(Yes, he does.)
Full series roundup will be coming later today, but with all the bad blood between the Sox and Rays boiling over these last two weekends, I want to talk about our best current rivalry. For a long time the Tampa Bay baseball franchise was a joke; now they’re not. They got smart, drafted well, and found a model that put them in a position to succeed despite one of the worst professional sports facilities in North America and a fan base that is best described as somewhere between non-existent and apathetic.
But while I’ve hated the Rays for quite some time now, their current team feels different. In the early days of the Devil Rays, they were just plain annoying: it was pests like Gerald Williams getting into it with Pedro and just being a nuisance on the way to 100 losses. It was watching Wade Boggs get his 3,000th career hit on a homer while draped in a uniform splashed with purple and yellow and blue and green. They were gross. But then all of a sudden their draft picks started to work out and as they made their way up to the majors, the front office realized they could moneyball their way into some wins, they got the right manager, and all of a sudden there were cowbells in the Trop and the Rays were playing for a World Series.
A lot of elements from that AL Pennant winning team are still in place: the front office is largely the same, Joe Maddon is still the manager, and although there’s been player turnover, the players that are there now were almost all drafted, developed and then brought up the same way as the ’08 team. So why is this Rays team even more hateable than the recent Rays teams that also threw at, brawled with, and, most importantly, beat the Red Sox?
It’s because the Rays are now a bunch of pussies. They’re fake. They’d like to think they’re hard-nosed and tough, but they’re just not. Look at the guys on their team. They went from guys like Matt Garza and James Shields and Dan Wheeler and Jonny Gomes to guys like David Price and Yunel Escobar and Sean Rodriguez. They used to have guys that were some of the toughest, meanest, most “ready to go at the drop of a hat” type guys in the entire league in their dugout. You hated them but you knew that they hated you too and that they would back it up by playing with an edge, drilling a guy in the back and being willing to handle the consequences afterwards. That’s gone now.
I talked about Yunel Escobar last week when he challenged the Sox dugout to a fight while pulling the “hold me back” move because if he really wanted to get to someone his 57-year-old third base coach totes could have stopped him. But David Price made Escobar look tougher than fucking Jake LaMotta this past weekend.
We’ve all been refreshed on the circumstances, so just briefly: Ortiz hit a bomb off Price in the ALDS last year and Price, in all his divine wisdom, deemed that Ortiz had admired the ball for too long and after the game he cried like a little bitch to the media because that’s how a grown man traditionally handles his issues. Ortiz, being a decent human being, reached out to Price in the offseason to bury the hatchet and Price eventually agreed to do so after much introspective thought and soul searching. So what happened on the first pitch Price throws to Papi this year? He drills him in the back. A grown man (I feel like I have to reiterate that this is not a 13-year-old girl we’re talking about here) held a grudge for six months even though he accepted an apology and reconciled with the one who he perceived had wronged him. Does David Price look like a bitch? Yes he does. Because he is.
And then he spent the rest of the weekend defending himself after people called him out for being a fucking crybaby and calling out Ortiz for his postgame comments. Obviously Ortiz was upset when he said that David Price is a bitch and a coward and that he better be ready to go next time something like this happens, but he wasn’t wrong, and anybody who follows the game knows that. That’s what made Price’s comments on Saturday so utterly laughable; he claimed that he gained a lot of respect from people by hitting Ortiz. He claimed that pitchers from 20 years ago used to police the game all the time. Both of those comments are so stupid that I’m not sure I should be making fun of Price because he might not be all there mentally. He gained respect from absolutely no one with even the slightest degree of intelligence, and pitchers of days past would be appalled with the way he handled himself. Do you think Nolan Ryan respects David Price more now? How about Bob Gibson? Maybe Roger Clemens? Those guys would probably go on a rant on twitter about how anyone who criticized them was just a nerd who was probably a waterboy in high school and then brag about the awards that they’d won rather than taking responsibility for their shitty performance, no? Those three seem like the kinds of guys that would fake accept an apology, right? I’m sure they all would have pretended to be okay with Ortiz and then hit him. Oh wait, no those are men so they would’ve just told Ortiz to go fuck himself and slammed the phone down if he called. If you’re pissed, you’re pissed. If you do what Price did you’re a pathetic, thin-skinned pussy.
That is one of the faces of the Rays franchise now. That is one of their leaders. The rest of the world looks at David Price and they see a great pitcher who is as mentally tough as cream cheese on a Phoenix sidewalk. For the Rays, though, looking at David Price is like looking in the mirror; it’s unclear if he’s taken on the personality of the team, or if the team has taken on his personality, but one way or the other, they have become one in the same: soft.
