It Takes One to Throw One (Out of Baseball)

Upon learning last month that Josh Hamilton had relapsed on cocaine and alcohol, I braced for the coming deluge of articles and onslaught of on-air commentary. Major news stories involving addiction are like major news stories involving quantum physics: most journalists, though certainly well-intending, simply don’t have the background to adequately cover the subject matter.

The problem is, the only ones who realize this are addicts, like me.

To take a moment to qualify: I am a recovering addict and regular contributor to TheFix.com, a sober lifestyle website. I have been clean and sober for more than three years and, for nearly as long, have been wincing at the uninformed positions taken by journalists with no personal experience or medical credentials concerning drug and alcohol abuse.

It isn’t really their fault – because they are, unknowingly, trying to accomplish the near-impossible. Like no other disease, addiction is a takes-one-to-know-one affliction; when combined with the proliferation of online sports coverage and the need to fill limitless hours of airtime on 24/7 sports talk radio stations, the result is a wide swath of disparate assumptions, opinions and judgments that are, to varying degrees, either incomplete or flat-out incorrect.

They simply don’t know an addict’s mind, and – trust me – they don’t want to. Fortunately, most people don’t feel the illicit, illogical urge to drink and drug despite full knowledge of its vastly elevated – and potentially fatal – personal cost. But people like Josh Hamilton do. And before this starts to sound like a pity party, know this: we don’t want medals for our struggles, we just don’t want misinformation – unintended or otherwise – spread about our disease. Because what you don’t know can hurt us.

Case in point: On Thursday, news broke that a four-person MLB panel is currently split over whether to suspend Hamilton for the entirety of the 2015 season. Wrapped up in all of this is whether Hamilton should enter into a long-term (which generally means multi-month) rehabilitation clinic.

Both of these possible penalties are utterly ridiculous, and show the same lack of insight into the nature of addiction echoed in the mainstream media. And without proper background in addiction issues, it’s impossible to make an accurate assessment of Josh Hamilton’s personal history.

For starters, let’s dispel any myth – one that, thankfully, has been spread only by the most bloviating of broadcasters – that cocaine in the hands of an addict is in any way a performance-enhancing drug. Josh Hamilton didn’t use drugs to improve his baseball career. In fact, quite the opposite is true: an addict knows he is severely damaging himself but – for an intrinsic reason to which only fellow addicts can truly relate – simply can’t stop to save his own skin. This is especially true of people who, like Hamilton, have everything to live for. This was an act of destruction, not of deception. So please, let’s stop the A-Rod PED comparisons.

Next, let’s look at Hamilton’s history as an addict. He’s admitted to drinking alcohol a few times since 2009, but alcohol, though potentially lethal to an alcoholic like Hamilton, isn’t illegal and therefore can’t be taken into consideration when determining league-sanctioned consequences.

With regard to drug use, Hamilton had officially been free of cocaine for nearly a decade. Not bad for a man who, on his own admission, once pawned his wife’s wedding ring to buy cocaine and, in a separate six-week time frame, spent approximately $100,000 on crack. (A Los Angeles Times article from February 2013 details several of his addiction-fueled escapades, ones that make his redemption all the more unlikely and, for addicts like myself, inspiring.)

A decade is a very significant amount of consecutive clean time. Even considering his sporadic alcohol abuse, Hamilton has shown that he is capable of putting together years of consecutive sobriety and that, when he does slip, cocaine is very rarely involved. That detail, too, is important, because cocaine addicts generally use alcohol as a stepping stone to cocaine relapse. For cocaine addicts, bars are typically pit stops en route to the main event; that Hamilton has reached this undesirable destination only once in 10 years is a sign of his overall commitment to recovery.

Considering this, long-term rehab isn’t the answer. Addicts who have accomplished such lengthy stretches of clean time aren’t going to learn anything new in a rehab facility. In Hamilton’s case, rehab would be more of a “timeout,” a safeguard from further relapse where he can take a deep breath and prepare to recommence his recovery. To this end, anything longer than a few weeks is redundant, and would serve only to delay rehab’s intended result: the ability to stay clean and sober in the real world rather than a sterile facility where your every move is monitored.

Anyone can stay sober under lock and key. To put it in baseball terms, long-term rehab for someone with Hamilton’s level of sober experience would be like sending a slumping All-Star down to Single-A. It’s an overreaction, and it’s unhelpful.

So what consequences, then, should befall Josh Hamilton? Certainly something, of course. Cocaine use is both illegal and a violation of MLB’s banned substances policies. Addicts aren’t responsible for their disease, but they are responsible for their actions.

All things considered, a suspension of about a month seems both fair and, for Hamilton, healthy. Assessing the situation with the help of an addict’s mindset (though without, admittedly, being privy to the situation’s full details), a reasonable outcome would entail Hamilton spending a few weeks in rehab and, from there, getting right back to the structure of baseball activities. Because more than almost anything, addicts coming off a relapse need structure.

Unless he is in really rough shape – and judging by initial reports it doesn’t seem like he is – the healthy routine of a long baseball season provides the sort of self-esteem building structure that reinforces a sober lifestyle. Sitting around for a full year is not a healthy situation for an addict; I know that from personal experience when, upon losing a job back in my hard-drinking days, I quickly went from simply unemployed to wholly unemployable. For addicts, inaction breeds insanity.

For a league looking to start the tenure of a new commissioner off on the right foot, subjecting Josh Hamilton to an onerously long suspension falls in the same old misguided social practice of treating addicts like criminals instead of those suffering from an incurable, albeit treatable, disease. So long as Hamilton shows recovery from his relapse and wishes to continue playing, he should be welcomed back into baseball with open arms, hearts, and minds.