Pedroia: 'I've Turned The Best Double Play In The Major Leagues For 11 Years. I Don't Need The Fuckin' Rule.'
First of all, love this quote from Dustin Pedroia. It’s cocky as hell, but he’s not wrong. Vintage Pedroia soundbite right there. But this was the big outrage after Friday night’s 2-0 loss to the Orioles, a late slide by Manny Machado where his spike came up and caught Pedroia in the back of his left leg, forcing him to leave the game. And you know it was bad, because this fuckin’ lunatic would play every inning of all 162 games if his manager would allow it. For him to come out of the game, it had to have hurt like a son of a bitch.
Not that my opinion matters, but I thought it was a dirty slide. Orioles fans bugged out when I said it was a dirty slide, because they interpreted “dirty slide” as meaning “intent to injure”, but I don’t believe that Machado had any intentions of actually hurting Pedroia. I think he meant to take him out and break up the double play, which he was successful in doing, but in doing so, he injured Pedroia badly enough that he had to leave the game. I also saw the argument on Twitter from Orioles fans that Machado’s foot came up because it hit the bag, but I slowed it down frame by frame, and his foot started to come up before it hit the bag.
Here’s something else that I noticed when I slowed the video down. When Machado’s foot makes contact with the bag, his foot is straight up and down. If he had kept it that way, he might’ve gone up and over Pedroia’s leg or maybe just nicked it. But at the last second, he angles his foot so that it’s now perfectly in line with Pedroia’s leg. Watch Machado turn his foot at the last second. There’s your intent.
Red Sox analyst Jerry Remy didn’t care too much for the slide, and I found his comments about these two teams disliking each other to be pretty interesting.
John Farrell, quite obviously, was pissed about the slide, too, calling it “extremely late”.
After seeing the slowed down video, I’m not really sure how you defend the slide. It was clearly late — I think we can all agree on that — and I think Machado had the chance to avoid spiking Pedroia, and it appears that he chose to do the opposite. Mix in those comments by Remy after the game that the players and the mangers don’t like each other, and I would imagine that we haven’t seen the end of this yet.