The Off Season Continues

Dustin Pedroia made it official today, and the story I read attributed the knee problems that limited his last three seasons to nine games total  to the notorious incident with Manny Machado in April 2017. I'm not so sure. I would point out that Pedroia had just had surgery on that very same knee in the previous off-season. Granted, the play with Machado obviously didn't help - Pedroia came out of the game and was out of the lineup for almost a week. He was having major problems with the knee by the second half of the season. Despite all the umbrage taken by the Red Sox at the time (though not, curiously, by Pedroia himself) the Machado slide really didn't look like a dirty play to me. It looked to me like Machado's right foot hit the second base bag and bounced up off it, spiking Pedroia high on the calf. Which can happen. It certainly looked accidental - Machado actually attempted to catch Pedroia as he was falling and was clearly concerned that he'd caused an injury.  The real problem may have been that Machado is a tank and Pedroia is a squirt.

Pedroia was yet another second baseman cruising straight towards Cooperstown when a random evil fate got the best of him. (Chuck Knoblauch got the yips, Carlos Baerga got traded to the Mets, and Pedroia's knee gave out. ) But he was one hell of a ballplayer and I'll certainly miss jeering him and calling him Ratboy.