Hi, it’s Joe Erwin filling in for Sam again:

A week ago, the Rangers retired the number of Adam Graves, the quintessential good guy, as much for as what he did off the ice as on it. Now those same Rangers are set to bring back Sean Avery, who will never win a “good guy” award. Unfortunately that’s how it is today. You can be a shady character as long as you perform on the ice, field or court.

So Avery will be cheered at the Garden, if not immediately then the first time he makes a difference in a Rangers victory. And Alex Rodriguez can rehabilitate his image among Yankee fans not with good works but with something not even the best testing lab has been able to discover from him, a big postseason for the Yankees.

You’d love to see your team win with a locker room of people such as Adam Graves or Derek Jeter or Eli Manning, but it doesn’t always work out that way. The 1986 Mets were filled with druggies and ex-druggies and engaged in all sorts of bad behavior. But all Mets fans care about now is that they won it all.

I’d love to take the high ground, but I can’t be a hypocrite. I’ve cheered for the bad guys if they were “my” bad guys. How about you, Carp?

 CARP SAYS:

I’m sure I cheered for bad guys when I was young and naive, and it was surely easier to do when I was a rabid, ranting fan. But that was before I got this job and lost most of my fan-ship.

Once upon a time—I’ve confessed this in the past—I rooted for the Dallas Cowboys. When I was a kid, the Giants didn’t televise home games and you couldn’t get a ticket to see them play very often, so I was one of those TV-generation fans of another city’s team, as was the case with Oakland Raiders fans and to an extent Pittsburgh Steelers fans. I got hooked watching the Ice Bowl in ‘67, and rooted for the ‘Boys through the Meredith days, through the Staubach days and beyond.

Now? They couldn’t lose enough games, or by enough points, to make me happy. Why? Because of their creep owner who hired a creep coach in Barry Switzer and began obtaining all the creep players (who joined their own little criminals like Michael Irvin and Leon Lett). Now it is a virtual House of Cretins down there in Big D. 

So, in short, I do think character counts. It is why I’d rather have an Allan Houston than a Stephon Marbury any day. Or a Derek Jeter than an A-Rod. Or a Graves (or for that matter a Blair Betts) than a Sean Avery.

But the Rangers have gone this road before, and my all-time disgusting acquisition was Billy Tibbetts, a sexual-assault convict. Tibbetts also was awful as a player, so his impact was minimal. Avery is a pretty decent player who has high impact on the ice and just as much potential destructive impact in the lockerroom or anywhere else he goes. I wouldn’t want him on my team.

The ‘86 Mets are probably more fun in retrospect, as a group that won one of the all-time improbable World Series (improbable because of Game 6, not improbable because they were the best team in baseball at the time). But if you look back now, with the drugs and the drinking and the smoking, and the type of creeps many of them have turned out to be, well, it’s hardly a role-models Hall of Fame.