Ex-clubhouse hand Radomski: Locker room no place for kids

Ross D. Franklin/AP

Adam LaRoche opts to walk out on the White Sox, retiring after the team requests his son attend less practices during spring training.

Major League Baseball clubhouses are no place for kids, according to Kirk Radomski — and he should know, since he spent a lot of time in the Mets locker room when he was a teenager.

Radomski says he thinks it’s great that Adam LaRoche is willing to retire — and walk away from a $ 13 million contract — after the White Sox brass told him he needed to limit his 14-year-old son Drake’s visits to the clubhouse. But big-league locker rooms, Radomski says, are hardly family-friendly environments.

“I would never allow my kids in the locker room,” says Radomski, the father of a 17-year-old daughter. “I saw too much at an early age. I understand LaRoche wants to be a good father but the clubhouse is a place for adult men who do and say things that are not appropriate for kids.”

Radomski, best known as the man who provided performance-enhancing drugs to dozens of ballplayers and as the primary source for former Sen. George Mitchell’s 2007 report on baseball and steroids, was just 15 years old in 1985 when he started working at Shea Stadium as a clubhouse attendant. The 1980s Mets won just one World Series but they led MLB in debauchery and Radomski says he saw plenty of X-rated behavior during his tender teen years. In his memoir “Bases Loaded,” Radomski wrote about women he says “serviced” players in the bullpen during games. He told the Daily News Thursday that he also saw players fooling around with female fans in the clubhouse — sometimes even during games.

“The way the players treated women, that was the biggest thing,” Radomski says. “I was raised by my (single) mother so I learned to respect women. But for most of these guys, women were just a piece of a–. Almost everybody cheated on their wives — although some of the wives cheated on their husbands, too. We’d be on the team bus and women would drive up next to us and flash their t—. If you’re around that all day long you mighty start to think of women as a piece of a–, too.”

Radomski, as street-wise kid from the Bronx, says the first time he saw somebody do cocaine was in the Shea clubhouse. Some players pounded beers in the clubhouse after every home game.

Stephen Barcelo/Stephen Barcelo

Kirk Radomski.

“Guys would drink eight or 10 beers and drive home,” he says.

Radomski says Drake LaRoche probably hasn’t witnessed the kind of big-league sins he saw back in the ’80s and ’90s because players now are more focused on fitness than partying. “They are more worried about their bodies breaking down,” he says. “There is a lot more money now at stake. Now it’s all about business. Back then it was more of a frat house.”

But kids still don’t belong in baseball clubhouses, he says. “It’s great that LaRoche wants his kid in the locker room, but what about the other 24 guys on the team? What if everybody wanted to bring their kids in the locker room and give them a locker? That’s not going to work.”

Radomski says Drake LaRoche would probably be better off going to a traditional school and hanging around with kids his own age because life in MLB clubhouses is more fantasy than real world.

“In the real world people don’t make a million dollars a week and people don’t give you sneakers and gloves for free. In the real world, you can’t just drop you dirty clothes on the floor so someone will pick them up and washes them. I think it’s great that LaRoche wants to spend time with his son, but is that the kind of environment you want for your kid?”

Baseball – NY Daily News

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