My biggest objection in instances in which the athlete claims to have "made a mistake" when he took amphetamines is how they repair their images with the public. Davis said he "made a mistake", and it's a crock of crap. The dictionary says a "mistake" is performing a wrongful action not having realized it was wrong. If you're adding up a series of numbers on an adding machine and insert an incorrect number, therefore bringing an incorrect total....that's a mistake because you didn't know you had entered the wrong number. The error was unintentional.
What Davis did was no mistake. He took amphetamines, knowing he was violating the terms of his contract and hoping he wouldn't be discovered. There was no mistake.
You can understand why the player's lawyers and PR people want him to publicly confess to a mistake; they figure people will read the account and say: "Hey, everybody makes mistakes. So Chris Davis made one, too. He's just human, right?"
The truth lies elsewhere, but as long as Chris Davis can hit a baseball, he'll be fine. It's good he caught a significant penalty, yet I imagine that one of us getting caught by our employers doing stuff like this would result in far greater sanctions.
It pays to be rich and famous.
