Rick Burnham appears on MLB Network on Veterans Day. (Screenshot from MLB Network)
Slapping. Shoving. Verbal assaults. Beatings.
Usually, we surface these kinds of claims when women come forward against their pro athlete partners.
But, this isn’t about the women who accused baseball stars like Trevor Bauer, José Reyes, and Mike Clevinger of domestic violence. This is about the guy Major League Baseball sent to handle their cases, a former Marine and longtime cop who knows abuse investigations. Both sides.
Ricardo Burnham, a MLB senior investigator responsible for probing players accused of violent misconduct, himself had nearly a dozen police brutality or misconduct allegations during his past life as a New York Police Department (NYPD) detective.
According to NYPD records obtained by eyeblack, civilians accused Burnham of misconduct in six different complaints throughout the 1980s and 90s. His case files include two separate allegations that MLB’s veteran investigator both shoved and kicked civilians. In 1991, one complainant accused the then-detective of shoving a civilian and said Burnham, who is Black, used “offensive language” against what the case file terms “orientals”—itself a dated term for Asians.
According to Burnham’s records, an NYPD oversight board cleared him from each of the 11 allegations where he was accused of abuse or misconduct. However, just like our work reviewing MLB investigations—including Clevinger’s, one of many probes Burnham was actively involved with—we want to explain how the board operates. The process is just as important as the decision itself.
eyeblack obtained Burnham’s civilian complaint files through a public records request, which you can view here: