Can you really blame stars for jumping at best offers?

	Seeing Johnny Damon put on the pinstripes was enough to make most Red Sox fans sick. Al Bello/Getty Images

Because I analyze athletics and do so as a gentle, sensitive soul, fans often come to me with their sports problems. They see me as an avuncular figure, a Dr. Phil of games, a parson of the arena who can help them deal with difficult personal sports issues. Pastor, they say to me, for example, how can I control my wrath when too many commercials come on television during games? Or, tell me, counselor, why does it bother me so much that Shaquille O'Neal is so nasty to Kobe Bryant?

Today, though, the single issue that fans simply cannot deal with is home-team turnover, the way too many players keep changing uniforms. I can't tell you how many fans swear to me that they have given up caring about sports because the players they love leave for greener pastures, that their teams are suddenly made up of strangers ... or, even worse, former enemies.

The departure of Johnny Damon from the Red Sox, where he was a hirsute totem, to the clean-shaven Yankees, has utterly thrown many fans' psyches into a veritable cocked hat. That this unfathomable transaction took place during the holiday season, when family -- that is: team -- is uppermost in our thoughts, has caused even more distress. My hotline has been on fire. They used to say in Boston WWJDD? What Would Johnny Damon Do? Now it is HCJDDI? How Could Johnny Damon Do It?

Well, dear fans, in my most soothing bedside manner, let me comfort you with this warm advice: get over it.

Players have always switched teams, either because their teams sold them or traded them, or because they, like the healthy, wealthy and wise Damon, had the opportunity themselves. Free agency may be relatively new, but in various periods when leagues were in open competition, players were like Bedouins. At the turn of the last century, when the American League came into existence, so many National Leaguers jumped -- and some jumped back -- that the term "kangarooing out" came into existence. Generations later, when the American Football League and the American Basketball Association boiled up, kangarooing out was back in vogue. It always will be.

In fact, even though it seems that so many more players are switching teams now, the truth is that even in the dreamy past, few players lived out long careers wearing the same uniform. Babe Ruth, most famously, but just to name a few other peripatetic legends: Cy Young, Tris Speaker, Rogers Hornsby, Jimmy Foxx, Frank Robinson, Y.A. Tittle, Norm Van Brocklin, Johnny Unitas, Mike Ditka, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving.

The fact is, today's athletes may be younger, faster and stronger than you and me, but they're no less greedy and opportunistic than we are. Indeed, given the fact that they have short careers, it's only surprising that even more of them don't kangaroo out every chance. Inasmuch as we are a transient society and that the rules in our culture have changed and few of us stay with one place of business for the duration, Damon and his fellows are just mirroring our current culture.

Fans are loyal to their teams. Players are passing through. Just instruct your children to root for the uniform, and never mind the coming and going of the incidental flesh and blood that fills the uniforms up.