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“This isn’t a pick, it’s a scratch.”

Nice find by Zoo With Roy yesterday, digging up this nugget in Jim Salisbury’s piece about Jesse Biddle… which I think most of us would’ve missed since Chip Kelly was in the midst of flinging his balls around like a caffeinated shot putter.

Here’s Amaro, oddly refusing to acknowledge the fact that Phillies prospect and local kid Biddle had a concussion last year after being hit in the head with hail. I mean, after all, Ruben did go to Stanford:

In June, Biddle admitted that he was “miserable” and not having fun on the mound. Phillies officials sensed his frustration and sent him to the sidelines for what general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. called “a mental break.”

“It’s time for us to take a little heat off him so he can get his mind right and enjoy baseball again,” Amaro said at the time.

“I had trouble throwing strikes, trouble throwing to bases, just everything,” Biddle recalled earlier this week. “The whole game got very hard for me.”

Biddle believes some of his frustration at the time stemmed from his being struck in the head by an ice pellet during a hailstorm in Reading in May. He said he was later diagnosed with a concussion.

“I believe with the way it lines up, I was concussed and I was pitching with a concussion,” he said. “I saw a concussion specialist and he said I had a concussion.”

Amaro this week acknowledged that Biddle had “concussion symptoms,” but added, “I don’t know if it was a full-blown concussion.” He went on to say, “That wasn’t the reason we gave him the break.”

Somewhere, Bobby Clarke approves of this managerial strategy.

via (@bxe1234)