Bill Lee Cares Not About Your Opinions

An excellent idea for anyone looking to create an Internet sensation: put a microphone in front Bill Lee for a few minutes, give him a starting point, and let him hold forth. Kinda like what happened at the Red Sox Hall of Fame induction ceremony a few days ago. I had read Lee's Little Red (Sox) Book a few years ago, but I had forgotten about how much Lee does not give a crap about what anyone thinks about him: he's here to speak his mind and be clever, all at the same time. Does Lee blog at all? Because if not, he really should.

A few life lessons from The Spaceman:

• Winning is everything. No, really.
  
• When marrying Canadians, make sure the first one is cold before moving on to the second one.
• The Boston media gets the New York media's sloppy seconds.
• We should all be grateful to star players for gracing us with their presence, no matter what the result.

After watching this video, my friend Fred had a good point: Lee's vitriol about Manny may be a bit unfounded, but it's a comment on the long-held Red Sox tradition of crapping on star players when they leave town. After doing a quick mental tally, I can only think of two stars who escaped the pariah treatment when they left the Sox: Williams (he got while playing, instead) and Yaz, who both left because they retired. But Fisk, Lee, Pedro, Damon, Nomar, Manny...they either suffered the Vader force choke from management or the rabid dog attack of the fan base on their way out. It's not a particularly pleasant legacy to contemplate.

Watching History Unawares

I was in the gym this morning, pounding away at one of the elliptical machines, when a TV broadcasting one of YES's classic games caught my eye: Boston versus New York, clearly at Fenway. A date flash across the 22-inch screen; from 15 feet away, I thought I saw June, 1972. The score read 5 to 3 in favor of New York. 'Odd choice for a classic game,' I thought, but settled in to watch as someone (Fisk, as it turns out) hit a single that sent Yaz to second. I knew the Red Sox would end up losing this game - it's YES, after all - but it seemed like a good piece of diversionary history: intellectually interesting, but ultimately unimportant.

Not long after, Fred Lynn knocked in Yaz with a single to left. Hobson flew out to right for the second out and with runners on first and second, George Scott came to the plate. I knew Scott was a big part of the '67 team (something I used to help write off my growing confusion about why I knew the names of so many of the players on a team that supposedly played a good 15 years before I started watching baseball); I'd learned more about him after digging up his card from a box of baseball cards I'd gotten from my grandfather. 'Boomer,' I thought. 'Right-handed power-hitter in the classic slugger mold. Let's see what he can do.'

Not much, as it turns out. Watching Boomer swing was a bit like watching someone built like David Ortiz swing like Dustin Pedroia: monster cuts with a backswing so fierce it spun him out of the batters box, with none of Pedroia's twitch to help him catch up to the ball. Gossage nailed him to the wall in three pitches and the game cut to commercial.

YES skipped the top of the ninth; the Yankees singled, but couldn't put anything together against Andy Hassler. Rubbing a little forshadowing salt in the wound, one of the commercials was for the replay of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS; the TV broadcast the Aaron Boone homerun and I suffered a chest spasm. Five years and two championships later and that game still rubs a little raw.

Dwight Evans started out the bottom of the ninth with a flyout to left; Rick Burleson walked. Jerry Remy came to the plate and all of the sudden, the thought that had been lurking in the back of my mind, the realization that - as those of you who followed the Sox in the 70s have no doubt figured out by now - this game didn't take place in 1972. I was pretty sure Jerry Remy wasn't playing in the majors in 1972 and even if he was, he was out in California, not in Boston. Remy singled, Jim Rice came to the plate with the tying run on second, and YES flashed the game date on the screen again. Straining my eyes, I finally saw what had eluded me for the past 15 minutes through the blindness of distance and - perhaps - a willfull decision not to see. The date on the screen was October 2, 1978.

