If you saw Dale Murphy play baseball in his prime, you would know. Imposing at 6-foot-4, yes, but one look at his gangly frame was all you needed to figure out there was no way any of those 398 career home runs came from anything other than clean living.
Look at the kids playing in the Little League World Series, and it’s safe to assume the same. Mom and Dad didn’t give them anything in a vial to grow more muscles, and the time they even begin to think about having to bulk up for pay is years away.
Look at them more closely on national television, and you may see something else. It’s there in yellow, a patch on the left shoulder just above the Little League patch that reads: “I won’t cheat!” Not with steroids. Not in life.
It’s a pledge for today. It’s also a goal for the future, when the choices won’t be so clear.
“It’s really tough what kids today have in front of them,” Murphy said. “It’s a tough battle to fight, but we think we have a good battle to fight.”
The fight isn’t just against steroids, though that was the reason Murphy and some friends came up with the idea to begin with. They have made it the centerpiece of a foundation that tries to get kids to do the right thing when they face pressures to do things that aren’t so right.
Things like taking chemicals to grow muscles. Other things too, like not cheating to get an “A” on a test when a “B” isn’t all that bad.
The goal is to teach them that when they’re young and still impressionable, before they already have headed down a slippery path.
“Our idea was to get a thought in their heads at a young age that you don’t have to bend the rules,” said Murphy, who at 55 lives in Alpine, Utah.
That’s not easy in an era where even their heroes in baseball succumbed to temptation. When they began being aware of baseball, the mostly 12-year-old players in this year’s Little League World Series watched as some of the biggest juicers of the time crushed massive home runs one after another.
But it’s not just steroids and stars. Sometimes it’s the very adults who are supposed to show them how to live who teach them wrong.
You might remember what happened 10 years ago this month in South Williamsport, Pa., where a young pitcher from New York City with a 70 mph slider pitched a perfect game for his team in the World Series. Danny Almonte was a lefty with a future, the kind of player who seemed a man among boys.
Turns out, he nearly was. An investigation later revealed Almonte was 14 and well past the legal age to play for the Little League crown. His team’s founder and Almonte’s father were banned from Little League for life for cheating. The scandal forced Little League to toughen its rules on proof of birth, and this year a team from Africa was disqualified because of discrepancies in birth certificates.
I won’t cheat! A simple promise, in a world where things aren’t so simple.
They weren’t simple for Mike Jacobs, a fringe major-league player for five years who was doing everything he could to make it back to the bigs. Jacobs became the first professional ballplayer to test positive for human growth hormone, caught by a blood test that is only administered in the minor leagues.
To his credit, Jacobs didn’t blame it on a tainted supplement or some cream a clubhouse trainer rubbed into him. He admitted he used HGH to overcome knee and back problems, calling it “one of the worst decisions I could have ever made, one for which I take full responsibility.”
Jacobs said he hoped he would be able to resume his career after a 50- game suspension, but the Rockies quickly cut him from the club’s Triple-A team in Colorado Springs.
I won’t cheat! If Jacobs had learned that earlier in his life, there would be no need for an explanation or an apology. Imagine if Bernard Madoff had followed those words before launching an ill-fated Ponzi scheme that could eventually cost the owner of the New York Mets control of his team for allegedly profiting off it. Or former NBA referee Tim Donaghy before taking handfuls of cash for insider tips on games.
“It’s the human condition, really,” Murphy said. “It’s short-term personal gain versus cheating and breaking rules. That’s a temptation no matter what age you are.”
