Posts Tagged ‘Marco Scutaro’
Happy Birthday Kyle! (Original photo taken by Tex @ redsoxdeepintheheartoftexas.blogspot.com.)
I wondered this online last night and I’ll wonder it again here: Yesterday all the professionals were talking or writing about how the blowout on Tuesday night was proof of Tampa Bay’s dominance over the Red Sox. Jerry Remy went so far as to say (before the start of last night’s game) that it was proof the Ray’s were worthy of the playoffs and the Red Sox weren’t.
Over the last three games, the Red Sox handed the Rays two blowout defeats. Let’s forget about the standings for a moment and focus on that. If you are of the mind that the blowout on Tuesday (when the Sox lost) had some kind of significance for the season what do the other two games signify?
Last night, Tim Wakefield beat Matt Garza (becoming the oldest player to win a game for the Red Sox, overtaking Dennis Eckersley). Last night Marco Scutaro hit two home runs and went 4-5. Josh Reddick had three hits last night while Lars Anderson got his first Major League hit and RBI. Adrian Beltre, Victor Martinez and David Ortiz all also hit home runs. The Red Sox are nine games out of first place and 6.5 games out of wild card contention with 22 games left in the season. It’s not impossible but it’s, according to all the experts, improbable. Even with the improbability of it all, we still watch and we still hope and we still get excited over games like last night.
Three years ago today, I was on an Amtrak train heading home to Boston while a group of my friends stayed behind in Baltimore to watch a Sunday afternoon Sox/Orioles game. I began receiving excited text messages from my friends because during batting practice they approached Kyle Snyder and got him to pose for a picture with Steve T Ferret. All the specifics aren’t important but Steve and Kyle had become linked in the minds of my gang of friends and a photo of Kyle posing with him was what we called our “Holy Grail”. As you all can imagine, I was disappointed to have missed the moment in person, not just for the opportunity to see Kyle with Steve but because that day that my friends engaged Kyle in conversation and got him to pose with Steve also happened to be Kyle’s birthday. So the photo at the top of this page marks the first time Steve met Kyle as well as Kyle’s 30th birthday. (Steve would go on to meet Kyle again in 2008. Kyle has been quite the good sport in regard to Steve, as witnessed by his autographing the above photo TO Steve.)
No way I could let the day pass without a shout out to Kyle. Hope he has a happy birthday and his rehab is going well!
There are only six games in MLB today and only two taking place in the American League (the Jays being the only team in the AL East to play tonight) so we get a bit of a day of rest before we jump back in with a slew of west coast games. Rest up, folks!
Welcome back to the rotation, Wake. (Photo taken by me in 2005)
I really enjoy these mornings when watching “Breakfast with the Sox” is something I go out of my way to do. (When the Sox lose, I don’t watch the replays, hell I usually don’t even watch the post-game show!)
As an aside before I start bragging on Clay, Based on feedback I’ve been receiving the past few weeks after each live chat, I’m banging around the idea of a message board connected to the blog as a place where folks can talk baseball (or just random daytime talk before games!) and have game day discussions (with a chat room attached as well). Folks seem a little reticent to use the comments for chatting and some suggestions have come in about having a discussion board to visit. Not sure what the response would be from the masses, though, so I thought I’d throw the idea out there and see what you all think. Shoot me an email or leave a note in the comments section and let me know what you think (emails would be great since then I’d have YOUR email address and could send out invites for the board if folks are so inclined). What say you, folks?
We lost Greg Montalbano in 2009. Kelly O'Connor took this photo of him at the Lowell Spinner's Alumni Dinner in January 2009 (Used with permission)
Just a note of warning: This entry is long and although I want it to be all-encompassing, I’m sure I’ve missed few things. But this is pretty much how I remember 2009!
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2009 was a fairly eventful year for me personally in both the good and bad categories. Sadly more bad than good which is probably why I initially avoided writing any kind of recap for the blog. But while I was writing my recap of the Red Sox decade (and I’ll have that up as soon as I finish it!) I realized I should probably write something about the final year of the decade as well. So here goes.
January: I started blogging at WEEI.com. Looking back on my entries for this month, I’m genuinely surprised I found so much to write about (it didn’t stop new readers from complaining that I was writing “drivel” though. Should have been a sign!). Personal highlights in January: The ongoing Jason Varitek saga, the signing of Rocco Baldelli, Kyle Snyder getting picked up by the Mets, the beginning of the MLB Network and Jim Rice finally gets voted into the Hall of Fame!
