Marlon Byrd wrote a brief article today on his blog about Matt Holliday’s slide yesterday.
You call a play dirty when a guy is going out there trying to hurt somebody and that’s not what he did. If Holliday wants to go in and hurt somebody he will. He’s 6-4, 235, 240 pounds. That’s him playing hard. The way we take it when we see it is we want to defend our players at the time. When you go back and really look at it and how the game is played and how it should be played, there’s nothing wrong with that. If the umpires want to make their call and say he was too far off, so be it. Being dirty or being malicious, it’s not even close.
I agree with Byrd here. I said at the time that it was probably a higher slide than necessary, but other than that I don’t have an issue with it. He was clearly close enough to the base that you couldn’t call him out of the baseline.
Comments
Strangely, it seems to me that people aren’t upset because Byrd is wrong, but that he opened his mouth in the first place.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
People get mad if the players open their mouth when what they say disagrees with their opinions. If Byrd had said it was a dirty play they’d have loved that he opened his mouth.
mb21Quote Reply
[quote name=mb21]People get mad if the players open their mouth when what they say disagrees with their opinions. If Byrd had said it was a dirty play they’d have loved that he opened his mouth.[/quote]
I agree with that. I don’t speak for everyone, but I don’t get too upset anymore when an athlete says something because they’re not being paid to be public speakers and I figure it’s not worth my time unless they say something obscenely stupid like they hate black people or they want to eat my brains.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Yeah, RC, I figure they have as much right to stay stupid shit as anyone else does. I don’t care too much about most of the things people say so I’m not going to care about most of the things these athletes say. There is certainly nothing wrong with them saying something about the game that they know infinitely better than the fans do.
mb21Quote Reply
To me, it wasn’t that he strayed too far off the baseline, it was the fact that he kicked Castro in the leg. It wasn’t really a dangerous move; I didn’t think Castro was at risk of getting injured. I just think Holliday should have been called out because his contact with Castro wasn’t part of a slide but the result of an obviously intentional effort to kick or trip him. If it were the NFL, it would have been a tripping penalty.
AndCountingQuote Reply