Left Out

I've been watching baseball for thirty years, and I've never heard of anything as goofy as what Alfonso Soriano did yesterday. In case you haven't caught wind of it yet, Soriano refused to leave the dugout at the start of the Expos' exhibition game against the Dodgers. Apparently he really, really, really doesn't want to play left field.

Hilariously, this incident prompted GM Jim Bowden to do some tough-talkin' to the media. He said that if Soriano refused to play left field in today's game, he would request that Baron Budhausen's office put him on the disqualified list. Which is like a suspension, but worse from a player's point of view: no pay, no service time.

Bowden also added this:

We're in a position that if we can't make a trade that makes sense, we're not going to give him away, and we have a team to run. Our feeling is we don't want to wait till Opening Day to do this... Therefore, we told the player we needed him to play left field, that Jose Vidro was at second base, and that gives us the best chance to win.

Maybe the Expos wouldn't be in this position if Bowden had paid attention to all the times Soriano crabbed about playing the outfield before the trade this winter. Talk about a trade that made no sense: giving up some useful players for a high-paid out machine who is on record as saying he's not interested in playing the position his new team wants him to play.

As Jim has already noted, this is all on Bowden. I didn't think it was possible for MLB's Expos "ownership" to get any more embarrassing, but Bowden proved me wrong.