Written by Dave Sheinen at Washington Post.com
There was a time when Manny Machado might have reacted differently to the incidents that placed him at the center of the tense, two-day confrontation between his Baltimore Orioles and the visiting Boston Red Sox this weekend at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
When he first took out Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia with a hard, aggressive slide on Friday night, the initial reaction was to place the incident in the context of Machado’s other notable confrontations, such as the time he threw his bat towards third base in anger against Oakland in 2014 and the time last year he charged the mound against Kansas City’s Yordano Ventura, both of which resulted in suspensions.
“I’m the villain. It’s always me,” Machado said later, seemingly resigned to his reputation. “Manny always does something wrong.”
But to lump these affairs together would have been unfair, because if anything, Machado, the Orioles’ 24-year-old superstar, handled the situations with more maturity than anybody on either side. His immediate reaction to the slide into Pedroia was not one of escalation, but of de-escalation. He immediately went to check on Pedroia, and reached out to him via text message again after the game. When Pedroia himself absolved Machado of blame – the injury that forced Pedroia out of the game being wholly unintentional – that should have been the end of it.
“There was zero intention of him trying to hurt me,” Pedroia told reporters on Sunday. “He just made a bad slide. I’m not mad at him. I love Manny Machado.”
But that wasn’t the end of it, because Red Sox Manager John Farrell and some of his players made it clear they weren’t satisfied by the Pedroia-Machado peace pact, and in the eighth inning on Sunday, Red Sox reliever Matt Barnes took it upon himself to play the enforcer and throw a pitch at Machado’s head, saying afterwards – as most headhunters do — that the pitch simply got away.
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