You get to know people as a player, as a person, and figure out what their lifestyle is. “Then when he gets on the field, you know his tendencies, what he can and can’t do well, and maybe you can make up for that. “When you learn about a player off the field, you respect what he has been through,” Farmer said. The end result? The Reds play without Pham for three games because the player can’t control himself emotionally over something that had nothing to do with his job between the white lines then misses an additional game with “injury.”Ĭharlie Goldsmith of the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote an article titled “How intangibles helped the Cincinnati Reds turn a corner this season.” In it, Kyle Farmer was quoted: It wasn’t about pitches thrown up-and-in or trotting around the bases in too much of a laggardly, unmannerly fashion. It wasn’t about bat flips and disrespect. It had nothing to do with events on the field. “The Slap” was another childish playground confrontation that ballplayers are famous for, with a twist.
They channel their inner Hamlet, searching their souls for so much as a morsel of perceived disrespect, the smallest scrap of disparagement in their opponent’s behavior to fuel the puffery of their ambitions. I got to get mine right now.”Īthletes are famous for wearing the petty on their sleeves. At the end of the day baseball is going to move on without me. “I’m playing to get some numbers, I don’t care about anything else,” Pham said. Just like you don’t have to be Carl Sagan to find the moon at night, you didn’t have to be Nostradamus to surmise that maybe Pham wasn’t going to be the best teammate.
Which is why one has to wonder if Tommy Pham has outlived his usefulness in Cincinnati. Every manager the Reds have hired the past few years has valued a tight knit clubhouse the way Ron Washington loved to bunt. This is not the first time the organization has put its finger on the scale in favor of clubhouse bonhomie when deciding who plays and who sits.
“He’s a big part of our team, and he makes us better in ways you can’t quantify,” manager David Bell said. “Even when things aren’t going well for him, he finds a way to make it good for everyone else around him.” India said it simply: “He’s the heart and soul of this team.” “We’ve been forced a little bit to stay together, and Farm is a huge part of that,” Reds manager David Bell said. Farmer’s reputation of being a clubhouse leader-Scott Rolen-lite, if you will-has been repeated in quote after quote, story after story. When David Bell declared Kyle Farmer the starting shortstop before the season began, insisting that José Barrero was going to have to “force the issue” and take the job away from Farmer, everyone knew what this was about.