Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Out in right field

Trot Nixon is saying incidents like the Tavarez punch could be avoided if baseball had a balanced schedule. “This is a prime example of why Bud Selig needs to take a look at teams playing each other 19 ... times a year.” Okay, I love Trot, in a non-gay sort of way, but this makes almost zero sense to me.

- Tavarez has only been on the Red Sox for a couple weeks. I suppose one could argue that he was "just trying to fit in with the new team", but come on - the guy's obviously a bit of a headcase, as this list shows. He actually has some history with the D-Rays, back in 2003...when he was with the Pirates. Can't imagine the imbalanced schedule caused that.

- Trot says going back to the balanced schedule might prevent the brawls. Of course, the bad blood between the Sox and the Rays goes back to August 2000 (the Pedro/Williams/Flaherty game). The imbalanced schedule hadn't begun yet. (And I'm pretty some Sox-Yankees fighting had happened by that point?)

- Then, just to prove he doesn't know when to stop talking, Trot then goes on to blame the fans for the problems. "Fans (are) all out of control. Look what happened last year. One of our fans hit Sheffield in the face."

Ugh. Say it ain't so, Trot.

3 comments:

  1. From the list, I love that in 1996, Tavarez "threw a fastball behind the Brewers' Mike Matheny and in the brawl that ensued, flipped umpire Joe Brinkman onto his back." And he got suspended three games. THREE GAMES. Nowadays a reliever doing that would get, what, twenty?

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  2. Yeah, 20 sounds about right. Maybe more now that Bud has some swagger.

    Players are just dumb sometimes. when the unbalanced schedule came out, one of the selling points was that it would promote rivalries and revenues which the players would get more of. And it would reduce the travel time and costs and the intra-time zone trips - the Sox used to play at every west coast team two team. The union gladly endorsed that as an element that improved the life of players.

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  3. Wow, that sounds so un-Trot like!

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