Adam Piatt retired from Major League Baseball at the age of 28 in 2004. His career statistics are unimpressive: a lot of time in the minor leagues and a total of just 521 major league at-bats and 16 home runs.

Thursday afternoon marked the first time Piatt has ever made headlines: The Mitchell Report cited Adam Piatt as an admitted steroid user who claimed to have sold performance enhancing drugs to former MVP Miguel Tejada.

Piatt volunteered to provide former Senator George Mitchell with information for his investigation not because he had to, but because he felt it was the right thing to do. Mitchell wrote that "After Radomski's guilty plea was publicly announced, Piatt's lawyer contacted us. We later interviewed Piatt, who voluntarily admitted his use of performance enhancing substances. He accepted full responsibility for his actions and said that he had learned an important life lesson as a result. Piatt should be commended for his candor, for his willingness to admit that he made a mistake, and for accepting responsibility for his actions."

Today, Piatt is a Certified Financial Planner with Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER) and, if his involvement with the steroids investigation is any indication, he is just the kind of stand-up guy the company needs in its organization to get back on track. His candor and acceptance of responsibility contrasts nicely with the company's last CEO, who went packing with a $160 million severance package after the company reported an $8.4 billion loss on bad subprime investments.

A piece in the News-Press looks at Adam Piatt's confessions, and people who know him have a lot of good things to say about him, in particular his financial planning clients praised his character. Adam Piatt is a model of how every Major League Baseball player should have handled the scandal: admit you messed up, do what you can to make it right, and move on. It is also how corporate executives should handle their owns failures: admit they messed up, do what they can to make it right, and move on. I can only think of a handful of CEOs who operate under that philosophy.

In sports and in business, a willingness to accept responsibility for a mistake and do what you can to make it right is rare -- George Mitchell had a lot of trouble getting athletes to talk to him, but Adam Piatt, a retired journeyman with no particular incentive, spilled his guts and subjected himself to a lot of media coverage because it was the right thing to do.

Hopefully the media will treat him well in light of his revelations as a sign to people in all industries that, no matter how badly you screw up, there is redemption to be found if you do what you can to fix it