Dodgers Team News

Diamondbacks Manager Chip Hale Says Dodgers Are Good At Talking

2013 Year in Review

The Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks met for the first time this spring on Monday and it didn’t take very long for some of the bad blood between the two teams to surface.



Chris Anderson made his first Cactus League start of the year and battled some control issues in the first inning. Included in that was him unintentionally hitting Mark Trumbo. Justin Turner was then hit in the bottom of the first and both benches were warned.

Turner was plunked once more in the fifth inning, which resulted in Allen Webster and Diamondbacks manager Chip Hale both getting ejected. Dodgers Minor League Dillon Moyer was hit in the eighth inning by Derek Eitel, who was ejected along with D-Back bench coach/acting manager Glenn Sherlock.

Following the game, Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said Anderson didn’t purposely hit Trumbo and added such actions weren’t necessary in Spring Training. During an in-game interview on Time Warner Cable’s SportsNet LA, Jimmy Rollins, who is new to the rivalry, gave hits thoughts on the hit batsmen:

The one that we had with Trumbo was clearly an accident. Obviously, when they hit (Turner) the first time, it was intentional. OK, point made,” he said. “But it was a weak time to do it.”

Hale responded to Rollins’ comments in an interview with Arizona Sports 98.7, via Arizona Sports.com:

They can talk all they want, talk is cheap in my opinion,” Hale told Burns and Gambo on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM. “You know, they’re good at it. We’re just going to worry about playing the game. They can talk all they want about it.”

Tension between the teams dates back to the 2013 season when benches cleared at Dodger Stadium after Ian Kennedy, then with the Diamondbacks, hit Yasiel Puig and later Zack Greinke. The second incident resulted in a full-blown brawl.

Later that season, the Dodgers aggravated the Diamondbacks with their National League West division title celebration that spilled into the right-field pool at Chase Field. The two teams will face each other a total of 19 times this season, with the first series coming April 10-12 at Chase Field.

Twelve of the games take place before the All-Star break, so if emotions are to again boil over, the chances are it may come early and often.

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4 Comments

  1. Apparently they’re pretty good at winning the NL West too…AZ isn’t really in much of a position to talk smack.

  2. They wanted a rivalry soooooooo bad and now that they have one they cry like little girls. BTW, if all you want to do is play the game then maybe you shouldn’t be plunking minor league players in spring training games.

  3. Wait who are the diamond backs? They have a baseball team in Arizona? When did this happen?

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