Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports
There’s usually going to be bad blood when teams get into a brawl in Major League Baseball. It makes matters worse when the teams involved are rivals because things can turn ugly very quickly, which is exactly what happened in the case of the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres incident.
A day after the brawl, Padres owner Tom Garfinkel made a bad situation worse by saying in an interview that Zack Greinke hit Carlos Quentin on purpose and called Greinke ‘Rain Man,’ in reference to the movie starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. It wasn’t a compliment; it was a poke at Greinke’s social anxiety disorder, which he battles.
Garfinkel’s comments crossed the line and MLB should hold him accountable for his words. It was an insensitive thing to say and he knows he was wrong since he later apologized for his comments when he spoke to Yahoo! Sports.
“I was emotional the day after the game and regrettably, while defending our player, I said some things I shouldn’t have, especially as it relates to Zack Greinke, I was out of line and I apologize.”
It’s nice that Garfinkel apologized but I don’t think it’s enough. There are dozens of unwritten rules in baseball that players and organizations are expected to follow and one of them has to be making fun of an opposing player’s mental stability. MLB shouldn’t stand for these types of comments and it should send a message so that owners can’t go shooting their mouth off whenever they feel like it.
Tom Garfinkel crossed a line with what he said about Zack Greinke and he should pay a big price for his careless words.
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