(In other news, Jayson Werth cleaned up his beard, showed up with a goatee on Tuesday. Photo is courtesy of MLB.com's Bill Ladson.)
What's not to love about Jayson Werth's comments to reporters after the Nationals first full squad workout of the spring on Tuesday? Not only did Werth declare open season on two of three jobs in the Nats outfield, but he reiterated his love of the underdog and desire to be in Washington from the ground floor (NL East basement) and help build a winner. These are feel good quotes, folks, for example:
"I obviously (love) the situation that I'm in. I chose this situation. There were other suitors and other teams and other deals. This was the one that I wanted to be in. I wanted to be in that ground-up situation and be part of something. You build a team from what it was and take it to where I think it's going to go, I think that's the type of situation I want to be in."
(Jayson Werth, via Nationals Journal, 2/22/2011)"I think we're going to be there before people realize it."
(Jayson Werth, via The Goessling Game/MASNSports.com, 2/22/2011)
Sounds good. But some of Jayson Werth's quotes about his split with Philly (via High Cheese/Philly.com on Tuesday) make him out to be a guy still grappling with regrets about how things turned out. Like this one, on how the Phillies botched the opportunity to have both Werth and Cliff Lee under contract now:
"Unfortunately I think if they’d played it right, they probably could have had us both."
(Jayson Werth, via High Cheese/Philly.com, 2/22/2011)
Unfortunately? Guess we shouldn't kill the guy for being honest...but you'd think $126 million from Ted Lerner's coffers would've helped wipe away the memories. Here, Werth gets back on-message:
"After they assured me that they were going to take the right steps to continue to add to the young core group of players they had and were throwing around the number of years they were throwing around, the more I stepped back and took a look at this team and where I thought it was going in the future and what could be done here and the type of situation I’d be in, it was actually the type of situation I wanted to be in. Getting in on the ground floor and building it to the top. That kind of turned me on in a sense."
(Jayson Werth, via High Cheese/Philly.com, 2/22/2011)
In other words, no regrets...
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Biggest non-story of the year so far. Move on, please.
Posted by: jdc | February 23, 2011 at 10:29 AM