From one great to another, Clayton Kershaw says Major League Baseball should institute an additional punishment for managers who falsely malign a pitcher's character, as Joe Girardi did with Max Scherzer Tuesday night.
After he was already checked twice before in the game, Girardi asked umpires to check Scherzer's head for foreign substances in the fourth inning of Tuesday's game. The umpires obliged, although they came away with nothing but a handful of human sweat.
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"I will say this," Kershaw said. "You know how Girardi checked Scherzer, or called him out. I think there should be a punishment if they don't catch anything on the guy.
"Because Scherzer, he's one of the best pitchers of our generation. And to see him get checked — and I think it [a] was first-and-third situation, or guys on base — and mess up his rhythm... I think he ended up getting out of it."
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"But you better find something, if you're gonna call him out like that," said Kershaw. "So maybe there should be like a punishment if a manager checks a guy and there isn't anything."
When asked if a manager might actually stoop that low, deliberately trying to disrupt a pitcher's rhythm by calling for a check, Kershaw said he could see it as being a "good technique" for a manager to use. To curb such misuse, Kershaw suggested losing a replay challenge as a possible punishment, should no evidence be found of a foreign substance.
"You get a guy get going in a rhythm or something, and maybe you have a guy on base, and have 'em check you, it throws you off," he said. "It's something that you're not used to."
"I think there should be some repercussions for managers just doing that on a whim like that," he said, "because if you call somebody out — I mean, anybody — but [especially] somebody of Max Scherzer’s caliber and you don't find anything? I think that looks pretty bad on the manager's part."
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