Why do we try to erase sports stars when they do the wrong thing?

Alex Rodriguez Field is no more. Well, the field, in Appleton, Wisconsin where A-Rod played his only minor league season in 1994 is still there. It just won't bear his name anymore. The field was converted to a youth baseball facility and named after the now embattled Yankees slugger in 2003. Earlier this week, the youth organization that operates the field opted to remove Rodriguez's name after his suspension from MLB was handed down.

The Missouri legislature voted to name a stretch of I-70 in St. Louis after former Cardinals home run king Mark McGwire in 1999. In 2010, five years after McGwire's infamous " I'm not here to talk about the past" testimony before Congress, the Missouri legislature voted to remove McGwire's name from the highway.

The University of Florida recently removed every photo of Aaron Hernandez from its campus along with the engraved brick honoring him as a 2009 All-American. And who can forget about Joe Paterno? He had the most wins by a Division I football coach before the recent child sex abuse scandal shattered Happy Valley.

This is not an advocacy piece for A-Rod, Joe Pa, Big Mac or Hernandez. Institutions can do what they want with the honors they bestow. The issue I have with the sports world is that we try to erase these figures by erasing their accomplishments, and by proxy, we hope to erase the wrong they allegedly did.

Let's step away from sports and into real-life for a moment. Adolf Hitler has not been erased from history. You can still find him in history books, museums and educational institutions the world over. Mussolini, Stalin, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz and tons of other bad people are not gone from history. We don't celebrate the wrong they did. We learn from what they did so hopefully we as a society don't repeat what they did.

Not so in sports...has anyone seen or heard from Rafael Palmeiro since the 2005 hearing? We should be learning. The stove is hot and these are the guys with the burned hands to prove it. As a matter of fact, the erasure attempts make our kids glorify them even more. Instead of talking about what A-Rod took for over a decade and its potentially negative effects, we zero in on his every at-bat to see if he's the same player he was before he got caught.

Lessons can be learned from fallen sports stars. We have to talk about the past. If not, we are doomed to repeat it. More to the point, our kids are doomed to repeat it. Erasure doesn't make anything go away.