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Josh Towers has all the respect in the world for Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz as a hitter, but there's just no way in the world to convince Towers that Ortiz is worthy of an MVP vote.
The Blue Jays and players across the majors are in the process of doing their own players award balloting, so Towers has been thinking about this quite a bit.
"My personal opinion is I will never as long as I have a vote, vote for a guy who doesn't play both sides of the field," Towers said after Ortiz won the game for Boston on Wednesday with a two-run homer off Towers in the eighth inning.
"They don't go through the grind others do defensively, diving after balls, chasing balls, if you make an error how it might affect you next at bat. If you're a DH you don't go through any of that. You just hit. So as good a hitter as he is, and he's one of the best in the game, no question, I can never vote for him. That's all."
DON'T THINK, MEAT
Towers had handled Ortiz in each of the first three meetings, but when it came to their eighth-inning meeting, Towers messed up. "I think, and that's probably why I screwed up, I was thinking ... I think we just tried to outthink him," Towers said.
"We started fastball away because we got him out on a few earlier in the game and he takes it for a ball. OK, now maybe he's looking for something off-speed because it's 1-0 so we go fastball away again for a strike. Now we're thinking there's no way he'll be expecting another fastball so what do we do? We go fastball away. I don't know whether we did outthink him or not and we'll never know."
QUOTE, UNQUOTE
"I've just given up a homer and I'm looking at the ump saying: 'Give me another ball' and he's standing there holding it. I'm starting to get pissed because he won't give me another ball. Then I looked back and Gabe Kapler was down but I had no clue what happened." -- Towers' reaction to Kapler suffering a ruptured Achilles tendon as he was rounding the bases on Tony Graffanino's home run.