Despite being suspended for the rest of the season after choking teammate Bryce Harper, Jonathan Papelbon is receiving support from a variety of weird corners, including Fox Sports’ C.J. Nitkowski, The Kansas City Star‘s Lee Judge, and now, CBC hockey commentator Don Cherry. Cherry appears to be branching out to other sports these days; he called Tom Brady “too handsome to cheat” in an August rant, and Tuesday, he went off on those criticizing Papelbon for assaulting a teammate, unleashing one of his famed multi-tweet rants to blast Harper and support Papelbon:
1) I suppose everybody has seen Papelbon and Harper and their little dispute in the dugout. Papelbon was suspended for the year actually by
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
2) the team and the league. How anybody could blame Papelbon for confronting Harper boggles the mind. Alright, Papelbon shouldn’t have done
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
3) what he did to Harper on the bench. He should have waited for him in the tunnel and choked him there. For Harper criticizing his own
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
4) teammate publicly, and that’s the word, publicly, for throwing at Machado saying now they will throw at me next game. Can you imagine how
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
5) Papelbon felt when he heard that? He’s having a tough time this year anyhow, now the so called face of baseball throws him under the bus,
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
6) his own teammate. People who criticize Papelbon, rightly so for doing it openly, never played the game. Never, never, ever openly
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
7) criticize your teammate no matter what he does. In the dressing room that’s ok, yes but what is said in the dressing room stays in the
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
8) dressing room. Some people say they can understand how Harper just jogs down to first on a pop up. They say well, hey they have already
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
9) played 152 games. The guy is getting 10 zillion dollars a year, at least he can hustle to first base.
— Don Cherry (@CoachsCornerDC) September 29, 2015
As with many of his other Twitter rants, this one’s an excellent candidate for Don Cherry Bingo. Advocating physical violence in sports? Check. Implications that critics can’t understand because they “never played the game”? Check. Calling out stars and boosting “gritty” guys? Check. Espousing the sacred culture of the locker room (or, as Craig Calcaterra noted, the clubhouse)? Check. Really, this could be any of Cherry’s hockey rants, only with a find-and-replace to put in Papelbon and Harper. We could probably create a “Don Cherry Rant Generator” to predict what he’d say on any given topic; bonus points apply for each use of “hustle” and “never played the game.” Also, like Cherry’s hockey rants, it has a loose relationship with the facts: Harper is only making $2 million this season, part of MLB’s continual underpaying of valuable young players.
This Cherry story shows a couple of things. For one, it illustrates how absurd the Harper-Papelbon mess has become that commentators from other sports are now weighing in on it. It also is further proof of how predictable Cherry’s opinions have become; honestly, people could probably guess most of what he said just from reading a “Don Cherry weighs in on Harper-Papelbon” headline. Cherry’s Twitter rants in particular are starting to feel like some of Andy Rooney’s later pieces for 60 Minutes, complaints about the way the world is today and how everything used to be so much better. He’s not literally yelling at clouds yet, but he’s sending his yells into the cloud, bashing everything that isn’t grit, heart and playing the game the right way.
Comments are closed.