Don’t think I’ve heard someone your age who knows who Steve Goodman is – I haven’t listened to him for many years. I’ll have to get my son, who’s your age, to pull a few tracks off an old album of his and put it on CD for me now that he’s taken my LP’s and turntable.

See, we can agree and disagree. Rodney King would be happy!

Contrary to what you may believe about Yankee fans, some of us can be reasonable and literate. I’ve been going through this tete-a-tete with your fellows over there as well, so I thought I’d comment. Just wanted to perhaps offer a little perspective. I know perspective and sports controversies rarely go hand in hand, particularly between opposite sides, but here goes. By the way, one of the reasons I choose to answer, since I agree you’re unlikely to get a response fronm the Yankees organization, is because my name, like Mr. Steinbrenner Jr., is Hank.

The start of this rhubarb, of course, was the play in the 9th in Tampa last weekend, where Elliott Johnson ran into Cervelli in an attempt to dislodge the ball and avoid being tagged out. A perfectly legitimate instinctive play – assuming the plate is completely blocked like Rays fans repeatedly insist – in a normal baseball game. One that Carl Crawford also made a few days before, which Joe Maddon, an admittedly good guy, praised at the time as the way we play ball. We’re playing to win. Now many peeved NY’ers have snarkily cracked about the relative importance of winning in the first 2 weeks of spring training (my personal fave was “March Maddon-ness”), but teams do play to win at all times. The question comes down to this specific approach – bowling over catchers in spring training. Girardi, a 13 year major league player at catcher, says he doesn’t think that’s what’s done in spring training because of the risk of injury. Not to not play hard, but don’t go for intentional full speed body contact. So he claims he instructs his players not to do that in spring. Maddon, also a catcher in his baseball career with 47 games at A ball, differs in his approach. And some have chimed in on his side – notably his mentor Mike Sciosca, a plate blocker par excellance in his majors career. But contrary to your comment re “the rest of the world disagreeing with him”, there have been corroborating statements, not that anyone wants to come out and criticise a fellow manager in the press, particularly his former boss. To me, this a play best left for the regular season when the games really count. Curious that teams don’t practice this particular play in spring when they work on all aspects of their game. Why? Well, because their players might get hurt! Gardenhire of the Twins pointed out that they run no contact plays and don’t play the infield in in the spring, despite the utility of practising such tactics. Why? Because winning isn’t the focus in spring, and you might have collisions at the plate on such plays, where someone might get hurt!

But let’s just agree to disagree on that.

Let’s cover your points.

1) While I don’t agree Duncan’s attempt was to injure Aki, I completely agree the play was stupid and dangerous nonetheless, and shouldn’t have been done.

Duncan pulled a similar approach in a regular season game last season – going in to 2B “overzealously”. Was this an attempt at payback? Very likely so. Did Girardi support his player? His initial reaction was he had to look at the replay. To continue I’ll quote a leading Yankee journalist :

“Joe Girardi said yesterday that if he saw a replay that showed what Shelley Duncan did was dirty, he would have a meeting with him.

Girardi and Duncan met this morning.

Duncan said later he didn’t want to talk about the meeting. Let’s see, 2 + 2 …

“We talked,” Duncan said. “Whenever you have private conversations with people you like to keep it between them.”

Duncan said he saw the replay. “When you do something, it never looks the same as what you thought you did,” he said. “So it didn’t look the same as what I thought I did.”

Asked whether he would do the same thing again, Duncan paused. “A lot of time situations don’t repeat themselves. … When you have a walk with the manager he’s going to give you things to learn from that’s right or wrong, whatever his viewpoint is. That’s what we talked about.” ”

Now, you can choose to believe they were conspiring on what to do against the Rays when they play on Saturday – but I suspect Duncan might be playing in the other split squad game the Yanks have that day. An attempt to cool things down, or another Yankee dodge? I’ll let you decide.

2) the affront to Aki’s testicles. If you actually look at the sequence of photos, Duncan’s spikes hit Aki just above the knee. The somewhat more inflammatory photo making the rounds with Duncan’s foot somewhat higher actually followed impact as Duncan rolled to his right to start to get up. You can see the infield dirt from the impact above Aki’s right knee in that photo. Not to defend Duncan – he still overdid it. This is just for the sake of accuracy.

And typically, a visiting team sends no more than 4 starters to a road game in the first 2 weeks of spring. The Yankees had 6 there. Damon had a bruised foot from a foul ball. Jeter and A-Rod were allowed to stay in Tampa and play with Billy Crystal.

3) Andy Pettitte was scratched due to elbow irritation – this was announced the morning of the game. He won’t pitch again in a game until next Tuesday. The fill-in starter, Phillps, was scheduled to pitch in the game, and had been a starter most of his career (almost completely in the minors). He was the scheduled long reliever, thus the obvious choice to start. But he apparently chose to hit Longoria, the 7th batter, with 2 runs in, 2 runners on, and 2 outs, when he was struggling with his control, and despite the fact both benches had been warned before the game started meaning an immediate ejection. Thsi may suggest at least the possibilty of an alternate explanation. By the way, he was so effective at hitting Longoria the pitch was actually caught in position by the catcher Posada (one of those stars the Yanks supposedly chose to keep home).

Given your very fairminded and so well thought out approach in your correspondence, I’m sure the Yankees will getting back to you forthwith.

-George