Bradley Is on a Real Seesaw Ride

I talked to Dodger outfielder Milton Bradley on Tuesday.

I got the full conflicting treatment. I got the Milton Bradley that I like, smart and engaging, and the Milton Bradley, handcuffed and arrested on the edge of throwing away his baseball career, who thinks everyone is out to get him, especially the police, umpires and the media.

I got the Milton Bradley who said, “I don’t have an anger-management problem,” and the Milton Bradley who told me 10 minutes later that he not only had an anger-management problem and spoke regularly to a counselor, but that it was something he’d have to work on for “months and years.”

I got the Milton Bradley who always has an excuse for losing control of his emotions, and the Milton Bradley who becomes upset when told the obvious: “You cannot put yourself in the position ever again where you’re singled out for causing a problem.”

Mt. Bradley’s testy response: “This is what irritates the hell out of me -- you explaining to me that I can’t do that. I know that. I don’t need you to tell me that. You’re the last person I really care about. I listen to my mother or someone close to me -- not an average journalist in the paper.”

And we get along. He agreed to talk with me, and apparently no one else, because we’ve had these little chats periodically and I was the first to ask him why he’s such a jerk at times. I told him Tuesday I thought he was a “dunderhead” for interfering with the police in Ohio, and he said, “I do too.”

A few minutes earlier, he had described himself in almost noble terms, defending himself and explaining why he had gotten into the hassle with the police.

At one moment he’s agreeable to being called a dunderhead, the next he’s defiant in explaining why everyone has him all wrong. “The perfect imperfection,” as Bradley described himself.

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BY NOW, it’s pretty well documented that Bradley has been bedeviled by his emotions. The latest incident occurred last week in Ohio after a traffic stop. Bradley said a female friend of his was riding as a passenger in the car behind him, which had been stopped by the police.

Copley Township Police Chief Michael Mier said the woman had been driving the car when stopped by one of his officers.

“There was one female in the car, by herself,” Mier said in disputing the story Bradley had told the Dodgers.

Everyone agrees the woman had been drinking. Bradley said that she was a Columbia Law School student, a friend, and that he didn’t want her to get in trouble and jeopardize her future. So he got out of his car to help.

“I came out with my arms outstretched to show the cops they didn’t need to pull their weapons or anything like that, and I yelled, because I was 30 yards away, it was raining and there were cars whizzing by,” he said. “The cop told me to get back in the car, and I didn’t get in the car.

“I should have gotten back in the car; I know that,” he said, the human teeter-totter leaning toward repentance this time. “But I didn’t lose my cool. It was a very calculated scheme on my part. I had a friend, and she needed help. You help out a friend, regardless of the consequences.”

Mier said Bradley used obscenity and “was somewhat challenging as he got closer” to the officer.

Bradley said, “I didn’t break any law.” And yes, he said, he told the officer to go ahead and arrest him. “Why not?”

I tried answering his stupid question, but he didn’t want to hear it.

“I told him to arrest me,” he said, “and you might think that’s the dumbest thing, but it let me get my friend out of trouble. And it did.”

He said he was heroic that night, while everyone else reading the newspaper was reminded of the ticking bomb playing for the Dodgers.

“There really shouldn’t have been any headlines, because it was so ridiculously minor,” he said. “I was speaking up as Milton Bradley, a friend, and not Milton Bradley the baseball player. My friends will be there long after baseball, and that’s what is important to me.

“Morally, I don’t believe I did wrong. Legally, I did the wrong thing.”

Bradley said he would not have to appear in court -- he will be represented by counsel -- and all he must do is pay a small fine. The police did not believe the woman was intoxicated, and so she was not charged.

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IF IT had been anyone else, it probably would have been treated as something ridiculously minor, but it’s Bradley, a tightly wound stick of Dodger dynamite, who every once in a while explodes.

“Who is my anger hurting?” he asked. “Don’t put me in the Ron Artest category or the Mike Tyson category. I was playing poker the other night with Marty McSorley, and I don’t hit people over the head with a stick. Those are serious problems, biting people and running into the stands.

“I consider the things I do that are wrong -- not on that level. Artest was out of control; I showed restraint [in throwing the bottle to the ground in the stands]. Never in my life have I gotten into a physical altercation with anyone. Never in my life have I harmed someone. My anger is a completely different type. It’s not directed toward someone.”

He makes it sound, more often than not, that he doesn’t have a problem, because the battle is to move forward and anything else is surrender.

“That’s the way it is,” he said. “That’s how I live my life. I’ve risen above and beyond expectations, coming from where I come from and what I’ve gone through. I’m not supposed to be where I’m at, but I’m here.”

But for how much longer?

“I’m going to live my life the way I want and not by any guidelines or what the moral majority might want,” he said, the human teeter-totter this time tilting toward defiance. “I’m my own person. If it’s not meant for me to play baseball, whether I bring it on myself or it’s brought onto me, OK. I feel there’s something ultimately in God’s plan that is bigger or better for me to do to help people. I don’t look at myself as a major league baseball player. I look at Milton Bradley as the man.”

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BRADLEY SAID he met regularly with a counselor, who might want to schedule a few extra sessions after the Ohio incident.

“What I do is talk to a guy and go over every incident,” he said. “I tell a lot of stories and talk about anything that’s bothering me. There are a lot of things going on in my private life. I talk about my dad and his temper, and my family and their tempers. It’s in my genes. So far, that’s all I’ve done, is talk to a guy for an hour, and then he comments on what I told him.

“It gets into my head, and eventually it’s going to somehow make my brain go the other way when I get into trouble.”

Bradley said he’d sought counseling on his own earlier in his career but was told, “ ‘You reacted the way more than 50% of the people would have reacted in those situations,’ and so I was thinking I didn’t have a problem.”

Apparently, he still feels that way most of the time. He said the umpires have him all wrong. He said they purposely antagonize him, bait him and “just come off the wall with something” to get him upset.

“They poke and poke and poke at me because they can,” he said.

He said the media, the majority of the media, had him all wrong.

“They come up to you like smiling friends and then bash you in the paper,” he said.

Everybody seems out to get him: “If I didn’t play baseball, no one would be saying I have an anger-management problem.”

He might have a chance to find out if he persists in getting in trouble. Cleveland dumped him. So far, the Dodgers are sticking behind Bradley.

“In the past year or two, I’ve gone away from the church,” he said. “The first 18 years, I was in church every Sunday with my mother. I started getting into pro ball and I didn’t want to go to church anymore. I’ve gotten away from that Christian background and upbringing that got me this far, and God might be using these police, umpires and media people to get focused back on me and the Lord.”

The full conflicting Milton Bradley treatment can be exhausting and frustrating until he volunteers the obvious:

“A regular average guy doesn’t get into the problems I get into all the time. It’s something [I must] be doing.”

No kidding.

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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.