(Davey : “I looked Joe up on the internet”)
Not the kind where Nick Broomfield has his head shoved into a toilet, either. Joe Maddon took considerable umbrage at Nats skipper Davey Johnson insisting umpires examine the pine-tar smeared glove of Rays reliever Johnny Peralta. While Johnson has dismissed Maddon’s protests as the howling of a “weird wuss”, The New York Post’s Ken Davidoff suggests Washington’s manager might wanna reconsider the risks vs. rewards of future glove inspections.
OK, so what did Johnson risk? He drew the ire of much of the baseball community. Peralta told reporters that players on the Nationals were very upset about what their manager did, since he exposed them to similar scrutiny by opposing managers. I don’t know whether that’s true, but from speaking with people at Citi Field yesterday, it’s certainly feasible.
Consider that in Game 2 of the 2006 World Series, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa essentially let his team go down to Detroit’s Kenny Rogers even though the Fox cameras showed pine tar on Rogers’ hand. La Russa, managing against his good friend Jim Leyland, knew that he would open Pandora’s Box if he challenged what Rogers was doing. He’d be taking the game to a place in which everything from pine tar to glove sizes to spike sharpness could be in play.