Did you hear the one about the Michigan State game? Did you hear how Larry Eustachy was drunk during Iowa State’s 75-64 Elite Eight loss to the Spartans in 2000? And that’s why he got thrown out of the game, because he had no idea what he was doing?

What about 1998? Remember how much we fans loved the fantastic home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, how neither man could establish an insurmountable lead before McGwire’s five-homer barrage on the season’s last weekend?

Did you hear about how Sammy was corking his bats all season to keep up with Big Mac?

I can’t take credit for those rumors. It’s a sampling of the type of stuff that’s been pretty easy to find lately on sports radio, Internet message boards and the like.

There’s no evidence to suggest that either is true, by the way. One is based on the dubious assumption that angry people who swear must be hammered, the other on the equally questionable premise that a veteran hitter could never improve from year to year.

While Eustachy’s party photo episode and Sosa’s bat-corking incident Tuesday were separated by more than a month, a lot of the same things happened in the aftermath of the two scandals.

Fans and others extrapolated patterns from the isolated incidents. That’s normal and appropriate — we’d be foolish to ignore bad behavior because it only came to light once.

What’s more, each man deserved to have his name dragged through the mud by accusations. That should be an expected consequence of making a monumental mistake, even once.

This isn’t a lecture on the dangers of the spotlight. Admittedly, the number of criticisms Eustachy and Sosa were forced to deal with multiplied as the national media exposure of each man’s difficulties grew.

But it’s not as though Eustachy’s character would not be under attack had he been coaching a junior high squad.

Questions would still be asked about Sosa’s integrity had he cracked his bat in a single-A game for the Quad City River Bandits.

Eustachy was known well, perhaps best, for his animated arguments with officials and for his profanity, apparently his tool of choice for dealing with mistakes by officials and players.

During a 72—62 win in Columbia, Mo., in 2000, he merited a technical foul at the end of the first half and continued to argue while a security guard tried to escort him to the Cyclone locker room.

Eustachy screamed that the guard had committed assault against him.

The most famous outburst from Eustachy came one month later in Auburn Hills, Mich., with the Cyclones one win from the Final Four.

After guard Michael Nurse was whistled for his fifth foul, Eustachy chased referee Curtis Shaw out to midcourt, expressing his ideas about Shaw and the officiating staff with what Shaw later called “excessive demonstration and cursing.”

I’d say so. But nothing exists to link either episode to drinking, and Eustachy himself said he didn’t drink until the “day’s work” was done.

But he can’t prove it

Sosa’s status as baseball’s most marketable figure and its best role model has been pointed out repeatedly in the past week. And he has been a picture of contrition since shattering a fateful piece of lumber on a first inning groundout against Tampa Bay Tuesday.

“It’s going to be tough. Some fans are probably not too happy about it,” he said. “I was just trying to get ready and go out there and get ready for the game, and I just picked the wrong bat. I feel sorry. I just apologize to everybody.”

More and more of Sosa’s bats are being found perfectly legal, lending credence to his assertion that he didn’t know he had an illegal bat in his game rack.

Of course, any baseball player should know better than to bring such a bat anywhere near an official game.

Sosa’s excuse is dubious enough to keep people asking questions.

There’s absolutely no evidence supporting many of the outlandish theories about Eustachy or Sosa.

That won’t stop the rumor mill. And neither man should expect it to. They have nobody to blame but themselves.