Maddon's pregame Q&A

Joe Maddon was grilled for nearly nine minutes by the New York media this morning.

Here are some excerpts:

Will the bad blood between the two teams linger:

“I truly hope there is not because from out perspective it’s a done deal. That’s how I feel about it.”

It’s easy to say the incident is over, but is it?

“I think it’s easy to say it’s over, because I’ve already talked to our group about it, and from my perspective it is over.”

Are the punishments fair?

“Both sides were disciplined, and we’ll live up to our end of it.”

Did the Rays grow up a bit since they tangled with the Yankees?

“Regardless of who we play we want to play this style of game, it just happened to be that this incident occurred here. We want to play the game one way every day. That’s really the objective since I’ve arrived here. We don’t have banners hanging from our ballpark. We haven’t even been a .500 ball club. We have to play the game hard and right ever day. We can’t play with an on and off switch regardless of what the date is. So this has been my objective since I’ve been here to our guys to play the game hard and right according to what we perceive to be hard and right, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Can a fight unify a team?

“It always it is, regardless wherever a situation like this might occur. If you do hang together you have a pretty good chance of growing even stronger because of it. Our guys, from the top on down, we’ve hung together pretty well from this entire situation. It is an even that, sometimes, can draw you even closer together.”