Tommy Pham’s slap to the face earned him more than a slap on the wrist.
The Reds outfielder has been suspended for three games, Major League Baseball announced, after his bizarre batting-practice altercation Friday in which he slapped Giants outfielder Joc Pederson in the face over a yearlong fantasy football beef. Pham’s suspension will include the game he sat out Friday night.
Pham said in Cincinnati on Saturday that Pederson had said “disrespectful s–t” about the Padres, Pham’s former team, and “f–ked with my money,” according to a tweet by The Athletic reporter C. Trent Rosecrans.
“I slapped Joc,” Pham told reporters on Saturday. “He said some s–t I don’t condone. I had to address it.”
One night earlier, Pederson had explained that the rift had started on a text chain last year, when he was accused of cheating in a fantasy football league among several MLB players.
“Unfortunate situation. Kind of stemmed from a fantasy football league we both were in last year,” Pederson said Friday night. “I put somebody, a player, on the injured reserve when they were listed as out and added another player. And then there was a text message in the group saying that I was cheating because I was stashing players on my bench. I looked up the rules and sent a screenshot of the rules, how it says when a player is ruled out, you’re allowed to put him on the IR. That’s all I was doing.
“It just so happened that [Pham] had a player, Jeff Wilson, that was out, and he had him on IR. I said, ‘You literally have the same thing on your team, on your bench.’ I guess he was in two leagues and in one of them [Wilson] was on the IR and in one of them, he wasn’t, so maybe that was a confusion. In the ESPN league we were in, it was listed as out. It feels very similar to what I did. That was basically all of it, there’s not much more to it.”