Lynn Harrod and DeWain Stevens were sitting in Kauffman Stadium one night last weekend looking at a game program during the Royals-Indians series.

Harrod was Lawrence High’s baseball coach while Stevens’ son, Lee, was playing for the Lions, and the two were at The K to watch Lee perform for his newest team.

Something in the program caught Harrod’s eye. Stevens’ birthday was listed as October 3, 1967, and Harrod quickly realized that was a mistake. So, too, did the elder Stevens, who was as aware as anyone that his son actually was born on July 10, 1967.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Harrod told me, “but I know Lee didn’t change it.”

Curiously, I had spotted the same gaffe earlier in the week while researching the Cleveland Web site for Stevens’ up-to-date statistics. I, too, noticed his birthdate was listed as 10-3-67. I was pretty sure Lee was born in July, but I wasn’t positive. I had a 2001 Montreal Expos guide  Stevens was traded to the Indians by the Expos in late June  and I looked up Stevens’ birthday in that year-old Montreal guide for confirmation. I’ll be darned. The Expos listed his birthday as 10-3-67, too.

Ah, but I had a couple of Lee Stevens baseball cards from the ’90s when the 1986 LHS grad was a hot prospect with the Angels. And there it was. Stevens’ birthday on the baseball cards is 7-10-67.

Baseball players, particularly Latin-American players, are notorious for changing their ages. Remember how we learned that Royals’ shortstop Neifi Perez is actually 28, not 26 as listed in his biography? Or, at a lower level, who can forget the Danny Almonte Little League age scandal?

At first I thought Stevens might have subtracted three months from his real age on purpose in order to make it look like he was the same age throughout a major league season. Yet Stevens makes no secret of the fact he was born on July 10, 1967, that he is currently 35 years old and not 34.

Best guess is that sometime between his trade from the Texas Rangers to the Expos in 2000, Stevens’ birthdate was inexplicably changed by someone who was compiling his resume for the Expos’ media guide.

And, as Kevin Steele said a couple of weeks ago, “I never read my resume.”

Steele is Baylor University’s head football coach and someone discovered his resume contained an error in fact. Steele had not played football at Tennessee for four years as the BU media guide stated. He had begun at Furman U. and then transferred to Tennessee.

Resumes of coaches and athletes have come under more scrutiny than ever in the wake of Notre Dame’s hiring of George O’Leary as football coach, only to find O’Leary’s resume contained inaccuracies. Since then, a couple of other coaches have been caught with biographical boo-boos.

Other bios, while correct, may contain what may politely be called exaggerations. The best example I know of involving Kansas University occurred in 1984 when youthful Les Steckel, then 37, was hired to become head coach of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings.

Steckel’s Vikings’ resume contained a sentence that stated he was a running back at Kansas University from 1964 to 1967. A check of the files showed, however, that while Steckel was a part of KU’s football program he was a walk-on who mainly held dummies. He never played in a single game and therefore never lettered.

Steckel’s name does appear in the 1966 and 1967 KU media guides. He is listed as a halfback in ’66 and a fullback in ’67. So, in theory, Steckel WAS a running back at Kansas University in the mid-’60s. Or he wasn’t. It all depends on how you interpret his status.

All in all, though, that old bromide that warns baseball players not to look back because somebody might be gaining on them doesn’t apply to resumes. When it comes to your own history, you had better look back because somebody might be changing it on you.