Adam LaRoche is no victim in riff with White Sox

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Adam LaRoche is a good family man, but what the White Sox are asking of him is not unreasonable.

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You start here with Adam LaRoche, who decides to walk away from the White Sox and baseball and a $13 million contract because the White Sox won’t allow him to take his 14-year old son to work with him whenever he wants to:

This action from LaRoche, no matter how sincere he is with his love for his son, and no matter how sincere he is wanting to have his son with him as much as possible, does not make him Rosa Parks.

And if teammates like Chris Sale, who has had the most to say about this, including to team president Kenny Williams, feels this strongly about supporting LaRoche’s choices, then Sale should quit the White Sox, too. Or immediately stop acting as if the White Sox have tried to steal LaRoche’s pension.

Williams has become the bad guy here, in a debate that has so very little to do with the lives of most of the people following this story, and who don’t have jobs that allow them to turn any day they want to into take-your-child-to-work-day. These are normal people, whether they are fans of baseball or fans of the White Sox or fans of LaRoche, who must think the principle here – whatever it is – is as ridiculous as the amount of money being discussed.

If this really is a national debate about LaRoche’s actual rights here, or what he says the White Sox promised him, then we all need more to do.

About this, though, there is no debate: Kenny Williams is not the bad guy here. And Adam LaRoche isn’t a victim, or some kind of American hero. He doesn’t refuse to sit in the back of the bus here. He makes a choice to get off it, acting as if the White Sox are somehow interfering with his right to be a good dad. They’re not.

This all started because Williams privately asked LaRoche to cut down on the time Blake LaRoche was spending at the White Sox’s spring training facility in Arizona. He didn’t ban the boy, or tell the father that he no longer wanted his son around the ballpark at all. Williams simply asked that LaRoche not have the boy be on the field every day. Only after a few days, nothing changed. LaRoche kept doing what he wanted to do, saying that was his understanding with his team. At this point, Williams – again, the president of the team, with rights of his own – reportedly lost his temper, and told LaRoche that the boy couldn’t come around at all.

Williams quickly walked himself back from that. But the damage, at least in LaRoche’s mind, had been done. So he retired, and in the process quit his team. Sale smart-mouthed Williams in front of that team, and started telling the world that the wrong guy, a guy who hit .206 for the White Sox last season, had walked out the door of the White Sox clubhouse. Actually he didn’t. And again: If Sale finds working conditions that LaRoche finds intolerable just as intolerable despite being the White Sox’s best player, he really should follow LaRoche out that door.

Here is part of Williams’ original statement about this matter: “There has been no policy change with regards to allowance of kids in the clubhouse, on the field, the back fields during spring training. This young man that we’re talking about, Drake, everyone loves this young man. In no way do I want this to be about him.

“I asked Adam, said, ‘Listen, our focus, our interest, our desire this year is to make sure we give ourselves every opportunity to focus on a daily basis on getting better. All I’m asking you to do with regard to bringing your kid to the ballpark is dial it back.’

“I don’t think he should be here 100 percent of the time – and he has been here 100 percent, every day, in the clubhouse. I said that I don’t even think he should be here 50 percent of the time. Figure it out, somewhere in between.

“We all think his kid is a great young man. I just felt it should not be every day, that’s all. You tell me, where in this country can you bring your child to work every day?”

Clearly, LaRoche, the son of a major leaguer himself, took this as some kind of act of war, or at least betrayal. So did Sale, who has basically accused Kenny Williams of trying to rip their team apart. But just look at the end of Williams’ quote, and ask yourself the same question: Where else DO you get to bring your child to work every day?

Joe Girardi spoke to this matter in Tampa on Friday, putting words to a lament you hear from so many in the baseball life about how little he sees his own children during the season.

“I have to take care of my responsibilities here, but I also have to be a husband and a father, too,” Girardi said. He’s right. But he makes his own choices about baseball, and the job he has managing the Yankees, and the money he is paid to do that job. He has been in the life a long time, and knows what the hours of the job are, and the amount of time he is away from his family. In all ways, in the words of an old movie, this is the business he chose, and so did Adam LaRoche.

This is LaRoche’s explanation, in part, after he said that no parents will ever regret not spending enough time with their children: “This was likely to be the last year of my career, and there’s no way I was going to spend it without my son.”

By all accounts, LaRoche is a good father, a man of faith and strong beliefs, a popular teammate wherever he has played in the big leagues. I have four children, all of them older than Blake LaRoche is now, and was as involved in their lives when they were Blake LaRoche’s age as my time — and their own wishes — allowed.

But Adam LaRoche, no matter how honorable his intentions here now, isn’t acting like a parent that every other parent should turn into a hero here.

He’s the one acting like a spoiled teenager who got his privileges taken away.