the Major Leagues.  If Escobar's career continues on its upward slope, he'll reach his first million dollar season around 2012.  (In March of 2009, he signed a contract which paid him $400,000 for the season.) 

Leury says the real reason she would have taken her husband back was "I had hope that things would go back to the way they were."

But can things go back to the way they were?  Can you get out of that "dark place where angels fear to tread?"  It all depends upon the person.  "The coping skills vary from individual to individual," one ex-MLB wife says.  And besides, she continued, "Some women stay because culturally, cheating is accepted."  She brings up the point of how many baseball wives weren't born and raised in the United States.  "They have been 'conditioned' since childhood to believe that ALL men cheat and this is simply a phase that the men are going through. And in this case, divorce is not an option. In their eyes, cheating is accepted as long as, the husband are being 'respectful' of the wife and doesn't 'flaunt' the affair in the wife's face."

Yet, Cassidy Dover brings up one case of flaunting in which the wife didn't care.  She had a friend "who knew her husband cheated often, and she said, 'Why divorce him?  I get the house, the car, and all the paycheck.  She deals with his crap and I don't have to, thanks to her!' 

Cheating doesn't necessarily mean there was a physical relationship.  One current MLB wife said, "Any time you share a part of yourself that you have vowed to your spouse, you've cheated.  For me, the emotional can happen without even realizing it - you exchange emails and start to talk about the stresses of being away from your spouse. Then the arguments start to be discussed, then the dissatifaction overall in your marriage.  Now you've crossed a line.  You are turning to someone of the opposite sex to make you feel better about your life.  Not OK. That's the gateway.  From there you don't know where the relationship could go. "

Where is Leury Escobar's relationship going to go?  At this point, she knows there is no possible way to save the marriage, reason number 1 being that she doesn't love Alcides Escobar anymore.  She lives in Panama with her parents and her daughter, in the old bedroom she lived in as a child.  She relies on her parents for financial support, at least until she can settle the situation with her estranged husband.  "I want my daughter to live the life she's supposed to be living," Leury says. 

That is one life changed forever by the actions of a cheating spouse.