Psychological Testing and Enlightenment Therapy for John Rocker
by Sam Smith
January 7, 2000

First John Rocker proved to the world that he was an idiot. Now it looks like Bud Selig's turn, but there's probably more to the story than meets the eye.

According to the Associated Press, the Atlanta Braves pitcher has been "ordered by baseball to undergo psychological tests before deciding whether to punish the outspoken reliever for remarks he made disparaging gays, minorities and immigrants." Selig, the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, says he will await the results of the evaluation before deciding on any disciplinary action.

In case you've been off-planet, Rocker recently made a variety of racist, xenophobic, and homophobic remarks to a Sports Illustrated reporter interviewing him for a feature story. His willingness to say these things to SI is probably an even better indication of his intellectual level than the beliefs themselves. In any event, Rocker cleared up any lingering confusion as to why he chose baseball over rocket science.

So, help me out here. Rocker needs a psychiatric evaluation....why? He's stupid, not mentally ill, as best I can tell, and the comments we're hearing from baseball don't indicate that they know why they're ordering the tests, either. No evidence I have seen suggests mental illness, and the closest anybody comes to justifying the move comes in a statement by a Braves executive, who says that baseball officials and the players' association decided the evaluations were appropriate.

Unless, of course, stupidity has been reclassified as a mental illness. "Intelligence-challenged" – I like that. Or how about "differently knowledged." "Astuteness-impaired"? Maybe he suffers from an unfortunate "wit deficit."

The End of Personal Responsibility

Let me take a shot at what may be happening here. We live in an age where every violation of social mores is indication of pathology, and nobody is responsible for his or her own actions. If you rape and murder a sorority, it's not your fault because you were unloved as a child. If you get drunk off your ass, crawl behind the wheel, and kill somebody, it's not your fault. It's the bartender's fault, and it may even be the fault of Jack Daniels Distilling. But it's not your fault, because those 17 Lynchburg Lemonades made it impossible for you to exercise rational judgement.

Maybe our willingness to tolerate nonsense has reached the point where racism and stupidity aren't the fault of the redneck, either. Here's a prediction – when the results of the evaluation come back we'll learn that poor Johnny is a victim of negative cultural conditioning or somesuch. He's from the Georgia Outback after all, and down there they teach little white boys to believe that non-whites and non-boys are inferior, especially if they smell funny or have an unnatural attraction for non-girls.

Poor Johnny will be suspended, with pay, while he completes enlightenment reprogramming, and by the time spring training rolls around he'll be pronounced cured and he'll appear before microphones and he'll be saying all kinds of ennobled and repentant things in his best born-again tone and all will be forgiven and he'll head to Florida for the beginning of camp. And they'll do a made-for-TV movie about him and Melissa Gilbert will play the devoted therapist who breaks through the hard outer shell and helps John discover the compassionate, sensitive man inside. She'll be sitting in the front row behind the dugout when John makes his moving return to the mound.

We let people off the hook because it's not their fault all the time, but we make damned good and sure that moneymakers like Rocker, who was born with a cannon where his left arm ought to have been, are covered when they cross the line. And if alcoholism is a disease, and drug abuse, and wife abuse, and gambling, well, why shouldn't stupidity be a pathology beyond the control of the idiot, too?

Forgiveness?

It pains me to say all this, because I'm a diehard Braves fan, and after all these years of losing the big ones because we lacked a stopper in the bullpen, we finally seemed to have found the solution. This past year the pen was actually one of the great strengths of the team. But now Rocker, who was born with a blunderbuss where his mouth ought to have been, has tossed a big fat monkey-wrench into the works.

But that's not the point here. Bottom line, Rocker just isn't a very smart young man, and it's going to take more than psychological evaluations and enlightenment therapy and him reading a prepared statement that he's not nearly bright enough to have written by himself to make it all better.

I believe we can learn from our mistakes, and speaking as somebody who grew up a redneck, and who learned the same ignorant things about people who were different that John Rocker did, I assure you it's possible that some day he might prove to be a model for tolerance and racial harmony. But it doesn't happen overnight, and no 30-day program ever devised can alter such deeply-held attitudes.

As much as I love my Braves, John needs to be suspended indefinitely. If some other team is dumb enough to offer a fair trade for him, by all means let's send him packing. Otherwise, he should never set foot in an Atlanta facility until such time as his teammates welcome him back. That includes foreigners like Andres Galaragga, Eddie Perez, and Javy Lopez; the black teammate he called a "fat monkey"; and his white teammates, who depite their skin tone seem not share Rocker's worldview.

As for Bud Selig and his apparent inability to distinguish stupidity from psychosis, I'm guessing baseball feels it has to order the psych evaluation to cover its ass. If they land on Rocker the way they probably want to and he then finds a psychologist who'll testify that it's not his fault (and how hard would that be, after all?), then he'll be in a position to sue Major League Baseball for millions in lost wages and the gods only know how much in emotional suffering.

So while baseball's move may be stupid, it's probably necessary, and that may tell us about our society than did Rocker's comments in Sports Illustrated.