Professional Baseball Blasted as Anti-Latino

MANHATTAN (CN) - A Latino security professional claims he was turned into a chauffeur in a racially motivated "bait and switch" job offer from Major League Baseball. William Diaz claims pro baseball gave him a phony job title, which paid far less than he was promised, to try to cover up embarrassing allegations about its treatment of Latinos.

Diaz says MLB asked him in 2008 if he would accept a job as security supervisor, in charge of MLB's authenticators and resident security agents. The job had a starting salary of $95,000 a year, a company car and a 40-hour work week.

In his federal complaint, Diaz says he left his job as a fraud investigator with the New York State Attorney General's Office to take the job.

In reality, Diaz says, Major League Baseball hired him to be a chauffeur, working longer hours for less money.

Diaz says he was told after he resigned from his previous job that MLB could afford to pay him only $73,000 a year and that he would be driving then-MLB President Robert Dupuy and other MLB personnel and their families.

"MLB planned to drastically reduce Diaz's pay and responsibilities while giving him an important-sounding title to create the appearance that it was doing something about the sharp decline in the percentage of MLB Hispanic 'Professional Administration' employees," the complaint states.

Diaz said the sham job offer was made to counter negative publicity that baseball had received for a recent 50 percent drop in Hispanic professional administration employees and its exploitation of Latin American prospects.

Diaz claims his being made a chauffeur derailed a successful 29-year career in law enforcement. Before working for the attorney general's office, Diaz spent 11 years with the highly regarded FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force. He also was a member of the Trade Bomb Task Force, which investigated and arrested the terrorists behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

"As subsequent events disclosed, MLB only valued Diaz as a 'statistic' (and a false one at that), and was unwilling to judge him based on his objective qualifications, much less honor the specific promises it made to induce him to end his successful career at the New York State Attorney General's office to join MLB," the complaint states.

Diaz seeks $12.8 million in damages for racial discrimination and Labor Law violations. He is represented by Scott Lucas.

Major League Baseball Enterprises dba Major League Baseball and the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball are the defendants.

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