Elijah Dukes, a 22-year-old rookie outfielder with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, has been convicted of domestic battery and charged with drug possession, among other offenses. He’s been suspended for fighting with a coach, fighting with a manager, fighting with an umpire, and fighting with a teammate. He’s has said he wants to quit baseball.

A first-class young talent who leads American League rookies with eight home runs and has the talent to develop into a batting champion, Dukes has generally been referred to as volatile, or troubled, or angry. His horrific past — when he was a child, his father shot a drug dealer for selling his mother bad crack — has routinely been invoked as an explanation for what are referred to as his anger management problems. None of the euphemistic phrasing has done much to hide the fact that he is clearly a violent, degenerate thug, rather than a misunderstood, basically harmless kid. But when you can hit a baseball as well as he can, euphemistic phrasing is what you get.

Before yesterday, Dukes was well known to hardcore baseball fans, but he is now famous to all because he left a voicemail message threatening to kill his wife and children. His wife played it for the St. Petersburg Times, which recounted the details of Dukes’s appalling life in a lengthy article. Dukes has stormed into the classroom in which his wife teaches and threatened her, necessitating his removal by a school security guard; two other women who have borne children by Dukes have filed restraining orders against him, and four different women have successfully sued him for child support. You don’t have to be judgmental to label him deranged and beneath contempt. There are too many frightening incidents, witnessed by too many people, to come to any other conclusion than that the man is legitimately dangerous.

Dukes’s behavior is exceptional in its violence and extremity, but it isn’t unique. Last summer, Philadelphia Phillies ace Brett Myers, a 6-foot-4-inch former boxer, beat his wife and dragged her by her hair in front of dozens of witnesses on a crowded street in downtown Boston. Dukes isn’t even the first rookie to be charged with domestic violence this year — Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Alberto Callaspo was suspended earlier this month after being charged with assaulting his wife.

The choices those two teams made are an indication of the options available to the Devil Rays. The Phillies initially did nothing to punish Myers, who eventually took a leave of absence from baseball after the public expressed its outrage. One of the team’s minority owners, Bill Giles, dismissed the testimony of dozens of witnesses who saw Myers mauling a woman a foot shorter than he is. “Some bystander saw something that really didn’t happen. Brett was trying to help his wife,” Giles said. The Diamondbacks immediately suspended Callaspo, held a team meeting, and general manager Josh Byrnes said, “The incident involving Alberto supersedes any baseball issues for us at this time.”

These reactions tell us a lot about those organizations. Giles’s statement, and the initial indifference the Phillies showed to the incident, was simply indecent; Byrnes’s statement, and that the team’s instinct was to get Callaspo off the field pending new information, showed simple humanity and a desire to err on the side of concern rather than indifference.

Satisfying as it is to see a ballclub doing something other than cravenly minimizing sociopathic behavior and hoping bad press goes away, baseball can’t sustain a policy of suspending people who have been charged with wrongdoing or have allegations made about them in newspapers, no matter how credible they are. Player contracts don’t permit this sort of thing, and anyway a policy of suspending players on the basis of accusations isn’t a good idea, since it would leave innocent players open to blackmail.

This may seem unfair — why should union rules protect players who threaten to kill people? — but that’s looking at the problem within too narrow a scope. Suspending a player is hardly a fitting punishment for serious crimes; it’s a way to express disapproval of something while continuing to enjoy the long-term benefits of the player’s talents.

The Devil Rays’ problem is too serious for mere expressions of disapproval to be adequate. Assuming Dukes’s statements weren’t taken completely out of context, he is on record telling his wife, “You dead, dawg. I ain’t even bulls—ing. Your kids too, dawg. It don’t even matter to me who is in the car with you.” The mind reels at a pro athlete saying something like that after Carolina Panther Rae Carruth was convicted of conspiring to kill his pregnant wife in a drive-by shooting.

If the Devil Rays truly want to disavow this, they have to release Dukes and forfeit the benefit of his immense talent; to do much of anything else would be to say that his ability to hit a baseball outweighs his monstrous behavior.

They almost certainly won’t, and I don’t blame them; if they release him tomorrow, he’ll sign on with a competing team by the end of next week. There’s nothing to gain in becoming moralistic about a ballplayer’s private behavior. And that is the dilemma baseball faces: While it’s in the game’s interest to be rid of Dukes — an exceptionally rare player who’s actually a menace, and who would at this point surprise no one by actually killing someone — it isn’t in any team’s interest to not have him.

He’ll play in the majors unless he’s convicted of a felony.

Since everyone knows this, the best thing for the Devil Rays to do is absolutely nothing at all. The whole story is repulsive enough on its own. Can we at least be spared the spectacle of a team being outraged by a player’s threats to murder his own children, but not quite outraged enough to take them more seriously than a power stroke at the plate?

tmarchman@nysun.com