Cursed To First - Sox and Pats forever.

One of these mornings you're going to rise up singing

Sox vs. Twins. City of Palms Park, Fort Myers, Florida. By the time I get home it's the fourth inning.

Curt Schilling is holding his press conference after throwing a grand total of 19 pitches in his allotted two innings of work, and during the interview he seethes at the restriction, mentioning at several points that such a limited outing won't help him stretch his arm out.

It's a minor holiday of sorts, too: the first baseball broadcast of the year by Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo. Remy and Orsillo discuss their off-season activities, covering such diverse topics as knee surgery, CSI: Miami and hockey. They work their banter in, as always, effortlessly among the necessary comments on the game.

After that, several young prospects and down-on-their-luck quadruple-A players blend together, at the plate, on the mound, all sporting their brilliant red shirts and the new spring training hats; in the case of the Sox, the hats are uniformly red, which minimizes the effect of the supremely ugly half-moons over the ears marking all the spring training hats this year. The pants on the new home uniform are brilliant white against the green of the grass, which is mowed around the mound in a businesslike criss-cross pattern.

The park is quiet, full of idle chatter. On the second error on a tough pick by the Sea Dogs' third baseman Chad Spann, who spent much of last year sidelined with a left ankle injury, someone boos loudly from the stands, the only jarring sound in what is otherwise a relaxed atmosphere.

The slap of the ball in the glove, the smack of the bat on the ball, the slap of the ball in a glove again. A nighttime wind blows across the NESN microphones. Remy and Orsillo banter about their inability to name everyone currently on the field for the Twins. They have their first official giggle fit.

Every year, this day has found me somewhat different. Not only in my life in general, but in how I feel about baseball. Last year I was starved for it and quickly drunk on the first sight of batters kicking the dirt; two years ago I felt rusty, somehow, watching the first game. This year it feels smooth and easy. Comments come automatically out of my mouth in midseason form: "Aw, he didn't even have his foot on the bag," a knowing, "ooh," as soon as a home run comes off a Twin's bat against Julian Tavarez.

It's February 28 and the living is easy. A meaningless, though abstractly significant, game in a mild climate, in a miniature ballpark, with a dugout full of unfamiliar faces--right now all that matters is that the Red Sox are back on television, and life is good.

Manny's here

Now can we all move on with our lives?

Meanwhile, Daisuke Friday vs. BC, 6:05 pm. Mark your calendars. Although I have yet to hear of TV listings for this, so you might just be marking your calendar in order to raise a glass to our new Japanese phenom from afar at the appropriate time.

Curt fires back

If I'm even first with this, I'll eat my shoe. But here it is. On SoSH the following post has appeared:

"Can you guys imagine if we were actually pissed at each other? This could get ugly fast? Now we'll just have to let hacks and idiots like CHB stir up something that does not exist.

John Henry and I had a very comfortable discussion walking across the field yesterday. I have nothing but the utmost respect for him, and think he feels the same way about me.

Theo and I had a very comfortable discussion the last two days as well.

The Red Sox knew I was doing the morning radio show on WEEI and contrary to what Hemingway wrote in the Globe it's not a 'paid appearance' and never has been. THe money raised on EEI is for ALS and always has been.

The Red Sox knew, and we spoke at length prior to, this going public in January. We both knew that someone in the media had found out from someone other than Theo or I about the discussions and that person was going to write about it, with what would have been incorrect facts. No one was blindsided and no one really cared about the perception of it going public other than to want the facts to get reported.

I know CHB finds it hard to believe, which is understandable, but the 'gun to the head' approach was never a factor here, both sides knew this.

I'd love to tell you I look like Gabe Kapler with my shirt off, I don't. However I weigh 243 pounds right now, which is exactly 2 pounds under what I weighed in at at seasons end last year. The clothes make me look fat.......

Am I disappointed? Yep. Am I surprised? Nope. Is everyone but the parties involved making way too much out of this? Yep.

I've forever needed baseball a whole hell of a lot more than it needs me, I've always known that. I have also always known that it is a business, even when you don't want it to be.

Please trust me when I say, and have said, this will have zero bearing on my preperation or performance this season. I don't pitch for contracts, never have. My three best years were in the first year of new contracts. I pitch to win, just like most of the other guys in this game do.

One of the lines CHB failed to put into the article he wrote a few weeks back was me, on the phone, calling him an asshole. He knows as sure as he's reading this right now that I think he's a giant sphincter.*

At some point soon he'll realize that the dislike for him here is not because he's the guy always taking the 'other side' while trying to illicit opinions and responses from readers, but rather he's disliked because he treats people like shit.

