New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi is peeved at Tampa Bay Devil Rays reserve second baseman Elliot Johnson for running over Yankees catcher Fransisco Cervelli in a spring training game yesterday, breaking the 22-year-old’s wrist in the process.

Quoting New York Newsday:

“I think it’s uncalled for,” a visibly angry Girardi, a former catcher, said minutes after Elliot Johnson knocked Cervelli out of the Rays’ 4-1 exhibition win at Legends Field. “It’s spring training. You’re going to get people hurt. That’s what we got. We got Cervelli hurt. I’m all for playing hard, but I don’t think it’s the time when you run over a catcher.”

You know what I say to Girardi and a lesser extent to Cervelli (who had no problem with the play when asked by reporters)? Tough. If you don’t want to play the game within the spectrum of the rules, don’t field a team.

Every year guys come into spring training and NFL training camps fighting for a spot on a roster and will do whatever it takes to make the team. If that means going 100 percent during a 75 percent drill against an all-pro tackle or going headlong into a catcher at a play at home plate. The 24-year-old Johnson was giving it his all and trying to make that roster and make a living. If Girardi doesn’t like it, I suggest he find another line of work.

That being said, I do think that some of Girardi’s outrage was posturing. Appearing angrier than he was to stick up for his guy but my guess is, after seeing Girardi play for a good chunk of his career, that if Elliot Johnson was his guy, he would have gotten a pat on the rear for giving it everything he he had.

This likely isn’t the end of this story and Elliot Johnson will likely have one coming between his shoulder blades the next time these two teams play but with all the press this kid got today, I think that sting of that fastball between his numbers will have been well worth it. Welcome to the bigs.

Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Kyle Kendrick was shocked to learn that he’d been traded to the Yomiuri Giants in Japan for a player named “Kobayashi Iwamura.”

“I don’t know what to think right now,” he told reporters outside his locker shortly after getting the news from assistant general manager Ruben Amaro Jr.

Had he truly been thinking, he would have realized that such deals are prohibited. And with a little digging he could have found out that there is no Kobayashi Iwamura playing in Japan.

The “trade” was, in fact, a prank. The ruse was orchestrated by pitcher Brett Myers and was elaborate enough to include Amaro, manager Charlie Manuel, Kendrick’s agent, the media and others.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Man, ESPN really thinks this Mitchell Report is a big deal, huh? Dedicating HOURS of coverage yesterday to the release of George Mitchell’s report on his investigation into steroids in baseball. And yet when a co-worker asked me about the Mitchell Report and its list of names, I had a difficult time masking my indifference about the story. I really, truly, honestly, don’t care about major league baseball, its players, the players’ association, the union. I don’t care about baseball, period. And I probably never will.

I suspect that while many of you don’t share my vitriol for America’s Favorite Past time, my guess is that if you’re really honest with yourself, when was the last time you watched a baseball game from beginning to end? That’s what I thought. Say what you want about hockey and its dwindling fan base, baseball’s die hard fanbase is an equally fringe crowd. You can’t have a casual interest in baseball. The season is too long, there’s no competitive balance and the regular season games are boring and insignificant. Frankly, I’ve watched more televised golf and soccer in the last 12 months than I’ve watched baseball.

Steroids in baseball, like the sport itself, is a media-driven entity. This is the case for a couple reason but none more pertinent than the fact that the media was asleep at the wheel through much of the steroid era and now there’s no way they’re not going to over-cover this story. But baseball, as a sport, is largely irrelevant, falling far behind the NFL and even college football in popularity among the vast majority of American sports fans.

Major League Baseball owes a great deal of gratitude to the Worldwide Leader for continuing to talk, at mind-numbing length, about their sport.