Maybe You Can See Your Name in the Column of Obituary

"I saw it a couple times," Duncan said Thursday. "I still don't understand why they were as upset as they were."

Oh, lord, they're growing some real upright citizens these days in Yankeetown. Shelley has no idea why Aki Iwamura or Johnny Gomes or the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons might be mad about his studs-up slide into second base on Wednesday. No possible clue. Just going out there and playing the game the right way. What's everyone bothered about, anyhoo? You can't go all Geraldine Ferraro on a guy's ligaments anymore without the liberal media getting on your ass? In fact, maybe that's the problem -- they're attacking Shelley because he's white. Yeah, that's the ticket. Where's the problem here?

Ahem.

First of all, Shelley, your momma and your poppa gave you a girl's name. Sorry to drag gender roles into it, but if you're going to beat your chest like a Neanderthal over a cowardly slide into an unprotected opponent, I'm going to feel free to assert you might have some masculinity issues to work through. And it's not fair to work through them on Aki Iwamura's midsection. Your dad may be an excellent pitching coach, but if he screwed you up by naming you after a fugly actress who hasn't done anything decent since "The Shining," that's family business. Keep it that way.

Also, fella, folks not named Shelley are upset because you pulled a nasty, dirty, injury-baiting stunt. Rays manager Joe Maddon called the slide "borderline criminal," which might be a bit of an exaggeration, even in a post-Todd Bertuzzi world, but it was nevertheless an effort that Yankees scribe Steve Goldman mentioned "went out of style with Ty Cobb." Think about that. Cobb was known for a lot of bad shit, and not all of it departed the game when he did. Nasty, backbiting, spiteful comments about your teammates, those didn't go anywhere. Overt, hostile racism, that kicked around for a while. You could still even choke a dude if you wanted to.

But spiking guys with abandon, even the Negro-hating bastards considered that beyond the pale. Way to kick it old school.

Ray Bradbury wrote a great short story about a slide like yours, actually. From "The Golden Apples of the Sun," one of the best collections of short stories ever published by an American author. I'd recommend everyone get a copy and read it cover to cover, but the story in question is called "The Big Black and White Game," and it sketches a tense baseball matchup in the Jim Crow South that ends prematurely following a vindictive spiking on the black team's best player. Bleeding and injured, he limps off the field rather than, as the whites ringing the field hope, set off a race riot.

Johnny Gomes never read this story. But still.

Girardi had called the home-plate collision in the first game between the AL East rivals unnecessary. Duncan said he was trying to knock the ball out of Iwamura's glove.

"I believe both instances are definitions of players playing the game hard," Duncan said.

Well, I believe the sun revolves around the earth and that Rudy Giuliani would have made a great president, but that doesn't mean I'm not out of my fucking mind. Shelley, if you can point to one other instance of a baseball going into second base with his the ball of his foot pointing at Ursa Major and not being pummeled, I'd love to hear about it. Quite a baseball tradition they're brewing in the gender-neutral Duncan household, it would seem. And what is it with this Yankee team and knocking the ball out of players' gloves, anyway? Is this something he discussed with A-Rod during Spring Training over the past few years? If anything, the Bombers should know better than anyone that the whole ball-knocking thing doesn't win you any friends.

As for Yanks manager Joe Girardi, he's in quite a bind. You may or may not recall Girardi weeping like an overworked schoolmarm after the play that provoked the whole spiking incident. Tampa's Elliot Johnson broke the wrist of New York catcher Francisco Cervelli during a play at the plate last week, and Girardi acted like Johnson had pulled a gun, calling it "uncalled for" and saying it had no place in games that didn't count. That got him rapped by none other than Don Zimmer, who essentially told Girardi to stop acting like a bitch already, but Girardi reiterated his feelings in a follow-up, saying, "It's spring training, I just don't understand.


Well, if plays at the plate have no place in Spring Training, then certainly the Take-Out-The-Second-Baseman-With-A-Sharp-Object routine should be saved for the regular season as well, right? Forgetting for a moment that Duncan's scummy play was not, in fact, a good-faith slide -- at the very least, it has to be equally objectionable. A manager with a shred of consistency would at least have to make a reference to that.

"Shelley told me that he was taught as a player that when you're going to be out, you go after the ball, and that's what Shelley did," Girardi said. "Shelley made a hard, aggressive slide, and I need to look at a replay to determine exactly what I thought."

What. A. Fraud. "I need to look at a replay?" Little known fact -- the media and its audience is six years old. We don't know that one. When the time comes to discuss the play tomorrow, maybe he'll be washing his hair. Or doing his homework. Come on.

Say what you will about Joe Torre, but Joe Torre was not above criticizing his guys when he needed to. He played favorites, to be sure, but he would praise another team when praise was due, and his comments about another team's play were very rarely unfair. When the Yanks lost to the Orioles or Jays or Rays, Bedard or Burnett or Kazmir had pitched a nice game. Maybe a new manager doesn't have the comfort level to do that, or needs to build trust with his guys, but there's a fine line between building morale and talking out of your ass. It's tough to command respect when you're flat-out two-faced.

Also, this part really cracked me up:

"The words that come from another team don't affect me," Duncan said. "It doesn't bother me. They won't change how I play the game. I'll continue to play the game as hard as I can. What matters to me the most is the respect of my coaching staff and my teammates."

Sure, fine, fair enough. Jorge Posada, any thoughts?

"You've got to ask Shelley. I've got nothing to say."

Ooooh, that's some Jeter-quality backup from the teammates there. Nothing like being a crappy backup first baseman on an island. Posada knows that Jimmy Shields is going to be gunning for his aorta come May, and he don't want no part of it. Rightly so. This is the Pedro/"Ice" Williams corollary from the old Red Sox-Rays brawls around the turn of the century -- it's not a balanced fight if a guy making $400,000 is hurling a four-seamer at a guy banking $20 million. In other words, you shouldn't go around starting feuds with teams with little to lose.

It's actually kind of awesome to see the Yanks acting like low-class punks. Mets camp hasn't exactly been inspiring thus far; there's injuries all over the place, very few positional issues to discuss, El Duque is losing his flava ... not a ton of uplift all in all. Whereas one can always count on the boys from the Bronx to pull this type of thing and remind you just why they deserve hating after all.

The world, in the end, makes sense.