Cheap shot. Duncan should be ashamed.

Typical NYY class - respond to a hard clean play with a dirty one. Don't dig in Shelly.

Far be it from me not to take a shot at the Yankees when the opportunity arises....but I'm just going to shoot straight on this one. Under Torre they were calm, cool and collected. The last few years though, fans complained about it. Girardi is trying to mold this team in his image now. He is trying to get them to be more passionate, more gritty and a little nastier. Good luck Joe for whatever it's worth, but lets save some of that enthusiasm for the dog days of summer. Torre had the Yanks playing Earl Weaver baseball towards the end of his reign waiting for the 3run HR. Girardi so far is an interesting study. As a player I'm sure he'd appreciate all the hard play and bravado coming from the Rays right now. As a manager, I believe he is a bit conflicted. The Girardi I knew around here would not have had a problem with the incident at the plate, over the weekend. Now it's percieved around here the spikes high slide by Duncan today is an indirect order from Joe. Girardi is a fiery type. I'm not so sure all his players are going to play the role it seems Joe wants to cast them. Jeter is the Captain. He needs to be sold on this plan. If Jeter isn't in on it, Girardi will loose the clubhouse if he persues this new culture. Is DJ going into 2nd base hard to break up a double play? Is Moose, Andy, Wang or the 3 Boys Wonder going to make things uncomfortable for Big Papi or Manny in the batter's box? Is ARod going to step up his game or is he still about slapping balls out of gloves and yelling "Aahhh!" on pop-ups? Is Posada going to start blocking the plate on a tag play now that Joe is here?

Good luck Joe. This group will never be the GasHouse Gang. They won't come anywhere close to being the Bronx Zoo again either. The 2008 Rays resemble them more than this cast of Torre Hangovers.

We don't know that Girardi had any influence on Duncan. For all we know this could come strictly from the players, especially if the injured catcher (Cervelli) was popular with his teammates. People might be too quick to point the finger at Girardi when he might not have had anything to do with it. As far as his comments that people say had something to do with it, what do you expect him to say when one of his players gets hurt?

Hard clean, hard dirty. What pure horseshit.

Both slides were designed to hurt the fielder, and to 'send a message'. You can decry both or you can applaud both, but only the idiot section of RSN (I can't tell how large that section is) claps for the Ray and squeals bloody murder over the Yankee. (We all expected as much from emains, of course.)

Over the top, dirty play by the Yanks, but Maddon's wise ass schtick with the media locked them into the brawl. No need to agree with Girardi, but the sarcasm escalated the hard feelings. They see each other rather often, Kazmir putting Jeter, Arod, or Cano on the DL for a couple weeks around August seems likely.

would anyone give a damn if this was any non-Yankee team? .... no

A Hal McRae/Roger Maris/Don Baylor roll block would have been perfect payback, but Duncan's spike was way too high. Did anyone note the size of Duncan's cleat, looked like size 16 to me.
In 1951 WS, NYG Ed Stanky kicked ball out of Rizzuto's glove on tag play and no one said a word. In 1952 Browns Clint (ScrapIron) Courtney tried kick play on Rizzuto and Billy Martin smashed Courtney, who also had his glasses deliberately ground into the turf.

Do yourselves a favor, read the paragraph on p. 266 of David Halberstam's Summer of '49 on how DiMaggio stuck up for and protected Rizzuto. It may enlighten you.

Mars - thanks for pointing out the obvious that you know nothing about baseball - if the catcher blocks the plate then it's game on - if you're trying to spike fielders the only message you're sending is that you're an asshole who doesn't know how to play the game. But abe's exactly right - starting a beanball war with a last place team is like getting in a wrestling match with a pig.