Writers like him, and there are others I can assure you, are the reason athletes come to despise members of the media. They aren't all like that but it's just hard to figure out who's who sometimes.

I'm a father of 4 incredible kids, the husband to a woman who turned her bout with cancer into a life saving organization, the boss of a man who drives an hour each day to work, both ways, in my company, that is dying from ALS, and the Lord has blessed me with the ability to spend 21 years playing professional baseball.

I guess what I am saying is that the sun came up today, life is good. If it's meant to be that I come back here then it will happen. If not then I sure as hell will relish in the fact that I got to be here and experience something I couldn't have dreamed up.

Now move along people, talk about something like my career OPS, or can Papi hit 60 this year? Don't let the media make you waste time on issues that just aren't issues to anyone but them.

They can hate the fact that I talk on EEI, or write in these forums, hell he's done it for 4 years, but it's still going to happen and at the end of the day he's still going to be the most misinformed guy in this group when it comes to the Sox and their fans."

*I literally applauded at this line. And cackled.

Work ethic

Daisuke threw 103 pitches in his first bullpen session yesterday. Seriously. Jason Varitek sounds giddy in his quotes:

“He stayed pretty consistent,” Varitek said. “He stayed at a pace. It wasn’t rapid-fire and he paid attention to details to repeat what he needed to do. He ratcheted it up as he went along, so I got to see another gear on some of his pitches.”

In fairness, the Herald points out,

Matsuzaka...is coming from a team that deployed a six-man rotation in a league that has a built-in day off every Monday.

So he's used to throwing more pitches, but less often. They'll have to stretch him out a bit, re-shape him, in a way. But I think right now they just wanted the $103 million kid to put on a show.

How soon can we we expect a frothing editorial in the Globe demanding to know why Manny can't get out there and throw 103 pitches?

Also: DEAR DAVID ORTIZ,

DO NOT EVER, EVER DO THIS TO ME AGAIN. EVER.

Love,

Beth

And: For those of you waiting for me to comment on the Schilling situation...I really don't know what to say right now. I'm angry with Curt for, as Denton points out, negotiating through the media, though I'm not surprised. I'm angry with Red Sox ownership for paying to field JD Drew and balking at locking Schilling in for another year. I'm angry with Curt for pulling a Roger Clemens and then just expecting the Red Sox to rearrange their plans around it. I'm angry with the Red Sox for quibbling over $13 million for their World Series hero. I'm angry at the thought of another of The 25 finishing his career elsewhere--when that career is so close to over, you'd think it would be easy for the Sox to just extend the contract. Basically, I'm pretty pissed off at both sides; the long and short of it is I think the way Curt has handled it has understandably put off the management, but I think Theo might also be cutting off his nose to spite his face over it. Also, there has been the infamous "I would never play for the Yankees" speech already, at which I simply put my fingers in my ears and go LA LA LA...

And finally: Without Corey Dillon, we don't reach 21, and we don't win XLI. Let's show him some love on his way to retirement.

I am about to make your whole day

(Boston.com photo)

Annette pointed this out to us on the NEET.

I mean...it's David Ortiz kissing a puppy.

I'm oddly superstitious about my desktop backgrounds. I'm oddly superstitious about many things. But this immediately earned the "Set As Wallpaper" honor. It's an image you look at--or even just imagine--and all your troubles just disappear. David Ortiz, kissing a puppy. Seriously. Next time you're having a bad day? Just think David Ortiz, puppy, kissy face. It's really all you need.

Also, Sam has a good scholarly analysis on Matsuzaka Mania today.

Straight Ball, I Hit Very Much

Why do I get the feeling Wily Mo Pena stays in shape in the off-season by hitting balls off a tee with a Volkswagen?

Guy's ridiculous. Not one day in training camp and there are already HULK SMASH stories.

Ten bucks says he hits the Citgo sign this year.

Ah, Spring Training...that magical, pristine time of year before Wily Mo Pena has even once struck out swinging on a fat curveball on a 3-2 count with men in scoring position.

Ah, Vegas

This is the view from the tarmac at the Las Vegas airport. Suffice to say you know you're not in Kansas anymore.

Let's just say Vegas is really not my cup of tea. Let's also say I have to travel there frequently anyway--it's the old allergic to cats / cats love you analogy. And I'm talking, I'm not nuts about Vegas on a regular weekday.

So I can only imagine what it was like there this weekend, after hearing the stories that have come out of the NBA All-Star Game. Given my extensive experience with Vegas (rather than with basketball), I couldn't resist comment.

