The Diamondbacks’ Luis Gonzalez, no doubt unnerved by last night’s blowout loss, if not his team’s utter collapse of late, took umbrage at the Dodgers’ retaliation for the Snakes’ attempts at murdering Nomar Garciaparra in Monday’s series opener. From the LA Daily News’ Tony Jackson.
“Go ask Baez and (Dodgers manager) Grady Little,” Arizona left fielder Luis Gonzalez said. “They’re the ones that (expletive) waited until late in the game to throw at him. It was (expletive) gutless.
“Go talk to them, so they can tell you the ball slipped out of his hand.”
The curiously placed pitch did come at an interesting time, given that four different Diamondbacks pitchers had hit three different Dodgers batters five different times in the first two games of the series, including hot-hitting Nomar Garciaparra three times in Monday’s opener.
Dodgers reliever Jonathan Broxton hit Arizona’s Conor Jackson (ElCamino Real of Woodland Hills) in the seventh inning Monday, after which Arizona reliever Randy Choate plunked Garciaparra in the bottom of the same inning and was ejected.
This time, it was J.D. Drew who took one from reliever Brandon Medders in the fifth inning, providing the backdrop against which the Baez-Green drama would later unfold. Baez vehemently denied hitting Green intentionally, barking an expletive of his own when told of Gonzalez’s comments.
“I was trying to go inside, but the ball caught him and hit him,” Baez said. “Everyone knows I pitch inside to everybody, so it’s nothing new (against) any team.”
Carl Everett would like to know “why am I the only player being messed with?” Indeed, this would be much harder to explain, than say, evolution.
The New York Post’s George King, the morning after the Yankees’ 19-1 capitulation to the Indians.
A year ago, he was a welcomed life raft in a turbulent sea. Today Shawn Chacon is a cement shoe attached to a body that is slowly sinking into the muck of a dirty river.
Former no. 1 overall draft choice in 1999, OF Josh Hamilton (above) made his first appearance in nearly 4 years last night, going 1-3 for Tampa Bay’s Hudson Valley Renegades in an 7-2 loss to Brooklyn. Having lost a time of playing time through his struggles with substance abuse, Hamilton is not only kind of long in the tooth for the NY-Penn League, but he already helped Hudson Valley win a title 7 years ago.