Cursed To First - Sox and Pats forever.

When the man comes around

Kevin Millar, originally uploaded by avraham bank.

Forget that mess of a Daisuke start last night. What I want to talk about is Kevin Millar.

Millar's a member of that 2003-2004 club that will probably always have a unique place in my heart. There have been few Sox I haven't loved in one way or another, and even fewer I haven't liked at all. But the lineup Millar rattled off last night on the pregame show, tossing off names like Billy Mueller, Trot Nixon, Mark Bellhorn -- even the names brought a smile to my face.

Apparently Millar's been getting mixed reviews after his first appearance as a NESN analyst. Me, I don't care what anyone else says, I want him and the Eck on heavy rotation -- preferably together -- forever more. I want Millar to be groomed as Rem-Dawg's heir starting now.

He's still a little green -- someone needs to talk to him about slowing down his twangy auctioneer's speech pattern, for example -- but his ebullience is contagious whether he's on a baseball field or in a broadcast booth. And he has a lexicon to rival Eckersley's ("circling the pillows" was my favorite expression of his last night) along with an audacious sense of humor to rival Pedroia (referring to Joe West as "Cowboy Joe", repeatedly addressing a taken-aback Jim Rice as "Jimmy").

Maybe it's just all the 2003-2004 montages talking. Clearly I have no direct experience in broadcasting. I may be the only one who feels this way. But that was the best pre and postgame show ever, and I still left last night's debacle of a game with a smile and a spring in my step, all because of Millar's irrepressible presence.

The fine line that separates Millar's boisterousness from an Eric Byrnes-style obnoxiousness is the depth that gives his light energy ballast. At heart, there is something dead serious about Kevin Millar, for all the ribbing he dishes out and takes in turn, for all the jokes and winks and "y'alls".

That something, skillfully encapsulated in the video from MLB Tonight that's been making the rounds, is that Kevin Millar loves the game of baseball as much as anyone who's ever donned a glove or held a bat in his hand.

Lots of players talk about loving the game, and who wouldn't love being famous, rich beyond their wildest imaginings, and playing a game for a living? But Millar's love is different -- nothing has come easy to him, and he's never known that star spotlight. He clawed his way up from the St. Paul Saints, and charmed and battled his way through more than a dozen Major League seasons, all while freely admitting to anyone who asked that he was a bad player. "I don't have any of the five tools," Millar says in that video. "But the one tool that I've always felt I had in my heart is that I loved it more than anybody."

Stories of overcoming adversity are, almost by definition, widespread in the Major Leagues. And each player handles it in a different way. Pedro Martinez's inborn rage propelled him past the seeming limitations of a slight frame to become a dominant power pitcher. Dustin Pedroia's fierce, unrelenting tenacity has similarly served him. With Millar, the strength has come from his devotion, his palpable awe whenever he steps out of the dugout, the grin that spreads across his face under his eyeblack and sunglasses.

One of my most vivid memories of Millar -- perhaps the most vivid, despite its relative insignificance -- is the shot of him in the dugout after the Sox dropped the ALDS in 2005. Millar was the last to leave the bench. Tears were standing in his eyes as he bit his lip. It wasn't the loss he was upset about -- it was the fact that he knew these would be his last moments in a Sox uniform at Fenway Park.

There has always been something extra, something rare, going on behind those twinkling eyes. Watching it bubble to the surface like that -- I'll never forget the power of that image in that moment, the way Millar's cheerful veneer pulled back and revealed a true, deep, pure passion that took my breath away.

How else do you explain his return to the St. Paul Saints after his release from the Chicago Cubs this year (incredibly, his first-ever release from an MLB team)? How many other big league players, especially those with decade-plus careers, would actually do this, just for the chance to keep strapping on the cleats every day, and to work with younger players?

"[Baseball] is all I've known," Millar says against a shot of darkened Minnesota streets in the video linked above. As far as I'm concerned, whether he's on the field, in the dugout as a coach or manager, or delighting us from the press box, it's all he ever needs to know. He may not be a Hall of Famer, but that kind of heart has its own special place in the game.

Nuf Ced, Play Ball

This off-season, after the Red Sox let go of Jason Bay and the winter months flew past without directly replacing his power in the lineup, an argument began. The discussion has largely split along partisan lines in baseball's culture war between stats and gut feelings, between those who see this past offseason's moves as the philosophy of Run Prevention in action and those who see doom in a potentially diminished offense with the droughts of the previous July and October still fresh in the collective memory.

The night began heady with anticipation and a tearjerking hug between Pedro Martinez, who threw out the first pitch, and Johnny Pesky, along with fireworks and a flyover of fighter jets. A matter of hours later, the anticlimax seemed complete, with Josh Beckett heading to the showers early and the Yankees generally pissing upon the Opening Night festivities at the old ballyard. Right then, around the fifth inning, the temptation to decry Run Prevention as 2010's answer to 2003's Closer By Committee was fierce indeed.

The fourth inning had also featured Jacoby Ellsbury clanking off the Monster and missing a fly ball by about a yard in left, and the Yankees pulling off a double steal of second and home to score their fifth run after firing up the merry-go-round on Beckett, thereby giving that whole Run Prevention idea a swift kick right in the jimmies. Thus resumed, at least for a time, the chicken and egg debate that had come to define this off-season.

What I was forgetting, at that point, was that this was a Sox / Yankees game, and so there were still about six hours to go. And as usual in a Sox / Yankees game, the ensuing events would render any conclusions made and inferences drawn in the fourth or fifth inning largely irrelevant by game's end.

What the Sox offense lacked in power early on against Sabathia, they made up for in patience, wearing CC down and tearing into the Yankees bullpen by the sixth inning. When all was said and done, the same Pedroia-Martinez-Youkilis combination that buried the Twins last week in Ft. Myers sent the big man packing with Kevin Youkilis panting behind him on third, having cleared the bases with a standup triple. 

Then came Adrian Beltre, who knocked Youkilis in to tie the game and hang a fifth run on CC to match Beckett's.

In the bottom of the seventh, Dustin Pedroia was rewarded for his ability to restrain himself from planting a knuckle sandwich on Angel Hernandez (who took a page out of CB Bucknor's playbook this evening at first base) with a towering Monster shot off Chan Ho Park to tie things up again.

Damaso Marte was next out of the bullpen for the Yanks after Pedroia's blast, and once again there was Youkilis at third base, having taken it on a passed ball. Another passed ball a few pitches later sent Youk across the plate with the go-ahead run.

In the bottom of the eighth, with the table nicely set by Cameron and Scutaro, Pedroia showed up for an ass-kicking encore, delivering the ninth Sox run against Joba Chamberlain.

In the end, not many Runs were Prevented, on either side. 9-7 Sox on 12 hits. The Yankees racked up a dozen of their own. And I wonder if we'll still be arguing about this in June.