ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - The dual roles of former Boston pitcher Pedro Martinez and ex-Olympic softball player Jessica Mendoza as team employees and broadcasters have drawn the concern of baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.
Martinez is a Red Sox special assistant and an analyst for TBS. Mendoza is a New York Mets baseball operations adviser and an ESPN broadcaster.
Both criticized pitcher Mike Fiers for revealing the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scam to The Athletic. Fiers, now with Oakland, sparked an investigation that led to the departures of 10% of the major league managers: Houston’s AJ Hinch, Boston’s Alex Cora and the Mets’ Carlos Beltrán.
“I’m a transparency guy,” Manfred said Thursday after an owners meeting. “That someone should be kind of singled out because they saw something that was wrong and decided to talk about it, I don’t agree with that.”
Martinez, a Hall of Famer, told Boston radio station WEEI “whatever happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse, and Fiers broke the rules.”
Mendoza was a gold medalist for the U.S. at the 2004 Olympics.
“To go public, yeah, it didn’t sit well with me,” she said of Fiers on an ESPN broadcast. “Honestly, it made me sad for the sport that that’s how this all got found out.”
Manfred concluded their comments were made in their roles as journalists.
“I’m not all that comfortable with it. I’m really not,” he said of their dual roles. “It’s a topic that remains under discussion internally. It caused a lot of complications, not just on this particular incident or comments, but in general.”
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