Good!
I was at the Braves game yesterday (groan!) so I’m glad to see this news:
“LaRoche said when he got to the dugout, Cox told him, “[Johnson] was out. But it shouldn’t have been close. You have got to start hustling.”
Cox said he wouldn’t discuss publicly any disciplinary measures or elaborate on the situation. He once famously pulled a young Andruw Jones off the field for not hustling, but there haven’t been any comparable incidents since.
LaRoche finished the game, then went to Cox’s office to apologize. Cox told him Brian Jordan would be in the lineup today for the series opener against Florida, and that he didn’t know what he would do beyond that.
Good. LaRoche should have been pulled out immediately for not hustling. The thing is I actually like LaRoche. When he’s hitting, he’s pretty good and he is, when he hustles, a pretty decent first basemen. Hopefully being benched today and all the booing he got from the fans yesterday will teach him his lesson.
With hustle like that, they’ll be over .500 in no time!
Not that I’m condoning LaRoche, but SportsCenter was showing the replay from a good angle and it looks like the guy was actually out, and was just a bad call from the ump.
I can only imagine how many Little League coaches groaned during the lack of hustle play..
At last he took responsibility for his lack of hustle. Most players would bitch about the call and never take any blame.