It was bad enough when two journeyman Major League ballplayers got into a fight over fantasy football, but now the fray has dragged in one of the game’s biggest fish: Angels outfielder Mike Trout.
Cincinnati Reds outfielder Tommy Pham, who just served a three-game suspension for slapping San Francisco Giants outfielder Joc Pederson Friday over a disputed move in fantasy football last fall, said perennial MVP contender Trout bears some of the blame, too. Trout, after all, was the commissioner who let Pederson get away with the alleged shenanigans, Pham claimed.
“Trout’s the worst commissioner in fantasy sports,” Pham told the The Athletic. “Because he allowed a lot of s*** to go on and he could’ve solved it all. Nobody wanted to be commissioner, I didn’t want to be the f***ing commissioner. I’ve got other s*** to do. He didn’t want to do it; we put it on him. It was kind of our fault too, because we made him commissioner.”
Mike Trout on Tommy Pham's fantasy football dig: 'Every commissioner I know always gets booed' https://t.co/xDXbkiFtXC pic.twitter.com/eZOT8u6EKP
— New York Post (@nypost) June 1, 2022
Trout shrugged off Pham’s attack.
“Every commissioner I know always gets booed,” he told reporters.
Pham was apparently still smarting over the dispute that landed him in hot water with the commissioner’s office. He admitted slapping Pederson before the game and seemed unrepentant.
“I slapped Joc,” Pham said later. “He said some s*** I don’t condone. I had to address it.”
Pederson was caught off-guard by the pre-game attack.
“It was a surprise,” Pederson said. “There was no real argument. He kind of came up and said, like, ‘I don’t know if you remember from last year,’ and I was like, ‘Fantasy football?’ He was like, ‘Yeah.”
After the game, Pederson said he was accused of cheating in the fantasy football league for putting San Francisco 49ers running back Jeff Wilson on injured reserve and replacing him with a free agent. Pederson insisted the move was legal because the player he put on IR had been ruled out for that week.
“I sent a screenshot of the rules, how it says that if a player’s ruled out, you’re allowed to put him on the IR and that’s all I was doing,” Pederson said. “He literally did the same thing. That was basically all of it.”
Pederson speculated that Pham may have had Wilson in another league and gotten mixed up.
“Maybe that was a confusion,” he said. “In the ESPN league we were in, he was listed as out. It feels very similar to what I did. That was basically all of it. There’s not much more to it.”
Pham said Trout, a three-time MVP, could have prevented the disagreement from boiling over if only he had enforced the league’s rules.
“Trout did a terrible job, man,” Pham said.
Pham is getting a reputation as a hothead. In April, he challenged San Diego’s hulking first baseman Luke Voit to a fight after Voit slid hard into Reds catcher Tyler Stephenson.
“If Luke wants to settle it, I get down really well,” Pham said. “Anything. Muay Thai, whatever. Like I said, I’ve got an owner here who will let me use his facility.”
Source: Dailywire
