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March 27, 2007
A locally tinged spin around the baseball world . .
THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR: What's better than the last week of spring training? As long as your team is relatively healthy, you can revel in its March successes, dismiss its failures as exhibition gobbledegook, rave about the young studs who made a good impression and dismiss as unnecessary the ones who didn't. (Like, say, Craig Hansen for instance.) But Seth Mnookin, whose insights on the Red Sox aren't limited to his blog, tells us why we should be excited with a detailed and cogent analysis of how the Red Sox traveled from the last week of September to the last week of March in this month's Boston Magazine. In the midst of it all, though, one line shot out at me: All it took was one World Series win for the Fenway Faithful’s mindset to shift from one that always expected disaster to one that felt entitled to perpetual success. While I wouldn't argue its not true, local reaction to the playoff loss to the Colts convinced me this winter that that sentence would be far more accurate if you substitued "three Super Bowl championships" for "one World Series win" and "Fenway" to "Gillette" . . . Also pumped and jacked about the upcoming season is our old friend Bill Simmons, who talks about the Sox in the ninth question of his mailbag.
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: Strange, isn't it? After their playoff loss to the Tigers last October, Joe Torre appeared to be a dead man walking . . . at least as far as continuing as Yankee manager was concerned. Now he's letting it be known he wants to stay in the job.
WORDS OF WISDOM: Want to know why I love Bill James? Read the last answer in this interview with the Shea Faithful blog, which starts off as a defense of the wild card but quickly shifts to a greater philosophical point. Quick nugget: That's the real problem with the NBA . . . the best team is going to win in the long run, and everybody knows it . . . therefore, why play hard, why dive for the ball on the floor, why fight for the rebound, why sacrifice your body to score a point, when you ultimately can't win. No sport can survive if the best team always wins. Read the whole quote to keep it in context, but he's absolutely right.
OLD FRIENDS: Looks like Todd Walker is out of a job in San Diego. He was a key member of the 2003 Sox that took us on a wild ride, broke our hearts in the end, but laid the groundwork for the glories of 2004; I, for one, will always remember him fondly. Not that he's finished by any stretch, because he's still a good left-handed bat and someone will probably pick him up . . . Guillermo Mota is back. If you're wondering where he's been, you haven't been paying attention to baseball's burgeoning drug scandal . . . There are no fond memories locally of Jay Payton, not after the crass and calculated way he schemed to escape Boston in 2005, so, cold as it sounds, there aren't many tears being shed for his latest piece of misfortune.
-- ART MARTONE
Posted by Art Martone 
at 7:09 AM | Permalink
