Salomon Torres Stages His Own Protest
The Pirates survived the highly publicized fan walkout last Sunday, but unfortunately for the team there’s more bad news around the corner. Reliever Salomon Torres has filed a grievance and asked for a trade because he feels the team broke a promise they made to him when he was negotiating his last contract.
Torres claims he signed an extension with the Pirates for below market value because General Manager Dave Littlefield strongly hinted that the team would rent one of the two baseball academies Torres built in the Dominican Republic. The Pirates never ended up renting the academy and after months of waiting Torres rented it out to the Texas Rangers. Torres also says that to punish him for complaining about the baseball academy sitution the team has laid out a very slow rehabilitation schedule for his return from an elbow injury.
“I don’t have a problem with the diagnosis or the treatments,” Torres said. “But they told me it would be up to me to tell them when I felt good enough to come back. Now, all of a sudden, I hear about another month. I feel like I’m being blackballed from the team… I’m just tired of being treated like this. I’m tired of the lies. I gave this team everything. I bought a house in Pittsburgh to be part of the city. But, if you’re going to lie to me, trade me.”
Perhaps in hindsight Littlefield should have rented Torres’ baseball academy. Even if it didn’t produce any big leaguers it might have generated some PR specialists that would have been of use to the team.
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