AngelsSurfer

Yup, that's what I thought too. He was just telling them something they were going to find out on their own anyway.

That's an excellent point. It seems as though Hamilton might be fully capable of getting himself booted. As to booing him...I didn't do it at the playoffs; I just refused to applaud or cheer for him. At this point, though? I don't normally like booing people but I'd seriously consider it for Hamilton.

That's what I am wondering, too. When he's not around the clubhouse every day it would be difficult to get those tests. Did Hamilton admit it now because the testing would have been starting up again with spring training?

The game where Pee Wee Reese stood up for Jackie Robinson.

I do wonder if this case might be the impetus to make changes in the contracts down the line. I totally get that there would be pushback from the players' union, but the idea that a team has no recourse to release a player who is a danger to themselves or others seems absurd. I'm suddenly remembering that incident from the playoffs where Josh was at bat and hit the catcher. It was an accident but it does seem like the type of thing that can happen when one's spatial awareness isn't quite there...

I'm not particularly interested in your opinion. You've already shown that you don't understand - or want to understand - a single thing about this issue.

Oh, I agree completely. He's an asshat, he's had a lot of extra chances, and he's got far more resources at his disposal than most people do. With ANY Illness the onus is on the patient to agree to follow the treatment plan and make a commitment to being healthy - and Josh isn't doing that at all. This is all on him. And I will never say "he can't help it" because while addiction is a disease, he has the choice to get help. Josh is responsible for his actions and they're reprehensible. However I just took exception to the idea that someone can just decide they're going to stop being an addict and boom, they can do it, and maintain longterm sobriety, without any help. To me that's like telling someone with a broken arm that if they simply decide that their arm isn't broken anymore, they will be cured. Does that make sense?

That's why there's AA, and why all those rehabs and detox centers exist, right? Because addicts can magically stop on a dime. Sorry, but psychology and medicine disagree on this one.

It doesn't work that way for an addict. Addicts CAN'T "just stop."

Addiction is a disease. He can't help heal his addiction by pulling his head out of his ass any more than he could help heal a broken arm that way. It needs treatment like any other condition. In terms of overall attitude, not being an asshat would help him, though, yes.

If it were a one time thing, would there be all this drama? And would they be talking suspensions? Addicts have a hard time doing something just once and then stopping. It's why they're addicts. Also, with addicts falling off the wagon, even once CAN be justification to pursue some more intensive help in staying clean.

Retiring might be the healthiest thing for him to do right now for his own sake. If he really IS interested in getting help for addiction, it's going to be a hard thing to do when he's playing baseball six days a week and traveling a lot.

Nobody is saying it is easy for an addict to stop using. If it were as simple as saying "hey, just don't do it anymore," we wouldn't have people who struggle with addiction for decades and lose everything to it. However - and I say this as someone who has known addicts and has had to cut a few of them out of my life - it IS on the addict to make a commitment to staying well. It's on the addict to make that commitment to get whatever help they need so they don't relapse. As I understand it with both AA and NA - and I'm not saying everyone uses this system - everyone has a sponsor they can call who can offer them immediate help if they even THINK of using. It IS on the addict to stop making excuses for their behavior and take responsibility for themselves. And as others have mentioned, Josh is fortunate to have the time, money and connections to get all the help he needs. The Angels have his accountability coach on the payroll. They seem to have been committed to helping him work through his issues. That's way more help than most addicts ever have.

It's been mentioned already that a condition of his return to baseball was drug testing three times a week. The question is, does that continue in the off-season? I'm not really seeing why it's so commendable that he came forward. If they were drug testing him they would have found it anyway.

As others on this thread have said, I harbor no ill will toward Josh Hamilton, the human being. I dislike Josh Hamilton, the Angels player, because I feel he's been a waste while he's been here, and he has a bad attitude in general. The positivity on the team seems to go up immensely when he's not there/when he's not in the lineup. If he didn't play for the Angels again I would not consider it to be a loss. And I think that's how a lot of fans feel. In terms of addiction, I've been lucky enough never to contend with it personally, but I have lost friends to it- friends that died, and friends that were so immersed in their addiction that I didn't know them anymore, I didn't like the people they'd become, and I had to cut ties. I also have friends that have very proudly maintained long-term sobriety from drugs and/or alcohol. It's a beast of an illness to fight, but it requires hard work, commitment and the desire to actually engage in the fight for the long haul. What I notice about my friends that have successfully fought and won against addiction is that they are very high on personal accountability. They don't make excuses for themselves and they don't blame their failures on others. Josh doesn't seem to have that concept down yet. Every interview with him seems to be a blame game - the fans were horrible, he didn't feel good, whatever. And that IS on him. As others have mentioned, he's been given far more chances, and more resources to try to fix this, than many addicts are lucky enough to get. I hope for HIS sake that they don't just slap him on the wrist and treat this as a first offense. He needs to be suspended for a while - simply because if he's relapsing again he needs to take the time to check into rehab and deal with that head on. He's not going to help the team if he's trying to handle a relapse during a busy season, and more importantly he's not going to help himself.

