“I can’t win this, and I’m not trying to,” said an embattled Ken Griffey Jr, responding to the Tacoma News Tribune’s Larry Larue and the journalist’s claim that two of Junior’s Mariner teammates spotted the likely Hall Of Famer dozing in the clubhouse during a game last week. “I don’t have a blog. I’m just hoping that whoever said it is man enough to come to me and talk about it.” While a blog is pretty good for self-defense, Griffey’s teammate, Mike Sweeney seems to be proposing a bullet-proof vest, with a series of nonsensical words of support, as tweeted by Ken Rosenthal and quoted by Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra.
“We will support and fight and take a bullet for Ken Griffey Jr. if we have to. He’s our teammate . . . Nothing is going to divide this clubhouse, especially a makeshift article made up of lies.”
“We don’t think there are two players who said that (about Griffey sleeping). I challenged everyone in that room — if they said that — to stand up and fight me. No one stood up.“
Even Paul Lo Duca is reading this and believes Sweeney ought to calm down. Calcaterrra suggests “the Mariners are now less a baseball team than they are Ken Griffey’s P.R. firm.”, and while that’s damning enough, consider the past week’s worth of incidents surrounding Sweeney, Griffey and Milton Bradley. For all of Colin Cowherd’s talk of the Pacific Northwest being too laid back to give a shit about sports, the region’s lone big league baseball team are acting just as prickly as media-besieged colleagues in cities like Boston and Philadelphia.