Wrist-slaps send scary message

[missionhockey21]

Thursday, August 11, 2005 Wrist-slaps send scary message By JOHN LEVESQUE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST Blaming baseball commissioner Bud Selig for messing up the wrist slapping of Texas Rangers bad boy Kenny Rogers is too easy. It's a hanging slider for any columnist. So, too, is lambasting commissioner Gary Bettman for allowing convicted mugger Todd Bertuzzi back into the National Hockey League. We should be looking deeper, because the silliness of the Rogers and Bertuzzi affairs begins and ends with a culture that has no discipline when it comes to discipline. We talk a good game, but when push comes to shove, we don't even have the nerve to nudge. We're afraid of reprisals, threats and lawsuits from the aggrieved parties. And so we'll tell a player he has to sit out the first half for some infraction of team policy, and hope he'll learn his lesson, dadgummit. Rogers was back on the mound Wednesday night because Selig overstepped his bounds. Bertuzzi will return to the ice this fall because Bettman has completely lost all grasp of common sense. But the real issue is the tendency in our society to levy light penalties and then bemoan the high rate of recidivism. Was Selig's original reproof of Rogers reasonable? Hardly. A 20-game suspension for a starting pitcher means he misses only four starts, which is roughly one-eighth of a season. A $50,000 fine amounts to 1.5 percent of Rogers' $3.3 million salary.

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