We’ve seen what can happen when professional athletes face charges for crimes or whose public behavior goes against the morals their leagues preach.

And the sanctions that can result.

Next up on the docket is a double-barreled look at what the leagues — the NFL and Major League Baseball in this case — do when some of their own, the owners and chief executives of the franchises, are in similar predicaments.

How much of the high moral ground, you wonder, might pro football and baseball insist upon when the names in the headlines are New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and San Francisco Giants’ chief operating officer Larry Baer?

How heavy will the commissioners’ gavels come down against people the commissioner works for rather those who work well under him?

Baer, who has been COO of the Giants since 2012, had a public confrontation with his wife, Pam, in a Bay Area plaza last week.

The police were not called and no charges filed, but video, aired by TMZ, shows him toppling is wife from her seat as she screams “Oh, my God. Help! Oh, my God. Oh, my God” while he wrestles a cell phone away from her during an argument in which a bystander is reported to have interceded.

Baer issued an apology and the Giants announced a leave of absence for Baer while MLB says it is investigating.

More well known are Kraft’s visits to the now-infamous Orchid of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Fla., where he is alleged to have solicited sex, two first class misdemeanors. Kraft has denied participating in illegal activities and the case is due to be heard March 27.

The undercover case that is alleged to have ensnared Kraft and 24 others is part of a wider action by Florida authorities to combat growing sex trafficking and debt bondage.

In the NFL’s case, the commissioner is given wide latitude to sanction owners “for conduct detrimental to the welfare of the league or professional football,” something Roger Goodell, the would-be law and order commissioner, has invoked more than his predecessors when it comes to the players.

Goodell suspended Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay for six games and fined him $500,000 in 2014 after Irsay pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated, the first owner to be suspended by the league in more than a decade.

Though the late Bud Adams, then the owner of the Tennessee Titans, was fined $250,000 by Goodell in 2009 for obscene gestures at a game, he was not suspended.

Irsay and Adams, however, were not the pillars of the NFL establishment that Kraft, owner of the league’s signature franchise of this era, has been. The one some call a “shadow commissioner” in the league.

It was Kraft who helped lead the vote for Goodell’s five-year, $200 million contract less than two years ago. The one that Dallas Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones was willing to go to court to oppose.

The difference between league commissioners handing down sanctions against players is that those in uniform, however well paid, essentially work for the league and its teams. But the owners and COOs employ and help set the contract terms for those who would now judge them.

Now, we wait to see if those distinctions temper big-league justice.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.