Cursed To First - Sox and Pats forever.

Jose Iglesias and the Play of the Weekend

With being a football fanatic to distract me through most of the winter, I'm not normally pining for baseball as much as the next Sox fiend by the time pitchers and catchers report.

After that, though, it's quite a different story.

For me, the wait from 'pitchers and catchers report' to 'actually playing real baseball' is the most interminable of the sports year. What few games are broadcast this early in the season are utterly meaningless -- utterly. Inferences and predictions are equally meaningless this time of year.

Even if you tune in to see the familiar faces, you won't always find them. What real joy and intrigue there is to take from Spring Training, once we've moved past the first-day-of-school feeling of the initial reports to the Fort, can usually be found in the minor leaguers invited to camp (provided you're unhealthily obsessed, anyway).

This year, though, there's not much new there, either. As Don Orsillo and Peter Gammons rather drily pointed out, by the end of last season, more than a few of the "bench guys" who played last night -- Nava, Kalish, et al -- actually already have been regulars.

There is one player in camp this year, though, who is a real novelty to see. Still far too young to be on the big club's radar last year, no matter how dire the injury-plagued straits they found themselves in, this player has nonetheless been talked up since he first defected from Cuba to join the Red Sox around this time last year. And during his appearance in last night's exhibition, at least, 20-year-old shortstop Jose Iglesias did not disappoint.

His best play, and arguably the best play of them all in this weekend's contests with the Yankees, came in the bottom of the seventh last night. A chopping grounder bounded toward short, and then...

Red Sox Spring Training 2010: Be Still My Heart

I can't even be angry at the moment that my TiVo didn't record the game, and I got back home from dinner out to find I had to resort to NESN and Web highlights to catch up on the Sox v. college kids action tonight. Because I still got to see even a moment of never-before-seen Red Sox baseball (tm Red), and right now, that's enough to put a spring in my step.

Meanwhile, the upside to seeing just the NESN highlights of the BC game was that it cut through the sleepiness of an exercise that was less a contest than a circus of starry-eyed college kids getting tossed like raw meat to the pros; seeing just the best moments gave me a straight shot of good baseball.

Boof Bonser, with his plush Youk-esque goatee and broad shoulders, reminds me somewhat of a teddy bear. But his pitches were fierce, including a breaking ball to send an Eagle down swinging in the first.

Later that same inning, Dustin Pedroia dropped a precise, neat little hit into right field, then rolled into second shaking his head and laughing, presumably at an error in the outfield that had allowed him the extra base.

It was the second time in two days I'd seen Pedroia's grin (the first on a 2009 highlights montage showed Saturday, and God knows I love me a nice, sappy, music/baseball montage). There's something invigorating about that expression of his, eyes alight, mischief bubbling over behind his smile.

He was audacious as a rookie and insouciant as one of the relative newcomers to the team in previous years, but now that he and fellow Sox farm product Kevin Youkilis have coalesced as the core of the Sox infield, there seems a more relaxed, somehow even cockier air about him -- at home on the infield dirt, chuckling at the youngsters bumbling around behind him on the grass.

Not to be outdone, Pedroia's protege, Jose Iglesias, also earned a spot in the highlight reel with a bases-clearing double and pickoff throw for an out at second, both in the fourth inning. And that pickoff throw, it turns out, had come from none other than Jason Varitek. 

You mean...I actually enjoy hearing from the CHB, and I get to see Tek actually get a runner, any runner, out at second base -- all in the same day?

Will wonders never cease.