Griffey's Nap

Most of you probably know by now about the situation with Griffey, where a couple of young players on Mariners apparently told the press that Griffey had been sleeping in a late-inning situation where Wakamatsu would have otherwise used Griffey.

Apparently, Wakamatsu and Griffey both came out today and said that the situation is not exactly as described. Griffey simply denied that he had been asleep during the eigth inning of the game, and never said that he wasn't sleeping at some point during the game.

Obviously, this implies in a way that Griffey was sleeping at some point during the game, but realized that he might be needed late in the game and woke back up. Either way, this situation is a little ridiculous. In my opinion, this is another case of the press making way too big of a deal about nothing. I understand that if Griffey really was sleeping, then it doesn't look too great to the young players, but Griffey may have had his own reasons for needing sleep, somethign the press failed to catch up on. I also highly doubt that this is the first time a bench player slept during a certain part of the game, especially if there are extenuating circumstances.

The unnamed younger players on the team who said Griffey was sleeping said that he had a hard time sleeping because he's away from his family. There could well be more to the situation than we know, such as a family issue for Griffey that has been keeping him up at night. At any rate, the point of this blog is simply that the press makes far too big of a deal about Griffey having (possibly) slept once during a game, and probably shouldn't report things when they don't have the entire story. Obviously, that's not how the world works, especially with a 24-hour sports news network like ESPN.

This is much like the situation I talked about an earlier post where David Ortiz was quickly scrutinized for his bad start to this season. Of course, it has turned out that Ortiz has started the season on a prolonged slump, but the point remains that the media jumps on things far too quickly.