Play like a pro…or not…whatever

Thanks to Jere for pointing out this article in the New York Daily News about what a good sport Joe Girardi is.Yankees minor-league catcher Francisco Cervelli fractured his wrist yesterday when Devil Rays infielder Elliot Johnson knocked him over at the plate.

Now, Joe’s bitch is that it’s a spring training game and the Rays shouldn’t be playing so hard. Joe Maddon’s response is “Yay! My guys want to kick the Yankees’ asses even in meaningless games!”.

Okay, that wasn’t really Maddon’s reaction. But close enough:

“I loved the hardball right there,” Maddon said. “We’re playing it hard, we’re playing it right. It was a bang-bang play at the plate. I couldn’t tell exactly where the catcher was in regard to the plate, but he was trying to score a run right there and that’s part of the game.

Now, I never want to see a player get hurt, even f he wears pinstripes, but these kids are fighting for their spots on the team and need to do whatever it is they can to stand out in the crowd. As long as it was clean, kid just barreling into home to score, no spikes up, no taking the catcher out at the knees, I have no problem with him playing hard. It sucks that someone got hurt, but it also isn’t whine-worthy.

Most interesting to me was the final quote by Girardi in that Mark Feinsand piece:

“I know kids are playing aggressive and hard – and that’s how you want them to play – but maybe if it happens too much, you should mention something,” Girardi said. “A player asked me about it before we even played a game and I said, ‘Absolutely not.'”

There was a similar play with Carl Crawford and the Astros earlier in the week. So does this quote imply that Girardi thinks Maddon isn’t doing his job properly and should talk to his players about being too rough? Could he possibly be that arrogant? And what does that line about “a player asked me” mean? One of his players asked him if it was okay to plow into the catcher in order to try and score and he told him “absolutely not”? What kind of sense does that make? What manager would say that to one of their guys? You don’t want anyone purposely hurting another player, but to tell a player to ‘absolutely not’ play hard? That’s like telling your kid not to fight back when he gets pushed around in the schoolyard.

Well, if nothing else, this certainly will make the Rays/Yankees games more interesting this year.

Adding an edit. Shelley Duncan talks a big game:

“There’s going to be no evil intent to carry over, but what it does just adds a different type of fire to your gut when you play that team. You understand how they’re playing the game and what their mind-set is,” Yankees first baseman Shelley Duncan said. So if he’s attempting to score when the teams play again, will he slide and try to avoid contact with the catcher? “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “That will be determined in between third and home.”

So trying to score is a “mind-set” that Shelley isn’t familiar with? Good to know.