Remorse Code

It's possible Scott Sauerbeck is the first Cleveland Indian to be picked up by police while hiding in a hedgerow at 4 a.m. with a woman who was not his wife. But if his transgression was unique, his remorse was not; it was part of a tradition. "I want to apologize to my family, my teammates, the organization and the fans," the reliever (right) said on May 30, before pleading not guilty to obstructing official business and allowing someone intoxicated to operate his car. (It's a long story.) "I'm sorry if I created a distraction for my teammates."

Athletes have made acts of contrition an art form (Life of Reilly, May 8), but the sorriest sport of all, in terms of the quality and quantity of apologies issued, is baseball. Here are the national pastime's four greatest mea culpists--with apologies for any that have been overlooked.

Marge Schott "I did not mean to say anything insensitive."
The late Reds owner went public with regret often during the '90s, after revealing herself as homophobic ("only fruits wear earrings"), racist (she admitted it was "possible" that she had referred to Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as "N----- Day") and pro-Hitler (she owned a swastika armband and once said, "Everybody knows he was good at the beginning, but he just went too far").

Wade Boggs "I totally regret the situation."
The Yankees' third baseman apologized in 1996 for telling a flight attendant who refused to deliver one last beer before landing that he would "kick [her] fat lips in." Boggs was already an expert in self-reproach. Seven years earlier he expressed sorrow after Margo Adams revealed their four-year extramarital affair in Penthouse, blaming his philandering on an addiction to sex: " Wade Boggs is human, and I'm sorry for what I did.... A disease was taking over Wade Boggs , and it just did for four years."

Darryl Strawberry "It was something I should not have said even jokingly."
The former outfielder has been sorry for many drug relapses, but his most startling moment of remorse came in 1993, when he was asked about wildfires blazing in Southern California : "Let it burn down, because I don't live there anymore."

Pete Rose "I am not a bad person, but I did some bad things."
After being banned from baseball in 1989 for gambling, the Hit King offered a string of halfhearted bleats of contrition in a futile quest for reinstatement. Finally, in 2004, Rose came clean--sort of--in his autobiography: "I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way."

Paul Slansky is the co-author, with Arleen Sorkin, of My Bad: 25 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them.