Major League Baseball

Little League's simple pledge for a better future

Published Aug. 20, 2011 4:38 p.m. ET

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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 says. ''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've 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've already 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 first began being aware of baseball, the mostly 12-year-olds 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 Williamsport, 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 would later reveal 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 in an attempt 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 Colorado Rockies quickly cut him from the club's Triple-A team.

I won't cheat! If Jacobs had learned that earlier in his life, there would be no need for an explanation or an apology. If he had taken it to heart, he still might be getting paid for playing a child's game.

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 of it. Or former NBA referee Tim Donaghy before taking handfuls of cash for insider tips on games - including ones that he worked.

''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.''

Not for Murphy it wasn't. A devout Mormon whose clean-living ways carried over into the clubhouse, Murphy was a slugging outfielder for Atlanta who was so consistent that for three straight years in the 1980s he hit 36 home runs before hitting 37 in the fourth year. His skills were fading when steroids first started being used in baseball, but he was not the kind of guy who would turn to them to further his 18-year career.

Murphy has numbers that might have once gotten him into the Hall of Fame, but numbers don't mean nearly as much in baseball anymore. His message, though, isn't about his place in the game.

It's about future generations, and the future of the sport.

And a world that would be a whole lot better if everyone followed one simple pledge.

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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org or http://twitter.com/timdahlberg

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