Red Sox first baseman Adrian Gonzalez appeared on 1090 XX Sports Radio in San Diego Thursday and addressed his published comments regarding the Red Sox schedule, which has been widely portrayed in Boston media as Gonzalez making excuses for the team's collapse in September.
"I never brought up anything on my own and said anything out of a way to complain or say that it was the reason we lost or anything like that,'' Gonzalez told radio host Darren Smith. "I answered a question that was presented to me. I know I am taking a little bit of heat for the scheduling part, but that wasn’t something I did on my own. The writer came up to me and said ‘Has the schedule been tough on you this year?’ I said we played a lot of getaway night games. I said it has been the most grueling season physically for me. That was my answer to the question and the question was prior to the collapse, so I answered the question I was asked.
"It was written after the last game when we didn’t make the playoffs and it was mentioned in a way as I was complaining of the schedule. I wasn’t. I was just answering the question of how hard it was on me. It was tough and it was really hard on my body. ... I’ve learned that you don’t try to go out and try to justify your comments. You just let them be because you are never going to win the battle of trying to justify yourself.”
Gonzalez said he read the story in Wednesday's Boston Globe detailing reasons for the team's collapse.
“It’s a piece to get people interested and talking about it,'' he said. "Again not everything in that story is true and a lot of it is personal opinion rather than actual fact.”
Asked by Smith if there were elements in the story that were true, Gonzalez replied: “I would have to have the piece in front of me to be able to comment on that.”
Gonzalez would not comment when asked specifically about the conduct of the team's starting pitchers, and was not asked about manager Terry Francona.
Smith asked Gonzalez if the team choked in September.
"It’s hard to say,'' he said. "We didn’t play the baseball that we could. We didn’t do it in every aspect of the game. We didn’t hit when we needed to hit. We didn’t play defense when we needed to play defense and we didn’t get the outs we needed to down the stretch, so yeah, we really didn’t play good baseball and we lost in the playoffs because of it.”