Gary Cohen attempted to walk a fine line while taking issue with Cubs rookie Matt Shaw’s recent absence from the club.
Shaw got permission from the Cubs to miss Sunday’s game to attend the memorial service of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, but Cohen took issue with the fact that the rookie third baseman left the team in the middle of a playoff race.
The Cubs, who clinched a playoff spot last week, are sitting in the first wild-card spot in the National League.
Cohen attempted to sidestep the political aspects of the conversation when he broached the subject in the bottom of the fourth inning during Tuesday’s SNY broadcast of the game between the Mets and Cubs at Wrigley Field.
“I don’t want to talk about any of the politics of it, but the thought of leaving your team in the middle of a race for any reason other than a family emergency, really strikes me as weird,” Cohen said.
Mets analyst and former first baseman Todd Zeile added that he thought it was “unprecedented” and “unusual” before adding later that what added to the controversy was that it wasn’t revealed why he wasn’t at the game “until after it came to issue.”
When Cohen asked if his status as a rookie played into the circumstances, Zeile said it would be unusual during his era (1989-2004) in the game, before noting that “there was no paternity leave, there was no bereavement leave” when he was a player.
Shaw made the decision to attend the service after Kirk’s wife, Erika, invited him. He said spoke with manager Craig Counsell, president Jed Hoyer and several of the veterans on the Cubs roster.
“I made sure that everybody I talked to, I had their support, that they knew why I was going, that I wasn’t leaving just to leave, that it was something that was really important to my faith,” Shaw said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “It was really nice to see how everyone was able to support me in that moment.
“I felt as though it was something that was really important for me to do. … I was very thankful for how the team responded, allowing me to do that was really special.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
