Who knows? Maybe the Cubs’ recent dugout skirmish can result in a World Series championship.
Marlon Byrd and Carlos Pena called a players-only meeting on Thursday in the wake of sloppy play and the scuffle between Aramis Ramirez and Carlos Silva.
“The first thing I heard about it is somebody mentioned something to me about it today,” Cubs manager Mike Quade said on Friday. “When those guys want to talk, I don’t get involved in that. All I ever do is ask them to understand their responsibility and stabilizing the club and clubhouse.
“When you have guys like Marlon and Ryan Dempster and Kerry Wood and the two new guys from Tampa Pena and Matt Garza, there are a lot of folks in there who can command the kind of respect where you’d like to think players will listen and keep things together. I had nothing to do with that. I know these guys well enough that I wasn’t surprised. It couldn’t preempt that I needed to have my meeting.”
Players kept the topic of the meeting private.
“It happens every year,” Wood said. “I’ve been involved in fights before and the media didn’t know about it. It happens. You never like to see it happen where everybody can see it, but it is what it is.
“We’re all grown men. We leave here in three, four weeks and we’re going to work together for 162 games. It better bring us closer.”
Not that he would recommend daily fisticuffs, but Garza has seen positives come from negatives. In June 2008, he and Rays catcher Dioner Navarro scuffled in the dugout after a home run and an argument on the mound in Texas. The Rays reached the World Series that year.
“You guys all have families,” Garza said. “We see these guys eight, nine months out of the year. You can’t tell me you never get in an argument with your brother or sister. It happens.
“I think we care enough that it shows. That’s why I have a good feeling about us. We care enough to say something. If we didn’t care and just swept it under the rug and players didn’t say anything, that’s a bad sign. At least we know here, ‘I’m going to hold you accountable just like you’re going to hold me accountable.’ When push comes to shove, I know he’ll have my back, and he’ll know I have his back.”
Quade said he felt Ramirez and Silva resolved their differences on Wednesday after the incident. Silva came into the dugout after a rough first inning in which the team committed three errors and he served up two two-run homers and said they needed to play better. Ramirez took exception, and there was a minor altercation.
“I thought it was over the day it happened,” Quade said.
Silva talked to the media on Friday about it for the first time.
“Everybody takes a day,” Quade said. “I get furious, and if I would address things immediately a lot of times, it would not be good. Why should I think players would be any different? When something like this happens, you take a step back, you go home, you have dinner, you relax, you come the next day, you’ve had time to cool off and think about things. We have a chance to sit down all of us and address it and move on. If nothing else, by the end of that day and the next morning, that was enough for me.”
That’s enough for Wood, too.
“It had to be addressed, talked about and it’s over,” Wood said. “I hope it’s better left in-house. We’ve handled it. These guys are grown men and they’ll handle it the right way.”