Rays' Crawford wears Griffey line shoes proudly

When Ken Griffey Jr. made his major-league debut in 1989, Carl Crawford was a 7-year-old growing up in Houston who was soon to have a new idol.

Crawford remembers when Nike released the first line of Griffey signature shoes in the mid-1990s. Everyone wanted them.

"I was a teenager when they started making them, and you would do anything to have Griffey shoes at the time," he said.

So it is with a certain amount of reverence that, each day when Crawford gets ready to head out on the field, he ties on a personalized pair of Griffey's exclusive Swingman shoes with "CC13" emblazoned on the heel.

"To have my own model is just unreal," Crawford said. "I never thought I'd see that."

Only a handful of major-league players can make the same claim. Crawford was among a half-dozen or around the majors handpicked by Griffey to wear custom versions of the Swingman shoes. Others include Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Braun, Adam Jones and Orlando Hudson - all players whose style appeals to the future first-ballot Hall of Famer.

"They're guys kind of like me, who have fun on the field and are capable of changing the game," Griffey said Wednesday. "I've always loved the way Carl plays."

The feeling obviously is mutual. Crawford only knows Griffey in passing, he said - "he's one of those guys that's so big that you've just got to wait for him to talk to you" - but considered it a high honor to begin wearing his shoes last season.

"I know the deal with Griffey, so for him to have chosen me to be one of the guys, I definitely felt good about that," he said. "I grew up trying to be exactly like him. You can't really get higher praise than that in baseball."

Remember us? Manager Joe Maddon has said repeatedly since his team fell out of contention that he would continue to play his regulars for the balance of the season and not go out of his way to carve out time for those on the roster who haven't seen much action.

He has mostly stuck to that, aside from giving Reid Brignac a few starts, as he did Wednesday with Jason Bartlett moving to DH. But he expects to stick with his plan for the most part, since aside from Wade Davis, the Rays aren't really attempting to evaluate any of their younger players.

"You'll see Reid out there a little bit," Maddon said. "And I want to get (Shawn) Riggans into a game at some point. But still, we're going to play to win these games. There's not a whole lot of auditioning going on among our group. We know what Reid can do, we know what Riggans has done in the past, and all of the young pitchers are getting an opportunity - maybe get Dale Thayer out there a little bit."

Thayer and Jeff Bennett (unused since Sept. 7) have had the most idle time of anyone, but as Maddon said, they were mostly summoned for insurance purposes and haven't been needed.

"They were here for a reason when they first got here, and the blowouts didn't occur," Maddon said.