What I find incredible is the hypocrisy here. Lets examine this little image
Utley is torn apart for sliding away from the bag and it's said he intentionally tried to take out Tejada, both comments are utter trash. The first image there is the Utley slide, a little after the bag but his left hand is clearly on the bag. The next two images are Daniel Murphy, earlier in the same game clearly 2 feet off the bag, out of the base path and he has no chance of touching the base and being safe on the play. This his 100% worse than Utley! He has no chance of being safe all he's doing is going hard at a player, while he's out of the basepath and the only outcome is he could hit Rollins hard and breakup the play possibly hurting Rollins. Much worse than Utley later in the same game.
The last image there is holier than thou David Write sliding into Utley a few years ago. Once again out of the basepath and also after the bag. No chance of being safe he's just trying to slide hard and disrupt Utleys throw to break up the double play. Ironically in this play Wright hurt himself and not Utley. Both instances are Mets players doing what Utley did or worse. The only difference is no broken leg from Tejada.
Now lets look at a play that happened 4 days prior to the Utley slide.
https://streamable.com/7cqd
Almost the exact same slide but this play exposes why Tejada was hurt and it wasn't the slide. The difference in the play is Altuve's DP partner Correa makes a nice throw to him so he doesn't have to turn his back or attempt a wild 360 in order to throw the ball. Unfortunately for Tejada his partner Daniel Murphy made a wild throw and instead of Tejada protecting himself and taking the easy force out he tried to make an acrobatic play and it cost him on Utley's perfectly standard hard slide into 2nd base.
And for another example that this is a perfectly normal play lets take everybody's favorite team the St Louis Cardinals. The self(and fan) proclaimed classiest team in MLB and an example of how the game should be played.
Here we have a game on 9/20/2015 a mere 23 days ago. In this game the Cardinals do what Utley did not once but twice once in the 1st and once in the 2nd innings. You even have the legendary Cardinals player and announcer Tim McCarver saying after his partner states "As Heyward went in with clean baseball at 2nd base" Tim goes on to say "The reason this inning is continuing is because of Jason Heyward's slide. And the Cardinals appreciate it." The 2nd slide IMHO is far worse than Utleys he went just as hard and was just as late sliding into the base but Molina being the class act that he is went with his foot up off the ground spikes into the infielder. And once again McCarver defends the play as hard but perfectly normal and legit.
So please, take this garbage that Utley did anything wrong and throw it out with the dirty dish water. What Utley did happens 2 or 3 times a day at minimum and is done by every team. This is a perfectly normal play in baseball. If you want the play changed that's fine, no issue with that. But to sit here and act like this was some horrible crime and he should be punished is utter garbage and people should know better. This was perfectly legal, the umpires at the game ruled on the play properly according to the rule book. And Joe Torre's suspension of Utley is pure knee jerk reaction to contrived outrage at the play.