You know the rest, of course: Rice sac-flied Burleson to third for the second out and Yastrzemski, in what must have seemed like a microcosm of the whole season, popped up to third, ending the game and stranding the Sox in second place. Bucky Dent would go on to become a byword for Red Sox futility by virtue of having homered the winning runs in the seventh; the Sox didn't see the top side of third place until 1986 and have yet to match their 99 win total in the thirty years since. As the Yankees celebrated around home plate, I climbed off the elliptical machine. The historical significance of this supposedly unimportant game had suddenly hit a little too close to home.

Josh Beckett Needs Tommy John Surgery

Best of luck to Yaz on his recovery.

You know what I love? Some good fear mongering (that's why I chose that inflammatory, if potentially misleading title). Take a potentially bad situation (Josh Beckett and his tingling fingers), throw in a worrisome lead up (Beckett goes less than three innings in his prior start, then admits to the press that his fingers are numb), a tension-filled situation (race to the playoffs, problems with the ace of the staff with the well-deserved big game hunter reputation, and an unsure position in the AL East and Wild Card races), and a lack of solid communication by the team about Beckett's true condition, mix 'em all together, and guess what: you've got a concerned fan base. What's a good paper to do to address the needs of their audience and maybe stir up some ad-selling controversy at the same time? Why, interview an expert, of course!

Dr. Robert Shalvoy of University Orthopedics in Providence does not know the specifics of Beckett's numbness, but he fully understands the ramifications of the pitcher's symptoms.
[...]
Shalvoy, who obviously has not examined the pitcher, said normally these types of symptoms take six weeks to go away.
[...]
Shalvoy, who has preformed ulnar collateral ligament surgeries, described Beckett's issue as "prime symptoms" for a pitcher who has needed Tommy John surgery to repair the damage.

So, to review: this doctor says that a patient he hasn't examined may need Tommy John surgery even though he's only had access to the same minimal symptom reports that the rest of us have seen? Really? I realize the guy is an expert with an impressive resume, but a complete diagnosis of a complex ligament problem from a TV interview seems a little hard to swallow. And really: who prints an opinion like Shalvoy's without any sort of counterpoint? Fear mongering, man, I tell ya.

A Strange Coincidence

A couple of weeks ago, I was up at my parents' house in the Boston area, digging through their bookshelves for new reading material, when I came across the 1990 edition of The Red Sox Reader, a collection of writings on the Sox by a number of famous journalists and authors who are either Red Sox fans or fans of one particular player (mainly Williams or Yaz). Intrigued (it was the same day as the Fenway Tour, so I was in the perfect nostalgic mood), I dug in to immediate reward: pages of excellent writing on all of the noble heartbreaks of the past 100 years of Red Sox history, palatable without pain (I realized) only because of the fortunate combination of 2004 and the unbounded hope of spring. Not all of the selections are gems, but the inclusion of selections like John Updike's farewell to Ted Williams, Roger Angell's deconstruction of the 1978 season and David Halberstam's epitaph to the final fateful game of 1949 make this book a winner and well worth the read.

A couple of days ago, I reached Thomas Boswell's piece, "The Greatest Game Ever Played," a blow-by-blow coverage of every up-and-down moment of the one game playoff on October 1, 1978. All of the sudden, one page jumped off the page and hit me square between the eyes:

The Keep Your Sox On faithful sat silent in their fireman caps decorated with the names of their undependable deities: Boomer and Butch, Soup and Scooter, Rooster and Pudge, Eck and Louie, Big Foot and Spaceman, Dewey and Yaz.

Half an hour later, after an untold number of fevered Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia searches covering every combination of Keep Your Sox On, rooting group and fireman helmets I could think of, I was still puzzled. Who were these fans in their helmets, sporting the same moniker as my blog 26 years before the name popped into my head? Was this coincidence a case of Jungian collective unconsciousness, or had I encountered the phrase earlier in my life as a fan and buried it in my subconscious, where it waited for the right moment to bubble to the surface? More importantly, does anyone out there know anything about this group of fans? If so, put it in the comments section; I want to know the deal.