Gasoline was dumped onto the Red Sox-Blue Jays rivalry even before the American League East foes met for the first time in 2023.
Days into the new season, Alex Verdugo accused Alek Manoah of going about on-field celebrations the “wrong way.” The Boston outfielder specifically cited a “disrespectful” sequence last season when the Toronto ace barked at a pair of Red Sox players on the diamond.
Manoah, with the help of some colorful language, brushed off Verdugo’s criticism. And according to Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith, that was the popular reaction to Verdugo’s comments within the Blue Jays clubhouse.
“I asked John Schneider about it the day that it came out, and he’s basically like we don’t want to go there, we’re not talking about it,” Nicholson-Smith said on the “Baseball Isn’t Boring” podcast, as transcribed by Audacy. “He was like no comment, essentially. Manoah too was not inclined to talk about it — I know he made one comment to Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun. That was the extent of the comments he made about it.
“So you know that it was on the radar of people around the team, of course. And yet, I think there was an inclination not to give it too much oxygen because the Blue Jays, from what I can tell, didn’t take Verdugo’s comments that seriously. They didn’t agree with them.”
Although Nicholson-Smith’s report might suggest otherwise, don’t be surprised if there’s some extra intensity in early May when the Red Sox and the Blue Jays meet for their first series of the season at Fenway Park.
