Pedro, Manny, Zimmer and Garcia are fined for Saturday’s shenanigans.
BOSTON – A day of rain is just what the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees needed to cool off the hotheads.
As showers fell Sunday, postponing Game 4, baseball and the police tried to sort out the troubles of the night before when fights on the field and in the bullpen could easily have triggered nastier problems in the stands and streets.
If baseball wants a soccer-style riot all it has to do is let these two venom-spewing teams keep up their idiotic attacks on each other. The craziest of their fans will do the rest.
Fortunately, some baseball officials realize that. Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox were fined Sunday along with Don Zimmer and Karim Garcia of the New York Yankees for their actions in Game 3 of the AL championship series. The amounts of the fines were not disclosed.
Commissioner Bud Selig told the umpires and clubs that “any future misconduct by either team will not be tolerated and will be dealt with severely.”
Zimmer apologized for his role, fighting off tears.
“I’m embarrassed for what happened last night,” he said, his voice quivering and body shaking. “I’m embarrassed for the Yankees, the Red Sox, the fans, the umpires and my family.”
Red Sox president Larry Lucchino appealed for calm, asking fans in both cities to treat opposing teams with respect.
The ninth-inning brawl in the bullpen set a new low in the bitter history of these clubs. Everybody involved was wrong.
Yankees pitcher Jeff Nelson acted like a thug in picking a fight with a Red Sox grounds crew worker in the pen, and Garcia took a misguided leap over the right field fence to join the fray. Garcia wound up hurting the knuckle on his left hand and was removed from the game with the hand wrapped. He also was taken out of the lineup a few hours before the scheduled start of Game 4.
The grounds crew worker, Paul Williams, had no business pumping his fist and waving a white rally flag to Red Sox fans as they cheered their team’s double-play in the ninth while he was in the Yankees’ bullpen. It wasn’t just unprofessional of him, it was stupid to taunt the Yankees at close range.
“I told him, ‘If you’re rooting for the Red Sox, why don’t you go in their bullpen.’ He jumped in my face and tried to take a swing at me,” Nelson said.
Lucchino threw his support behind Williams and Red Sox spokesman Charles Steinberg tried to paint the worker as close to a saint, saying that he’s also a teacher who works with mentally disabled children. Sorry, that doesn’t wash. Whatever good deeds Williams does by day, he put on an imprudent display Saturday night and paid for it. He had cleat marks on his back and arm, and was wearing a neck brace when he left the hospital Sunday morning.
Williams readily acknowledged pumping his fist twice in the bullpen while clenching the rally flag, Steinberg said, but claimed he was facing the fans, not the Yankees a few feet away.
“If that was in poor taste, or poor judgment, it certainly didn’t warrant a beating,” Steinberg said.
It surely didn’t. Williams could have danced around the Yankees’ pitchers and made obscene gestures in their faces and it still wouldn’t have warranted a beating. The Yankees simply should have demanded that the two policemen in the bullpen throw him out and keep him out. And the Red Sox should have been quick to fire him.
But that would have required some restraint and good sense, rare virtues when these teams meet in the regular season or the playoffs.
The Yankees, meanwhile, were demanding an apology from the Red Sox.
“The events of the entire day were disgraceful and shameful, and if it happened at our ballpark, we would apologize, and that’s what the Red Sox should do here,” president Randy Levine said.
Levine shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for that apology.
The police, for their part, are looking for witnesses before deciding whether to press assault charges against the Yankees involved in the fight.
All that, near the end of New York’s 4-3 victory Saturday night for a 2-1 lead in the ALCS, has to be seen in the context of the other nonsense that went on:
-Martinez jump-starting trouble by throwing a fastball behind the head of Garcia after the Yankees took the lead in the fourth inning;
-Ramirez overreacting and shouting, bat in hand, while walking menacingly toward Roger Clemens in the bottom of the fourth after a high fastball that was only slightly inside;
-Both teams charging onto the field for a bit of basebrawl;
-Zimmer, still quick to boil even at 72, trying to take Martinez out with a running, left-handed swing during the melee and getting thrown headfirst to the ground by Martinez.
It was all over-the-top foolishness that could be dismissed as big boys acting like children, if it didn’t also carry the possibility of serious consequences. Angry and overzealous fans might think it’s their duty to join in the attacks. That could easily have happened in right field Saturday night when the bullpen fight broke out.
No one expects to see the Yankees and Red Sox hold a lovefest, but no one should take any joy in seeing this century-old rivalry deteriorate into gang war.
The umpires, to their great credit, kept things from getting too nuts in Game 3. Now it’s up to baseball officials, the managers and the players themselves to stop the fighting before the police have to step in again.
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Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at swilstein(at)ap.org
AP-ES-10-12-03 1950EDT
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