Rivalry Has a Lot of Time to Heat Up

If familiarity breeds contempt, in baseball as in all things, then the unbalanced schedule has accelerated the process.

The San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks were throwing at each other Thursday--an extension, perhaps, of the May 26 incident in which the Diamondbacks took exception to the eighth-inning bunt by Ben Davis that ended Curt Schilling’s bid for a perfect game in a game Arizona led and won, 2-0.

“Ever since Ben tried to help us win a game by laying down a bunt, they’ve had it in for us,” Padre General Manager Kevin Towers said by phone Friday.

“The funny thing is, I got a letter from a guy in Arizona pointing out how Tony Womack [of the Diamondbacks] had bunted in the sixth inning [of a recent game] with [Oakland’s] Mark Mulder pitching a no-hitter and no one said anything. It’s ridiculous.

“I mean, it’s really been the last two or three years that the Padres and Diamondbacks haven’t been very friendly. There’s just a sense of arrogance over there for a club that hasn’t been in existence very long.

“They’ve had some success, but it’s just something about the way they act. Even in spring training, and I know they’re the big club in Arizona, but they’d come into our stadium for a [morning] ‘B’ game and their whole staff would be sitting behind the plate as if they expected us to sit in the grandstand.”

Now, Towers said, with the games so important and teams playing each of their division rivals 19 times instead of 12 or 13, there’s a much greater chance emotions will carry over.

“It’s not just the Padres and Diamondbacks,” Towers said. “You’re starting to see tempers flare everywhere.”

In San Diego on Thursday, Arizona pitcher Robert Ellis hit Phil Nevin in the first inning, after which San Diego’s Kevin Jarvis, on a full-count pitch, hit Erubiel Durazo, who had homered in his previous at-bat, in the sixth. Both teams were warned, and Arizona’s Troy Brohawn was ejected when he came in and hit Ryan Klesko in the seventh.

Benches emptied, but there were no fights. However, Padre coach Tim Flannery sought out Arizona pitching coach Bob Welch to ask why two Padres had been hit when only one Diamondback had been hit. Welch referred Flannery, the son of a preacher, to the Bible.

“He said it came down to an eye for an eye,” Flannery said. “I guess they don’t add very good over there.”

Said Arizona Manager Bob Brenly: “There’s two teams out there playing with a lot of fire and emotion, and things happen. I’d much rather see it that way than a bunch of guys going through the motions.”

Perhaps, but San Diego Manager Bruce Bochy was seething, convinced Brenly and staff had ordered the hit on Klesko and convinced the Diamondbacks won’t put the Davis bunt behind them. The unbalanced schedule calls for the teams to start another series Monday, and Bochy said, “if they want to keep it going, we’re not going to sit back and tolerate it.”

In a unique fallout of the 2001 schedule, the Angels and Dodgers were out of town this weekend and are in town next weekend.

“It happens so rarely,” Dodger President Bob Graziano said of the head-to-head confrontations, “that it doesn’t seem to be a huge issue. The market is so big that it can easily support two major league teams, and the Angels and Dodgers seem to have their own fan base. I mean, we don’t take away from the Angels and they don’t take away from us. That being said, we try not to have it scheduled that way.”

Of baseball’s three worst-to-first teams, the Philadelphia Phillies have become the first to fall out of first. In no surprise, the Atlanta Braves have opened a two-game lead in the East.

Philadelphia General Manager Ed Wade says his team is still first-place capable--”I’m unhappy some people don’t give our roster credit and say we have to pull a rabbit out of our hat [before the July 31 trade deadline]”--but his team is 18-26 since June 1, struggling in all areas, and emotionally spent after a week in which it lost twice to the New York Yankees in extra innings and twice to Montreal, blowing leads in each game.

Said third baseman Scott Rolen: “I don’t think there’s a scale for mental drainage, but if there is, ours would be pretty high.”