Delmon Young isn’t due in Twins camp until Saturday, when the position players are scheduled to report. When he gets here, it will be interesting to hear his thoughts on Carl Crawford’s comments yesterday about life without Young and Elijah Duke in Rays camp, as reported here in the St. Petersburg Times:

“I just feel like it’s going to be a little more peaceful this year,” Crawford said. “I think it will be more at ease. Not so much crazy stuff. You just get the feeling it’s about everybody just wanting to come out and play good baseball this year. I’m done, you know I’m not really a drama person, so I’m kind of glad that stuff just seems a little smoother right now.”

“They’re both just young players who’ve got some growing up and maturing to do,” Crawford, 26, added. “I just don’t think the maturing part would have happened over here. It might happen somewhere else, but at the pace they were going I don’t think they would have matured over here because they had too much free range to do whatever they wanted to. … It was just one of them things where they just needed to grow up a little bit.

“They could do whatever they wanted to do and they did whatever they wanted to do. Being loud, talking too much, saying whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted to say it to. There weren’t no rules for those guys. Now they’re going to somewhere where they have rules, so I don’t know what’s going to happen then.”

“They’d been getting in trouble and they got rewarded for it every year,” he added. “So you couldn’t expect them to come here and think that they were going to do something different and they were going to be good all of a sudden. That doesn’t happen. It can only get worse. They’ve been doing that since Day 1. It didn’t surprise me at all.”

“We got rid of it [the distractions],” Crawford added. “We’re all feeling better. Everybody’s feeling much better around here now, and it’s just time to go play baseball.”

One thing I’ll say after getting to know Young for our recent profile is he is not Elijah Dukes. Completely different situation. For Crawford to lump them together seems a little unfair. Just my two cents.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 8:17 am and is filed under Around MLB, Twins thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.