Columnist Dean Juipe: Kent is only latest player caught in fib

Dean Juipe

Friday, March 22, 2002 | 9:15 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Traditionally, baseball conjures up a wholesome image.

The game itself has an almost unrivaled symmetry to it, and its fans relish not only the admirable gracefulness of the players but the peripheral elements that accompany a seat in the grandstands.

The green grass ... the fresh air ... the smell of hotdogs wafting through the stadium. Nothing beats a day at the ballpark, which is a shared experience that has bonded many a fan and family for more than 100 years in America.

Yet with the 2002 Major League season almost upon us, baseball has an epidemic on its hands.

By the look of things it's contagious: Players are being caught on a regular basis in factual lies.

Adding Jeff Kent's name to the list makes it no fewer than 16 MLB players who have been nabbed this year after fibbing to a higher authority, specifically, their employers.

Kent's deceit may be the most egregious in that it appears as if he concocted an otherwise absurd story to disguise the actual scenario that led to him breaking a wrist. The incentive for his creativity was the fact that he's contractually banned by the San Francisco Giants from riding a motorcyle, and it was a motorcyle stunt gone awry that prompted his injury.

With witnesses having come forward to say they saw Kent doing wheelies on his bike before he got hurt earlier this month, the Giants are in a curious position. However unlikely, given that Kent was the National League Most Valuable Player in 2000, they could void his contact and save the $6 million they're scheduled to pay him this year.

But they should do something punitive just to penalize him beyond the embarrassment he is certain to feel for having said the broken wrist came about while washing his truck. Imagine Kent's mind at work with his wrist shattered: "I can confess or I can use the old 'washing the truck' excuse."

He should have to wash everyone's truck for that one.

Kent's predicament brings to mind a similarly wild tale once fostered by CART driver Patrick Carpentier of Las Vegas after he broke a wrist two years ago. At the time of the accident, Carpentier said he had tripped while carrying a suitcase up the stairs at his Summerlin home. In truth he broke the wrist mountain biking, which was a contractually banned activity as part of his deal with his sponsors.

Carpentier lived through it and Kent will too, albeit with a reddened face and the prospect of a summer's worth of catcalls.

But Kent has company in baseball if you count the 15 current players who fraudulently gave incorrect birth dates to the scouts who signed them years ago and were caught in an INS crackdown last month. These are mostly Latin and Caribbean-born players who knocked two or three years off their dates of birth in an attempt to seem more attractive to major league suitors.

Among the guilty was Cleveland starting pitcher Bartolo Colon, who is 28 and not the 26 he had been claiming. While hardly scandalous, what these players did was deceptive and fairly pointless while mining a humorous vein.

They espoused more misinformation than you could overhear at a sorority reunion.