"What a Joke, Dude" - Garrett Stubbs with Context on the Diamondbacks Pool Quote that Turned into Bulletin Board Material
We had Phillies catcher Garrett Stubbs on Crossing Broadcast Wednesday afternoon. Great conversion covering a wide variety of topics.
Most interesting perhaps was his explanation of the Diamondbacks pool quote, which was was molded into bulletin board material under the guise of disrespect towards the Phils’ NLCS opponent.
Here’s a portion of the Scott Lauber writeup at the Philadelphia Inquirer:
PHOENIX – If the Phillies do what they came here to do — win two of three games and clinch a second straight National League pennant — they’re planning to add a wrinkle to their customary celebration.
Who’s ready to take a dip?
“I’ve seen that pool before, so I know exactly where it is,” backup catcher/team DJ Garrett Stubbs said Wednesday, referring to the famous natatorium beyond the right field fence at Chase Field. “If we take two here against Arizona, we’ll be bee-lining it for the water.”
…
“We’re a respectful bunch of guys,” Stubbs said. “We wouldn’t do it if it was a disrespectful thing.”
We asked Stubbs about this and he clarified:
Does @GarrettStubbs regret his quote about the DBacks pool?
Absolutely not. pic.twitter.com/B7yMtPjiJM
— Crossing Broad (@CrossingBroad) November 29, 2023
This conversation went on for a couple of minutes on the podcast, but it was a really good one, and it drifted into the territory of motivation and how athletes use it, so I transcribed a longer portion of it for some added context:
Kinkead: Were you surprised at how the quote about the Arizona pool was received?
Stubbs: What a joke dude! I was like, the Philadelphia Inquirer, they write the article and they do it with a negative connotation. They even tweet it with ‘this is bad vibes from the chief vibes officer,’ yadda yadda yadda. We were cracking up and blown by people actually taking the ‘if we win two wins in Arizona, we’ll beeline it for the pool,’ like get out of here with that. And then, the other funny part is that the whole conversation that that quote came out of, it was me and (audio drops) reporters on a practice day, and I was trolling myself about how to get into a NLCS game, one how cool it was, that it was frickin’ awesome, but two, trolling myself about the fact that I don’t play and I got in there. We gotta score 10 runs, maybe if we score 15 runs I’ll get an at-bat. And I’m messing around with them about that. Then someone asked me if I had seen seen the memes about the pool, there’s a bunch of memes about LeBron staring down whoever in the playoff game, and it’s Stubbs staring down the pool. There was one with Forrest Gump running down the road. And it said ‘Stubbs beelining it for the pool.’ Everyone was having fun with it. And they asked me, ‘hey if you win two games here in Arizona, will you jump in the pool?’ I brought up Paul Sewald talking about how ‘if people win in our stadium, go ahead and jump in the pool.’ So I thought, if he says it, and there’s no disrespect there, then yeah, if we win two games in Arizona, we’ll beeline it for the pool.
Kinkead: It’s funny because we had a field day with the Orlando Arcia thing, and Bryce staring him down when he went around the base path. And then Merrill Kelly comes out before Game 2 and says something totally innocuous, about how loud the stadium was going to be. But you give Philly fans an inch and they say, ‘oh yeah we’re gonna prove you a certain way.’ But Merrill Kelly wasn’t coming in here and saying ‘Citizens Bank Park sucks and every Phillies fan is a piece of shit.’ The concept of bulletin board material is funny to me because you’re playing in the NLCS already. If you can’t get motivated to play in the NLCS with a trip to the World Series on the line, then really what the hell are you a professional athlete for in the first place?
Stubbs: Dude, the amount of times I said that exact quote, and this is the first interview where anybody’s asked me. Those reporters that were there during that interview, they came up to me the next day, after it had caught fire, and the guy who wrote it, (audio drops), but literally every other person who was there for that interview was like ‘dude I am so sorry, I can’t believe they went and wrote it in the direction that they did.’ And I was like ‘dude, you don’t have to apologize, because one, you didn’t write it, and two, people are gonna draw to whatever (conclusion) they want to draw to.’ The Merrill Kelly quote, we were laughing about it, because in the locker room we knew fans were going to find a reason for this one. But we knew Merrill Kelly was just saying ‘I played in the WBC, awesome atmosphere, the (Citizens Bank Park) atmosphere, can’t imagine it would get much bigger, but we’ll see,’ that kind of thing. People blew it up.
Kinkead: Well maybe I contributed because I went on Twitter and said Garrett Stubbs should take a shit in the pool.
Stubbs: (laughing) Yeah, but that’s just being funny. You’re just messing around being funny and people run away with whatever they want to.
Pagan: So is bulletin board material not real?
Stubbs: For the fans, I think it’s a great way to get in somebody’s head. I think people enjoy that. But inside a locker room dude, if you think Bryce Harper needed Orlando Arcia to say something for him to hit two homers in a playoff game, have you ever watched that guy play baseball before?
Wonderful, chill conversation, here’s the full interview touching on everything from Aaron Nola’s return to college team bets and everything in between: