updated 12:26 a.m. ET May 16, 2006

ATLANTA - Adam LaRoche knows how it looks. He doesn’t seem to be trying hard. He comes across as inattentive, sluggish, a little too laid-back to be a professional athlete.

When LaRoche was coming up through the minors, countless coaches and instructors told him to show more emotion.

“They would tell me, ‘When you’re playing, we know you want to win, but it doesn’t always look like it,”’ said LaRoche, the Atlanta Braves’ first baseman. “They would say, ‘You’ve got to fake it. You’ve got to fake some excitement. You’ve got show them you’re giving 100 percent.”’

LaRoche’s relaxed approach — and a disorder that makes it hard for him to concentrate — have come under scrutiny after the most embarrassing moment of his three-year major league career.

On Sunday, after scooping up a routine grounder that should have been the third out of the inning, LaRoche took his time getting to first and was stunningly beaten to the bag by Washington’s Nick Johnson, who was hustling all the way.

The error allowed the Nationals to score four unearned runs on their way to an 8-1 victory, and led to LaRoche being benched for Monday night’s game against Florida.

He came on as a pinch-hitter in the sixth inning, stayed in at first base and wound up scoring the winning run in an 11-8 victory after leading off the seventh with a double, hustling all the way to second.

“I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t thinking about it still,” LaRoche said. “It was in the back of my mind.”

Standing at his locker beforehand, LaRoche stressed that he doesn’t want to blame attention deficit disorder for his mental blunder. He was diagnosed with the condition in high school, and it would be easy enough to stamp a medical explanation on Sunday’s boneheaded play.

“I just need to pick it up a step,” LaRoche said. “If I was going to blame this on ADD, I would need go get some medicine to treat it. But that had nothing to do with it.”

An admirable stance, to be sure, but a leading expert on ADD believes that LaRoche should take this opportunity to address an issue that is surely having an impact on his life — and perhaps serve as an inspiration to others with the disorder.

“A lot of people with ADD try to hide their symptoms,” said Dr. Patricia Quinn, a Washington, D.C., pediatrician who has studied the condition for more than 30 years. “They tend to suffer in silence. No one knows they’re having a problem. But when you’re in the spotlight like he is, playing a game in front of all those people, the symptoms come out where everybody can see it.”

Quinn believes this would be a good time for LaRoche to look into possible treatments for his disorder.

The first baseman tried medication while playing winter ball in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago, but didn’t like the way it made him feel. Quinn said there have been numerous advancement since then — in fact, a skin patch to treat children with a companion illness, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), was approved by the federal government only last month.

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“I’m sure he wants to be able to function like everybody else sitting in the dugout,” she said. “He wants to know what’s going on, when he’s coming up to bat, what the score is — those type of things. I’m sure this is something that is more than just this one play.”

LaRoche concedes that his mind occasionally drifts off to other things while he’s in the field or sitting in the dugout. Playing a sport which comes with so much idle time only makes things worse.

While ADD and ADHD are normally associated with children who have trouble sitting still in class, about a quarter of the cases don’t show those sort of symptoms. For them, it’s simply more difficult to stay focused.

They forget things. They’re disorganized. They’re inattentive to what others are saying.

Even within that group, there’s another set of symptoms known as “sluggish cognitive tempo,” according to Quinn. “That’s people who go at their own pace. They get there when they get there,” she said.

LaRoche fits that definition to a T.

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