Phillies’ Odubel Herrera receives 85-game domestic violence suspension

MLB announced Friday afternoon that Phillies outfielder Odúbel Herrera has been suspended without pay for 85 regular season games plus any postseason games that Philadelphia may play this year, which will not count toward the 85-game total.

Herrera, 27, has not played since being placed on the restricted list back on May 28 — the day after he was arrested in Atlantic City, New Jersey on domestic violence charges. This suspension indicates that MLB’s investigation found Herrera to have violated its domestic violence policy, a judgment that didn’t seem certain after Herrera’s girlfriend declined to press charges earlier this week. As The Athletic’s Matt Gelb pointed out via Twitter on Friday, the ban goes down as the second-longest (following a 100-game suspension for the Padres’ Jose Torres) since MLB instituted a formal Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy in 2016 — perhaps a sign that MLB is beginning to treat domestic-violence issues more seriously, but still not the greatest of looks for a league that frequently hands out 80-game suspensions for violations of its performance-enhancing drug policy.

The loss of Herrera, along with a season-ending injury to fellow outfielder Andrew McCutchen, seems to have adversely affected the Phillies in a major way. After finishing May with a 33-24 record, they’re 12-18 since June 1 and now sit six games out of first place in the NL East and a half-game out of the second NL wild-card spot. With that said, Herrera wasn’t actually having that good of a season prior to being suspended. He had a .222/.288/.341 slash line with just one homer and a -0.4 WAR as calculated by Baseball Reference.