Grady Sizemore needs to own up to his mistake

Last night we received a letter from CAA Sports, the Law Firm who represents Grady Sizemore. Before we dig into a few thoughts on the matter you’ll notice that our post about Sizemore has been removed. Sizemore lept into the public eye over this past weekend when some photos of him leaked out.

Basically, we were told that the photo we posted on our website (and we chose a ‘safe for work’ version) was stolen property of Mr. Sizemore’s and if we left the photo up we’d be subject to legal action.

And now we’ve got an opinion on it, and a few words for a Grady Sizemore, who we used to be a big fan of.

Let’s brush off the old Internet 101 book and remember that the world operates by the WWW nowadays. Anything you say, produce, or write could technically end up on the internet. You have to be careful and guarded. It’s not pretty but the reality is that when you produce material, there is always that chance that it could end up on the interwebs and in the eyes of someone you don’t want seeing it. When you’re famous, those chances get magnified by a large amount. Aparently, Grady Sizemore hasn’t figured out this part of being a professional.

You might remember back to when Josh Hamilton relapsed. This was not a proud moment for Hamilton. Many people out there were going to then say that Hamilton was a fraud and a fake. There were photos of him (a married man) with other women. This was not long after the time that he was featured on channels like E! with his wife, talking about their marriage and faith to the entire country watching.

What did Hamilton do? He apologized and owned up to his mistake like a man. He didn’t accuse bloggers and other media outlets of ‘stealing his personal property’. He moved on from the situation after acknowledging it because he understood that it was his own actions that caused the ripple effect and he understood that the definition of him as a professional depended upon what he did immediately following that mistake.

Fast forward to Grady Sizemore. Now it seems to us that Sizemore wants to pretend like the incident never happened. He hasn’t spoke on it, and now he’s getting lawyers like Terrence Price to do his dirty work for him. To be frank, that’s a chicken-shit way to go through life; especially when you are a pro athlete and you have millions of kids that look up to you. That brings up another subject in itself that we won’t touch. But as we said in our original post that has been removed–Grady, what are you doing? You simply must be smarter then this.

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer points out, Sizemore only hurt himself. When we sat back and took a look at the 15 or so photos that Sizemore snapped of himself, we couldn’t find a reason of why he’d do something like that. He’s not a 20 year old kid. He’s a man, and as people around the same age, we just don’t do shit like that. If we were one of the best centerfielders in baseball, we definitely wouldn’t be setting ourself up for a nightmare so voluntarily. If we were a ‘star’ player that hit .248 last season, we’d be spending that time in the batting cage working on pitch recognition; not seeing which coffee mug would cover our genitals the best and sending them off to women (no matter how much they seemed to mean to us at the moment).

This isn’t the first time that a pro athlete has been exploited and it won’t be the last. You learn a lot about the type of person you’re dealing with when a situation like this happens. Sizemore only confirms what the pictures initially said; he’s an immature young man and has no business in true ‘superstar’ territory no matter on how he improves on his numbers in the seasons to follow.

You don’t see Lebron James doing stuff like this do you? Micheal Jordan never did it. Derek Jeter has been with plenty of girls and things probably haven’t always ended well. But he’s not ending up with photos on various internet sites. These guys understand what comes with the territory of being men and professionals. Are they perfect, no. But we’d argue that they’d also handle things after the fact a lot more like a man then Grady has.

One might argue that Sizemore is a private person for reasoning why he has acted in this manner. We’d agree with that. We have followed his career closely and he hasn’t been a guy known to do an abundance of interviews. So why in the hell is he taking photos of himself with his pants down in a mirror and sending them off to women? It simply doesn’t make sense.

So we removed the original photo. Not because we’re afraid of a lawsuit or we don’t have a team of lawyers to fight Sizemore’s case (which he would most assuredly lose). There’s nothing to sue us for anyways. We don’t make enough money at this time to be worth Sizemore’s time. We took it down because it’s a lot more fun to make an example of Grady and rip him here. He didn’t lose the respect of a damn good fan here when he took the photos. We all fuck up and make mistakes. He lost the respect of someone who loves watching him run down fly balls on the warning track because he isn’t a man. He’s a coward.