The ongoing World Series matchup between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers has drawn attention because of other events beyond baseball. That’s Astros first baseman’s Yuli Gurriel’s racial gesture that seemingly mocked Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish during Houston’ 2-1 win in Game 3.
Gurriel’s action led MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to make the decision to hand him a five-game suspension. While it’s hard to debate that Gurriel deserved the penalty levied on him, the problem lies in Manfred’s apparent lack of sense of urgency to teach Gurriel a lesson. For many observers, the deferred suspension sends off a bad impression that MLB doesn’t want to compromise the quality of the World Series even if it’s because of a disparaging action by a player.
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Many others can’t help but compare Manfred’s decision to let Gurriel play in the grand stage with that of Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green being suspended for a game in the 2016 NBA Finals after hitting LeBron James in the groin.
When asked about the similarities between the two instances, Cavaliers head coach Tyronn Lue wasn’t convinced that his team got a tremendous boost out of Green’s one-game absence akin to the advantage the Dodgers could’ve gotten if Manfred did suspend Gurriel right away, per Dave McMenamin of ESPN.
“How?” Lue asked. “He played the last two games, didn’t he?”
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Lue has his reasons on why the two are different. For one, Green was still able there to play in Games 6 and 7, so it’s a bit flawed to completely parallelize Green’s situation to that of Gurriel’s.
The Cavs coach also noted that if anything, it’s the Warriors who got a big advantage in the 2015 Finals when the Cavaliers didn’t have the complete services of Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving.
“Well, if Kevin and Kyrie would have played in Year 1, it could have been different,” Lue said. “So whatever.”