I think the article made some valid points on both players. I remember a game last year where it was the bottom of the ninth, the opposing team walked two players specifically to get to Grant Green at the bottom of the lineup and strike him out - and he ended up getting a hit and winning the game for the Angels. And Rasmus clearly proved himself at the end of last season. There may very well be a place for him as a starter. If Hector Santiago is in the same shape he was at the end of last season, I'd prefer to see Santiago in the bullpen and Rasmus starting. On the other hand he's a very valuable long man for the bullpen, especially since there's at least one starter who has the potential to flake out and get pulled early (hi CJ!). It will be interesting to see what they do.

Losing Frieri for Grilli. I don't think Scioscia would have stopped playing Frieri if that hadn't happened.

I explained what I said in my comment above, if you don't want to read it, it's not my problem. You're trying to twist my words and misinterpret what I said; I'm not responding to you anymore.

There seems to be some blame on these children for not knowing or questioning who was on their team, which would suggest they went along with the cheating and were somehow responsible for it. And let's just take a hypothetical scenario here, going along the lines that the kids should have noticed. It's not justifiable, but we will run with it for a minute. Little Jimmy, who is on the JRLL, notices that Charlie is now playing on the all-star team. He's never seen Charlie and he doesn't think he belongs there. 1. He goes to the coach: coach says "no, Charlie belongs here. He just moved to our area" End of story. Except that the coach and Jimmy's teammates now think Jimmy is showing poor sportsmanship and isn't being a team player because he tried to get another kid knocked out of the team. 2. He goes to the parents, who then go to the coach. See #1. 3. The parents take it further. Since ALL the kids on the Little League team are supposed to support each other, Little Jimmy and his parents are now accused of being sore losers and showing poor sportsmanship because Jimmy didn't make the all-star team and Charlie did. This is especially true after the league produces the map they have made with the boundaries that make Charlie's participation legitimate and show it to the parents, making their complaint seem like sour grapes. 4. Oh, and after all of this, Charlie's still on the team. So this is about the adults. Not the kids. At all. Nobody's saying it was right of them to change the boundaries; of course it wasn't. Of course that should be punished. But the kids are the collateral damage here.

Nice straw man there, and totally irrelevant to the issue at hand, especially since I'm from an inner city area originally myself. Please show me where I said anything about intelligence. Right, I didn't. It's pretty well accepted that kids from the inner city may not have access to the same resources that kids from affluent neighborhoods might. For instance, relevant to this case, they may not have access to computers or get to travel outside their neighborhoods very much, and thus be unfamiliar with other areas around Chicago. Next question. There's no "standard" to be held to here. A kid from Newport Beach with his own home computer isn't going to be sitting there with a map of the districts and a directory with all of the players' home addresses either. There's absolutely no reason a kid would have any reason to worry about where another kid on their team is living and if they are there legally or not. In just about any kid's mind, the coaches put them on the team, they obviously belong there .End of story.

An electronic strike zone would certainly make things fairier, IMHO. The strike zone does seem to change with the umpire, which team is up and the inning.

You don't honestly think 11 and 12 year olds in the inner city are privvy to the exact details of the district borders, or to the home addresses of every member of their team? Or that they know all of the thousands of kids in the greater Chicago area who play baseball? The GCA is a huge place; these kids wouldn't be hanging out in the neighborhood or going to school together even if the districting were correct. Not to mention that it's a place where people do move around a lot so it's actually reasonable for new kids to show up midyear. IMHO it's not justified to think that children premeditated this cheating. If it's a situation like Danny Almonte where he was 15 and was told to say he was 12? Yeah, that's on him, because he knows how old he is. In this case? Absolutely not. When I was 12 and on a sports team, if a new kid showed up on the team, my reaction would have been "well, he was allowed on the team. The coach let him be here. It must be okay." They league changed the borders; the kids who played and their parents were told that those borders were correct. Why would they have had any reason to question that? Kids at that age trust the adults around them to do the right thing. They are taught to listen to their coaches and to trust that their coaches are doing right by them and there's nothing here that would have made a kid think otherwise. Should the adults in this case be banned from LL forever? Yes, of course. But this isn't on the kids.

ALL of the kids involved in this lost: The ones on the JR team, the ones that were excluded, the ones on the Vegas team that were the legit winners but will reap none of the accolades or perks of it. There aren't any winners here. I feel sorry for all of them. And yes, that includes the JR kids, because they went out there and played hard, and they shouldn't have lost due to the unscrupulous actions of the adults who were supposed to be watching out for them. And McCutchen's article is spot on. Good players from all socioeconomic levels should have the chance to succeed and they don't...that should change.

I don't think the kids can be held responsible for anything.This isn't a case like the one in NYC where the kid was overage and was lying about it. How many 111-12 year olds know the Little League zoning boundaries? Plus, even if they did think "hey, why is that kid I've never seen before on my team?" what could they have done about it? Were they supposed to go to the commissioner and say "hey, I think there's redlining happening in my district!" They were listening to, and trusting, the adults around them to do the right thing. The adults didn't. Stripping the title was the right thing to do. I do feel bad for the team who will now get the title by default who didn't have the chance to celebrate on the field at the time. But I do feel bad for the kids on this team that worked hard and lost the title due to the adults around them being unethical cheaters.

...and so it begins. The first built-in excuse as to why he can't produce for 2015. Did anyone really think he was going to get to, say. May, without an injury or an "injury" of some sort? The dynamic seems to be better without him on the field, so I can't see this as a negative for the team...just for the owners' pocketbook.