A lot of people have said that any time Alex Rodriguez opens his mouth he ends up putting his foot into it. He opened his mouth during the top of the ninth in Toronto and a few of the Blue Jays would like to put their feet into it after he helped cause a infield pop-up to fall in and extend an inning that saw the Yankees score four times. It put the 10-5 win out of Toronto's reach and made the story something more than the much anticipated end of the Yankee losing streak.
Say-Rod claims that he said "Ha!" as he passed Howie Clark near third base while the Jays heard him say "Mine" but either way the ball fell to the earth uncaught and the Yankees scored four runs in the inning. The Blue Jays were quite upset.
"I was under it and I heard a 'Mine' call, so I let it go," said Clark, who thought the call came from shortstop John McDonald. "This is my 16th season, granted most of them are in the minor leagues, but it's never happened once. It happened tonight."
"I told him it's bush league. That's what we do in Little League," (manager John) Gibbons said. "The one thing that everybody in the game respects about the Yankees is that they play the game right, they play the game hard. That's what they're known for. They're a class operation. That was bush league; it's just not Yankee baseball, man."
"Not since I think 'Major League II,' the movie; I think that's the only time I've ever seen it on the field," (Troy) Glaus said. "I've never heard of someone doing it and I've never seen anybody do it. That's not proper. That's not the right thing to do."
I like the way he said "Major League II, the movie." I thought for a second he meant Updike's novel. This happens all the time in baseball when a foul ball is hit near the dugout but that's obviously a different case than a ball hit near other fielders. Peter Abraham reports Rodriguez said he yelled, “Ha!” because, “I was excited running around third base. I don’t know what my intention was.”
That's as good a quote as any to illustrate why people hate Rodriguez. You were excited running around third base as the third out of the inning appeared to be settling into an infielder's glove? It's very telling that Joe Torre, while not slamming A-Rod, was unable to come up with an overwhelming defense of his player. If you go back to the 2004 ALCS when A-Rod slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo's glove Torre defended his fight if not the act itself. Last night he said "I don’t know what to feel for it. It’s baseball. It’s not like he said, 'I got it.'" Larry Bowa, the third base coach, said that "If you say, ‘I got it,’ I think that’s very unacceptable. He didn’t say, ‘I got it.’ He said, ‘Hey, hey.’ They parted like the Red Sea."
Bowa's last point is an important one, there's no reason that Clark shouldn't have caught the ball, regardless of anything A-Rod did. If Clark did this to A-Rod there's not much chance that this would be the subject of so much discussion. That doesn't mean that it's right or wrong, it just means that Rodriguez always finds himself at the center of one controversy or another because everything he does rubs people the wrong way. I was reminded of two plays last night. The first was when Pete Rose barrelled over Ray Fosse in an All-Star Game to score a winning run and the second was when Lonnie Smith got fooled by Minnesota's infield in the seventh game of the 1991 World Series and didn't advance on a ball because he thought a throw was coming back to second. Rose has always been saluted for his grit, even when he went out of his way to injure another player in an exhibition game, and the Twins were hailed for using deception to keep a key run from scoring. If A-Rod did either of those things he'd be reviled for it. Either way, you have to give him credit for getting people to talk about something other than his propensity for adultery on the road.
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