Last night, the struggling Miami Marlins went down 0-4 against the Washington Nationals and 19-year-old phenom Bryce Harper. Harper actually wasn't much of a factor in the game, but Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen snapped at the wunderkind and accused him of using too much pine tar on his bat. What followed was a profanity-laced tirade, a bunch of dirty looks, and some vague comments to the media.
Guillen claimed that in Harper's first at-bat, the player had pine tar too far up on his bat, so on his second at-bat, he came out with a new bat and a big smile. Harper even pointed his new bat at Guillen, and that set the manager off. He grabbed a bat, began mimicking Harper, and even pointed the bat at him.
"I was just telling [Harper] how cute he was," Guillen said, according to the Washington Post. "Something happened there the inning before and I didn't like it and I was talking to the umpire about it.
"I could have said a lot of [stuff] about this kid," he continued. "I've been praising this kid like every day. The last three times they asked me about him, the only thing I said was he's a great player. What he did [today] was unprofessional. I'm not going to tell you guys what he did because I'm not going to be talking about it on ESPN, Baseball Tonight, what happened again. I'll just leave it like that. I'll talk to his manager in a little while."
Asked about his side of the story, Harper brushed it off and just called Guillen a "great manager."
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