Of all the things I've heard--cabbies robbed, shootings, fights--it's the lines at the airport thing I still really can't comprehend. I heard about lines literally--literally--a mile long, which, if you've ever been through security at the Las Vegas Airport, you know is certainly possible. For those of you who have been spared the pleasure: rather than being broken up into several terminals separated by corridors, like Logan, the Vegas airport squashes all departing passengers into two lines, one on each side of a weirdly sloping main connecting space. You're either an A / B gate or a C / D gate--A, B, C, and D terminals don't separate until you're past security.

Also, since there's nothing but sprawling desert land out there, the airport building expands horizontally, not vertically. Once through security, you have to walk up to half a mile in some cases and then take a monorail to the actual terminal, if you have a high gate number.

Many's the time I've counted down the final seconds to a departing redeye in the smoking lounge at that airport, and so I know this by heart. I also know from bitter experience that you want to get to the Vegas Airport with as much lead time as you can possibly spare, because of the aforementioned architectural quirks.

But there's still something about it in general that doesn't add up to me. Namely...

Let's say you are a public works engineer for a major US city. All-Star games for major sports leagues are planned years and years in advance. Your city, being a lump of neon in the midst of otherwise uninhabitable badlands, exists solely as a venue for such events. And so years and years in advance you get a notice that the NBA All-Star Game is coming to Vegas. You know the amount of people your airport can reasonably handle. What I fail to comprehend is, given the fact that all you do in Vegas is plan and host events, and you know about this years in advance, AND literal rivers of cash are flowing through your city, why you do not:

1) Calculate the number of people your airport can reasonably handle, and restrict both incoming and outgoing flights at peak times for All-Star Game arrivals and departures.

Or, better,

2) Design a new effing airport, oh, 10 to 15 years ago when you should have, that can actually handle the foot traffic from all the airlines it serves working at maximum capacity.

Not. That. I'm. Bitter.

I have to say, though, as someone who dislikes Vegas, I've gotten a big kick this week out of sports-nut Vegas neophytes asking repeatedly, "Who the hell is Danny Gans?"

Nobody knows, man. Nobody knows.

Oh, and if you thought the Vegas experience was fun, guess which infrastructure-rich American City is gearing up for the 2008 NBA All Star Game? Why, none other than New Orleans!

I can't possibly forsee any problems with that. No sirree.

Here ends what will probably amount to the entirety of basketball coverage on this blog, ever.

The Annual Conversation

My parents are away visiting my grandparents this week. Meanwhile, my fiancee and I are housesitting. I called up my dad yesterday with a question about how the DVD player works, and we ended up having the following exchange:

MY DAD: You hear about your boy Manuela?

ME: Sigh.

MY DAD: He's a dog.

ME: Dad. He's not technically required to be there any earlier.

MY DAD: He's a dog. Everyone else is there.

ME: You know, next year when he goes to another team or retires, and David Ortiz is setting a new Major League record for intentional walks, you'll be all, "Why can't we get someone to hit behind Ortiz? What happened to Manny? And blah blah blah."

MY DAD: Dog. Total dog.

P.S. Looks like we're planning to break Jonathan again this year. Great.

Wake and Daisuke

This story has appeared in both the Globe and the Herald, that Tim Wakefield is willing to teach Daisuke the knuckleball.

For some reason I picture this lesson beginning with Daisuke standing on a mound in Ft. Myers with his translator, and then Wakefield walking up, ball already in a knuckleball grip, and beginning to speak in fluent Japanese. Somehow my IBW dictates that Tim Wakefield is fluent in Japanese, a fact unknown to all until this knuckler lesson.

I can see it so clearly--Matsuzaka blinking, trying to absorb both the lesson on throwing the butterfly pitch and the fact that Tim Wakefield has flawless pronunciation.

Pitchers and catchers, and some ugliness

Saint Theo? Boston.com has a delightful-as-always photo gallery of pitchers and catchers...

Last night I thought my lips were going to fall off from the cold as I wandered around Copley Square, but pitchers and catchers reported yesterday, and so spring has officially sprung. I'm off to surf for more cool stuff, and I'll update this post accordingly.

The Globe photo galleries are practically a flip book of Daisuke Matsuzaka's every moment in Ft. Myers since Friday. I bet the other guys are glad he's taking some of the scrutiny off them. I bet Daisuke's glad (at least during this first circus) that he doesn't speak English.

It was very interesting to watch the video of Daisuke's press conference on this Globe page...I feel pretty bad for the translator, as the reporters ask three questions in one run-on sentence for her to translate.

