''What do you mean, 'regret'?" Tavarez said when asked if he was sorry he hit Gathright with a blow to the jaw in the eighth inning of a 12-11 win over the Devil Rays, adding another line to the rap sheet of scrums between these clubs. ''I wish I don't have to [throw a punch], because I'm not here to fight, you know. Little things happen in baseball, you know. No big deal."
Incensed at what Gathright's teammate, Carl Crawford, called a sucker punch, delivered with Gathright on one knee and trying to push away Tavárez's left leg that was planted on his right forearm (''I can show you the marks," said Gathright, who did just that for reporters), the D-Rays expect that baseball disciplinarian Bob Watson will view the incident with more gravity than Tavárez did.
''I think that may require a suspension, absolutely," said Joe Maddon, the Tampa Bay manager who is replacing Lou Piniella, accused by Curt Schilling last season of fomenting some of the bad blood between the teams. ''That kind of action cannot be tolerated, and I don't want any of our guys ever doing anything like that, I know that."
As a first-year manager, Maddon might be new to this suspension business, but Tavarez certainly isn't. In brawls going back 10 years, including another spring-training flareup in which he karate-kicked an opponent, Tavárez has been suspended three times, each time wearing a different uniform: First with the Indians, in 1996; five years later with the Cubs; and then in 2003, when he was with the Pirates and mixed it up for the first time with the D-Rays. In 2004, with the Cardinals, he also was suspended 10 games for putting an illegal substance (pine tar) on his cap.
Later that same year, during Game 4 of the NLCS, Tavarez punched a dugout telephone and broke bones in two fingers of his left (nonthrowing) hand. He also threw a ball behind the head of Astros slugger Jeff Bagwell, for which he was fined $10,000 by Major League Baseball.
