Very sad news about Cory Lidle. Just the other day, when he was on the mound, I was thinking about how much his face looks like Greg Maddux’s. This morning’s Detroit News says he had a twin brother who played catcher and was drafted by the Tigers, but never played in the majors. I also read this, in NYT:
After the Phillies traded Lidle to the Yankees on July 30, Lidle questioned whether his former teammates shared his desire to win. In September, he said he had not thought through his comments before making them; he had been outside in the heat, cleaning his plane.
Lidle’s comments rankled some of the Phillies, including pitcher Arthur Rhodes, who dismissed him as a “scab” in an interview with The New York Post. That was a reference to Lidle’s experience as a replacement player during the 1995 strike.
Lidle was a minor leaguer for the Milwaukee Brewers at the time, and he said he would have been released had he not been a replacement player. (One regret, he said, was that his name could never be in a video game because he was forbidden from joining the players’ union.)
Maybe the players’ union now will see fit to remove this dumb rule about video games. On ESPN last night, there was a lot of talk about baseball’s “brotherhood” and “fraternity” and so on. Let’s see if this brotherhood is stronger than the union’s punitive prohibitions.