In the article below that video, Amalie Benjamin characterizes it as "a press conference that showed a sly sense of humor to go along with an engaging personality that hardly required an understanding of Japanese." So far I've definitely picked up on the sense of humor also, and his body language in every photo and video I've seen, sea of flashbulbs or no, has looked relaxed and friendly. I admire the way he's standing up to the pressure, and I'm rooting for him already. Also, I have to say that smile has got to be second only to Big Papi's on the team.

Further pictures: I cannot get over Jonathan. With the big crosseyed grin and the high white socks and the apparent mullet.

Maybe this is Youkilis' strategy for staying incognito over the off-season; I recall he showed up with this scary facial growth last year.

Nothing says "THE RED SOX SEASON HAS BEGUN" like this photo. It's like I plumb forgot in the darkness of winter that Jason Varitek was still out there in the world, still being the stately Captain that he is...and this photo was a pleasant reminder that hey, yeah, there's still Jason Varitek to look forward to this year. Behind the plate, anyway. I hope his bat will be different from last year.

***

Meanwhile, however...

I seriously wasn't going to write any more about Keith Foulke, but I saw this in one of Google's 311 news articles on his "surprise" retirement, and couldn't resist pointing it out:

The Indians, whose slide from 93 wins in 2005 to 78 wins and a fourth-place finish last season was tied to a dreadful bullpen, signed Foulke to a one-year, $5 million contract in January.

The club would have had to honor that deal if Foulke had reported to camp and then retired.

"He didn't want to disappoint the organization or his teammates," general manager Mark Shapiro said, praising Foulke's integrity.

Remember how that possibly-ironically-intended comment about "the first and fifteenth of the month" got Foulke such a thorough excoriation before he left? I sure as hell do.

Sometimes, like I said then and I'll say it again, actions really do speak louder than words. Really. Everyone who ever called Foulke a money-grubbing, unlikeable son of a bitch from the remove of their Barcalounger after he won us a World Series should really take a look at that and think about it.

"He was so miserable last year," Josh Beckett said yesterday. "He doesn't like being hurt. So, in that aspect, no, not at all [surprised]. My locker was right next to his last year. I knew he was dying inside.

"I think his elbow, I think his back, and his knees [were hurting him]. I think his knees were just killing him. He couldn't walk, he couldn't run. And pitching was just a pain in his butt." (Globe)

The guy was in pain all year and it's only now we're really hearing about that aspect of it. He didn't piss and moan, though he could have. He never once pointed out the shittiness of his treatment by some Boston fans in lieu of the 2004 season. I mean, bottom line is, this was a guy in tremendous physical pain who still had to go out in public and try to make his living with a broken body, and some of my fellow fans responded to this by mocking him. I don't know that I'm ever not going to be bitter about that.

I shouldn't let it get to me this much, because you can't change what other people think, but it drives me nuts whenever I read someone writing about Foulke's retirement who can't resist a snide mention of the "Johnny from Burger King" comment or to label him "cantankerous". The guy literally paid for our World Series victory with his career. With his livelihood. And yet, as Boston watches him ride off into retirement, there are still some among us so ungrateful as to bring up some stupid, offhand comment he made once. I just can't stand it when I hear it. So there's that.

I've been thinking also about whether or not I should even mention the subject I am about to in fact go ahead and mention, because I don't want to fan the flames. But I read on Jere's blog yesterday that apparently Deadspin and BDD have picked up on meme expressed on a blog that was written yesterday (and, actually, linked by its author in my comments section yesterday, if you're curious) about Daisuke being...get ready for it...fat.

Yep. The guy hasn't thrown a single pitch and already some among us are grasping at straws to find something wrong with him. It's like my dad said to me once: "Around here, we live for a guy to strike out in a crucial situation in May against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, so we can dog him for it the rest of the season."

Our team went out and spent $100 million to bring us this sizzling young pitching prospect all the way from Japan, a prospect hotly sought by other teams which will also bring us some much-needed revenue in the Japanese market and so maybe ticket prices won't be so impossible...and apparently because in one photograph he doesn't resemble an NFL runningback, he's fat and he'll suck.

It's not like I can say I'm all lily white in this, either. I've been pessimistic and unfairly critical of players in the past myself. And while I may disagree, there's nothing wrong with legitimate, considered criticism of a team's strategies or a player's performance. But a knee-jerk label of "fat" being slapped on the newest crown jewel of our pitching rotation, when he isn't even fucking fat...

Like I said, I don't want to fan the flames of this any more than it already has been. But at the same time, I think there's a benefit to making my displeasure about it known. At the very least, it will hopefully counterbalance at least one of the people who have apparently done lost their minds out there this week.

And let's hope (perhaps foolishly) that that's the last of it.