Last summer, when Josh Hamilton wowed the world with a crazy display of fireworks at the home run derby, he became the feel-good story of the year. From the promise of greatness, he sunk to the depths of despair, and then eventually arose from the ashes to achieve the success that had always been expected of him.

And as a country, we ate it up. After all, who doesn’t love a good tale of redemption?  (Remember, the bible is by far the best-selling book of all time.)

However, with the recent news (courtesy of Deadspin) that Josh Hamilton fell off the wagon last winter, our story seems to have lost its fairytale ending. The “comments” sections of various articles written about Hamilton in recent days reflect a variety of responses to Josh’s fall from grace. Among them, there are those who feel betrayed, disappointed, like they’ve lost a hero.

The question is: why?

Josh never promised us that his struggles with drugs and alcohol were over. Anyone who’s at all familiar with addiction and alcoholism will tell you that it’s a promise he would have been a fool to make. To quote the literature from Alcoholics Anonymous, addiction is “cunning, baffling and powerful.”  It’s a life-long battle, and the worst possible mistake an addict can make is to assume that’s he won a final victory.

Over the years, I have heard heartbreaking stories of addiction. I once heard of a woman who was clean for fifteen years when she decided to have that glass of champagne at a cocktail party, a decision which – within a matter of months – would result in the complete destruction of the new life that she’d built.  I have heard stories of people who kept coming in and out and in and out of detox and AA, unable to put clean time together, devastating the people around them, seemingly earnest in their desire to stop, but somehow incapable, despite themselves. For some of these people, there would never be a reprieve. On the other hand, I know a guy who’s been to detox more time than he can count on both hands, a guy who everyone had more or less written off as dead by the end of his drug use. Somehow, for reasons incomprehensible to most of the world, that last time he checked himself in, something changed. That was eight years ago, and he’s still clean and sober.

Addiction is a tricky, unpredictable beast.  Those who take it on at all do so against great odds.  Those who take it on and win, are members of an incredibly small minority.

For all these reasons, Josh Hamilton still deserves our respect.

Last year, we thought Josh was a hero because he had seemingly emerged from his battle with addiction as the winner.  He made a comeback the likes of which one might only see in the movies.  He did so after years of cocaine use, during which he more or less threw away any promise of a future.  Josh’s accomplishments last year – highlighted of course by his ridiculous performance at the home run derby – are not rendered nil on account of one stupid mistake this past January.  The fact is that in order to be where he is today, he had to fight an extremely slanted battle against a merciless opponent.  Every day he fought that battle and won was a success. True, his relapse was unfortunate, but it merely highlights the reality that his struggle with addiction is one that will never really be over.

One could argue that it wasn’t Deadspin’s place to publish those photos to begin with, but that’s a moot point. Deadspin exists, and they exist in order to break just these kinds of stories.  Love it or hate it, Deadspin is the most heavily trafficked sports blog on the interwebs. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.  So it isn’t really a question of whether Deadspin was wrong to run that story.  It’s a question of how much stock we’re going to put in it.

Josh wasn’t busted using performance enhancing drugs. (Clearly, as evidenced by his performance this year.)  His choices reflect – not a misguided attempt to improve himself – but rather an almost tragic instinct to destroy himself.  It’s a personal struggle – made less personal, of course by his willingness to share his story with us. However, we need to bear in mind that his choice to be open about his history was largely related to his desire to reach others who also battle with addiction. For all these reasons, I tend to buy it when Josh says that he is not so much a hypocrite as he is only human.

According to the story, Josh came forward immediately, talked to his wife, his team, told them what had happened right after it had happened. If this is true, he’s doing all the right things in order to get back on track.  We should leave him alone and let him.  Currently, Josh barely resembles the player we saw before the All-Star break in 2008. He’s posting terrible numbers, looks nothing like that beloved power hitter of yore.  This, after a remarkable performance at spring training.  However, after several weeks on the DL, he has not been able to find his stride.   (Though he’s shown some improvement in the last two series against the A’s and the Angels, going 9-for-25, including a three-run bomb.)

I don’t believe his struggles this year are related to his recent slip.  However, I think that we should allow him to focus his full attention on righting whatever’s gone wrong at the plate without the distraction of a mistake he made several months ago.  He’ll still be battling his addiction after we stop discussing it in the media, once the season is over and long after he’s retired from major league baseball.  However, at the moment, as sports fans, our primary focus should be Josh’s battle to raise his batting average and OBP.

After all, this is still baseball, and the Rangers are in a wild card race.

To put it like my friend Tim McCarver likely would: The wild card race is happening right now. Those pictures are from last January.