The fallout from Atlanta reliever John Rocker's second "interview" with Sports Illustrated writer Jeff Pearlman, an up-close, spittle-laced diatribe on June 4 in the bowels of Turner Field, must have had Rocker echoing Britney Spears's Oops, I Did It Again. He was hit by the Braves with a $5,000 fine and a demotion to Triple A Richmond, though the latter penalty was officially for poor pitching (he had yielded 25 walks in 18 1/3 innings). Considering his alleged threats against an Atlanta sportscaster in May, his hinting he'd leave baseball to become a stockbroker and his aforementioned wildness, Rocker seemed to be sullying the PR clean-up his handlers had been engineering ever since his xenophobic and misanthropic remarks appeared in the Dec. 27, 1999 issue of SI. The whitewashing included an arbitrator-ordered reduction of Rocker's Major League Baseball-mandated 73-day suspension to just the first 14 days of the season, public and private apologies and a January ESPN interview in which he boasted of having let teammate Andruw Jones, a native of Curacao, drive his car. The American attention span being about as short as a Britney miniskirt, interest in Rocker waned until the weeks leading up to the Braves' late-June trip to New York, a four-game series during which the 25-year-old left-hander responded to the media frenzy and the jeers of the Shea Stadium crowd by mowing down the Mets in order in his only appearance. Rocker never made good on threats to ride the No. 7 train to Shea, but 700 cops, a bullpen canopy, curtailed beer sales and a Diamond Vision apology to New Yorkers sufficiently discouraged potential Duracell chuckers. By season's end the public seemed to have forgotten, if not forgiven, the debacle, subscribing to the view of Braves outfielder Brian Jordan, who said of his teammate, "He just doesn't know any better."

--Jamal Greene