The Ledger

4.18 Wager

In this episode (4.18), a professional baseball player's father is killed, apparently over his large gambling debt. A local chiropractor who is also the neighborhood's gambling czar is the prime suspect. Briscoe and Logan investigate.

The episode begins with a cable guy discovering the beaten body of the ball player's father. They talk to the victim's second wife, who divorced him in 1982, who tells them that he was a hustler, always on the make for money and women. They also talk to a woman who was having an affair with the victim. She has a black-eye given to her by her husband, who learned of the affair. He's briefly a suspect, but they discount him as Briscoe plays a game of pool against him. (Briscoe wipes the table with him, by the way.) Next, they focus on the chiropractor/bookie known as "Papa Doc" who, the word is, looked out for the victim, apparently protecting him because of all the money owed to him.

Finally, they talk to the ball-playing son who says his father had a gambling problem but had cleaned it up. Briscoe makes a comment about how a lapse during recovery "doesn't happen to all of us." Logan's slightly surprised response makes me think this might be the first episode in which Briscoe reveals his drinking problem.

Evidence of the father's current gambling problem keeps mounting however, and an informant of Lt. Van Buren's informs the detectives that the victim was in debt $800,000! At this point, the ball player himself becomes a suspect, the theory being that he was giving all this money to his father, and his father was losing it all gambling.

The son, meanwhile, argues that Papa Doc killed his father as a message to the ball player to pay up. They find a guy named Lang who actually beat the father, and he says after assaulting the victim, he left him alone with Papa Doc. Papa Doc is arrested.

At trial, Lang retells his story, and the son says that it was his own money, and his father was just placing bets for him. This story doesn't hold up well under examination by the defense attorney however: the son can't remember the specifics of any of the bets, and finally McCoy forces him to admit (off the stand) that his father was the one with the continuing gambling problem, not him.

And look who shows up with background information about the ball player: Former Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez! He suggests something was going on with the ball player and his wife. In the family conference room at the DA's office, the truth comes out, and the ball player finally admits the truth: he was angry at his father over the gambling debts, assaulted his father, and accidentally killed him. He please to Man 2.

Quick casting note: Yep, that's really Keith Hernandez, playing a character with a different name. This was right around the time Hernandez also showed up in a two-part episode of Seinfeld called the boyfriend. As baseball players go, he's a pretty good actor, and has an honestness that is apparent in his appearances on Seinfeld and L&O.

Posted by adm at March 27, 2004 04:27 PM

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