The term "dumb jock" has lasted as long as there have been jocks, dumb or otherwise. Age has never been a qualifier until Alex Rodriguez made it one. To be young and dumb, or young and stupid, cannot be an excuse for anything after the age of consent, speaking legally.
Nor is permission for mischief granted to anyone young, stupid and rich, all of which Rodriguez was, still is in baseball years.
And to apply honest math to the Rodriguez re-clarification, he would have been 24 in 1999, not in 2001, when the mule train from the Dominican stash began. He also tested positive for two substances, not just one.
So, the dumb part of the Rodriguez defense would seem to include arithmetic, understandable when one is not required to keep track of the important figures of life, such as how much things cost and how to figure an earned-run average.
As Jimmy Buffett reminded us years ago, everybody's got a cousin in Miami.
One can grant that Rodriguez is "older and wiser," but it is wiser to settle for his being "older and trapped" since he is not the least bit of it, wiser I mean, rather than just now six years beyond the needle.
The betrayal by heroes never stops being painful, even to cynics, yet our expectations are neither responsible nor reason for the treachery.
The sin is always their fault. Ours is always imagining they were more than they are.
Overreaction seems to be a national trait, not to bring Iraq into this, and from the newsboy who cried, "Say, it ain't so, Joe," to the jury waiting to say one way or the other to Barry Bonds, judgment is the privilege of worship.
Maybe there ought to be a category for young and stupid, call it "yupid," and anything that happens during that time is designated as bogus, worthy of the famed asterisk that so many want to attach to an entire era of baseball.
So, we should not count the .358 batting average of A-Rod at age 20 in Seattle because he was young and stupid, assuming that he was not in remission for stupidity when younger.
Or at least we should put it under an entire new baseball statistic called "YAP," or Yupid Achievement Percentage.
Those 52 and 57 home runs in Texas during his yupid period would be discounted because he cannot be forgiven for doing one thing as young and stupid without being forgiven for all of it.
Rodriguez himself has set the age limit on yupidness, that being "24-25" and taking the outer limit of that, anything that has been accomplished as well as anything that has been committed up to that age is not part of the later adult world, which it is assumed that A-Rod is now a part of, his dalliance with Madonna aside, as well as any interview with anyone asking real questions.
Wisdom does not automatically come with years, as we see with Bonds and Roger Clemens, or with Pete Rose, who seemed to get dumber the longer he got away with breaking baseball's gambling rules that are tacked onto every dugout and in every clubhouse.
Maybe Rose just lost the ability to read.
The history of the world is littered with the young and not so stupid, from Mozart to Martin Luther King, not to mention the age of instant communication that defines us now, brought about by child wonders working with a screw driver and a soldering iron in their basements.
There have been suggestions that baseball's hallowed record book have a preamble to identify all the non-regular times, and then let the numbers be what the numbers are. For example, when Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs or when Ted Williams last hit .400, that time would be identified as the segregated era.
This does not assume that Josh Gibson or Satchel Paige would have been greater than Ruth or Walter Johnson, but it allows the notion.
Other times and numbers would be qualified by the dead-ball era or by the raised pitcher's mound era or the pre-expansion era, followed, naturally, by the expansion era with room left for the post-expansion era.
The Steroid Era would be roughly from, oh, 1994-2004, a neat decade if probably associated more exactly with the career of Jose Canseco, sort of patient zero in the contamination.
Canseco does not fit the young and stupid definition since he knew exactly what it was and why he was using it. So did Rodriguez. So have they all. We're not yupid.
(Contact Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News at lincicomeb(at)RockyMountainNews.com.)
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