Brady latest to face inflated discipline

We live in the era of Great Punishment, and Tom Brady is merely the latest to fall victim to our punitive wishes.

I cannot tell you exactly when this era began. I know only that I am forever at the low end of predicting suspensions and fines, and that I also never learn my lesson. I’m constantly baffled at fans’ determination to not simply see their former heroes fall but to have them kicked around in the gutter for a bit as well.

In Brady’s case, I wrote that he should get a two-game suspension when the Wells report was released last week. I thought that was almost being ridiculous, removing a player from the field on the basis of a report that says he appeared to have influenced a New England Patriots employee to reduce the air pressure in footballs.

But I didn’t know at the time about Brady’s and the Patriots’ general lack of cooperation with the league’s investigator, which surely resulted in increased penalties for all concerned.

Yet many others were calling for longer suspensions even without that same knowledge, and there are those who believe even now that the Patriots were allowed to skate. They got their Super Bowl, they can live without a first-round pick, and losing Brady for four games probably means one more defeat in the 2015 season — not enough to keep New England from winning its sorry division one more time.

What I’m trying to figure out is how and why we reached this point.

Part of me thinks it’s the 24-hour sports news cycle, the looming presence of ESPN and cellphone cameras, the fact that each of us on Twitter sees himself/herself as the ultimate authority on all things. I don’t doubt that the inflation of player salaries and movement through free agency renders all sports fans more cynical than those of previous generations. For some reason, we think players making millions should be put to a standard that team owners worth billions are seldom held to.

I know for a fact we hadn’t reached this point in 1991 when Albert Belle, who had something less than a squeaky clean reputation for sportsmanship, got into it with a fan and hurled a baseball into his chest. No fine. No penalty. I was there in 1996 when the Colorado Avalanche staged a NHL Western Conference finals upset of the Detroit Red Wings that included Claude Lemieux — whose reputation was already worse than Belle’s — shoving Kris Draper’s head into the boards. Draper suffered not only a concussion but required facial reconstruction surgery for a broken jaw. Lemieux got two games. In NFL terms (to contrast it with Brady’s penalty), Lemieux had to sit almost until halftime of one game.

The NBA tends to be harshest when it comes to these matters, especially if it involves anything approaching fisticuffs.

But then we all remember Alonzo Mourning and Larry Johnson — a true heavyweight battle — trading haymakers while Jeff Van Gundy clung for life to Mourning’s leg. Each player got two games. That’s half of Brady’s penalty in a sport in which five times as many games are played in a regular season.

None of this is meant to suggest Brady has been overpenalized. The judgment was harsh but appropriate. Sports leagues have to make the fairness of their contests the No. 1 priority.

That was made clear nearly a century ago when the Chicago White Sox players who took money to throw the 1919 World Series were banned for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

It makes absolutely no sense to argue that Ray Rice only got two games (initially), and Brady got four since Rice’s first suspension now qualifies as ancient history in the born-again offices of the NFL. Besides that, Rice probably lost his job for life after videotape led to his suspension being revisited.

I just think you have to be careful with the “throw the book at ’em” mentality. Consider how many Rangers fans took, if not delight, some measure of “yeah, we’ve been through that one” when the Angels’ Josh Hamilton was determined to have suffered another relapse in the offseason.

Then when Hamilton received no penalty at all from Major League Baseball, there was a sense of outrage that this repeat offender was suffering no punishment (never mind that the Angels’ owner was the most outraged; that’s a story we’ve already told).

Now all of a sudden, boom, Hamilton is wearing the Rangers’ Class AAA uniform of the Round Rock Express and soon will bring what’s left of his once magical bat to Arlington, Texas. That wouldn’t be so instantly possible had he gotten the 50-game suspension some were calling for.

Justice is good when it’s fair and swift, and in the case of Brady and the Patriots it has been delivered.

But the era of Great Punishment is a relatively new one, and we should be careful just how far we wish to take this thing.