David Wells was a guest on the Yahoo! Sports podcast with Kevin Kaduk and Jay Busbee earlier this week.
In addition to chatting about the division races, playoff matchups, Cy Young debate, and his role as one of TBS’ postseason announcers Wells also dropped a pretty big bomb by calling Joe Torre “a coward.” And he was just getting warmed up.
Courtesy of Kaduk and the fine folks over at Big League Stew, here’s a transcript of his exact words:
I had [Yankees pitching coach] Mel Stottlemyre come up to me in ’97 and tell me they were going to sit me out in the first round against Cleveland. I said, “If you’re going to sit me out the first round, you might as well just send me home.” That pissed me off because I won like 15, 16 games for them.
That’s pretty degrading when you have your manager tell your pitching coach to tell you, “Hey, you’re going to sit out,” rather than telling you himself. That’s what Joe Torre is to me, a coward. I don’t like him at all. As a manager, I think he’s terrible. He wasn’t a fair manager. He didn’t treat people the same. He definitely didn’t treat me the same. If he tells you anything else, he’s a liar.
Wells said some other interesting stuff about Torre, so it’s definitely worth listening to the whole podcast.
Between this, the little spat with Jerry Manuel, and Jamey Loney basically saying the Dodgers stopped playing hard it’s been an interesting week for Joe Torre and his reputation.