February: Bombshell of bombshells for MLB. Selena Roberts exposes Alex Rodriguez as a steroid user. The MLB Network cuts its teeth on this one and, unlike Peter Gammons and ESPN, doesn’t disappoint with their coverage. Unafraid of losing access to the players (again, unlike Peter Gammons or ESPN), they go full throttle on this story and introduce us to their newest addition to the network: Bob Costas. I wrote a lot about MLBN in 2009 and a bit about Sl*ppy. I would have written much less about the two, most likely, had this story not broken. Personal highlights in February: The Caribbean World Series on MLBN (I was genuinely surprised at how much I enjoyed it!), Truck Day, pitchers and catchers reporting and Joe Torre’s book about the Yankees.
Chapter 10: The End of the Curse. When asked by Regis Philbin the other day what happened to the Yankees over the past 7 years, Joe responded “The Red Sox happened”. That will go down as possibly my favorite Red Sox/Yankee-related quote ever.
March: I spent a lot of March writing ‘rants’ and pointing folks toward baseball-related Twitter accounts. Must have been resting up for April! Personal highlight in March: The WBC. I spent a lot of time ranting about players getting hurt and how I didn’t care who won only to be totally sucked into it by the end.
April: The beginning of the season! Lots of liveblogging and picking up more WEEI readers (with mixed results!). Personal highlights in April: Going to both Sox/Mets exhibition games at CitiField, attending Opening Day at Fenway and high-fiving JD Drew and Hideki Okajima during their introductions, being at Fenway for the walk-off win against the Yankees, Jacoby Ellsbury stealing home on Andy Pettitte, Tim Wakefield taking a no-hitter into the 8th inning (thus setting the table for his All Star selection), watching Jonathan Van Every pitch while Javier Lopez floundered in right field then eventually getting DFA’d (watched on television, not in person), the Patriots Day game where Luke Scott got all pissy and some idiot fan threw a ball onto the field and “Toeing the Rubber” getting nominated for a New England Sports Blog Award in the category “Best Red Sox Blog”. Relatively speaking, a great month except for one thing that really hit the baseball world hard and made the month miserable: the death of Nick Adenhart.
But I don’t cry because of any personal connection I have to Nick. I don’t cry because a future baseball star is dead. I cry because parents lost a son today. Many people lost a friend. And the world lost someone who could have potentially been great. Not just at baseball but at life. No drunken ass has the right to take that away from us. This doesn’t “put things into perspective” for me. I hate when people say that. I’m forty years old for God’s sake, I’ve seen enough death and tragedy in my life to have proper perspective, thank you. I don’t watch baseball and think that what goes on down on that field is life or death and more important than anything else in my life. I’d argue that most sports fans, even if they act like they have no perspective, have exactly that. Baseball is an outlet to forget about the realities of life for a few hours.
May: Getting to see Daniel Bard’s first Major League appearance (after having seen him pitch in Pawtucket) was very special. Finding out that Jerry Remy was recovering from cancer was sad and a little frightening. Personal highlights in May: Seeing Kyle Snyder with the Bisons at Pawtucket, Javier Lopez signing Steve the Ferret’s “Lopez” jersey (also at Pawtucket), Aubrey Huff fistpumping to Joba Chamberlain, appearing on “The Baseball Show” on Comcast SportsNet, crying (literally crying) over Big Papi’s first home run of the season, getting to meet metsgrrl and “paloozaing” with a huge group of people I love during the Mets/Sox series at Fenway.
Yesterday was an amazing day spent with friends (most of whom I haven’t seen in quite a while or hadn’t met yet!). There are many amazing tales to tell (but not here!) – my favorite being when our friend Susan noted that we could start singing “O Canada” except no one knows the words past “O Canada!”. Standing up and singing loudly and proudly, a group of us proved her wrong. That our serenade didn’t get us thrown out still kind of surprises me.
June: This month brought us the end of interleague play, the end of Jonathan Van Every’s season (thanks to knee surgery), Tim Wakefield hitting ten victories with his torn labrum, John Smoltz making us all wonder why we were so excited to have him on the team while Dusty Brown makes his major league debut. Personal highlights for June: Derek Lowe returning to Fenway with the Braves, Nick Green’s walkoff against those same Braves, sitting in Fenway during a mind-numbing rain delayed game that turned into a loss for the Sox (okay, that one is a lowlight, really) and the Sox capping off 7 wins in a row against the Yankees with an eighth.
MARCO! (Photo lifted from Kelly O'Connor/sittingstill.net and used with permission)
Sometimes moves are made on the team that make you (or me!) happier than they probably should. The signing of Marco Scutaro is one of those moves. I think he’s a good player who will fit in well with the Red Sox…but I’m also just looking forward to his playing in Fenway and the Sox fans greeting him with “Marco!” “Scutaro!”…I’m easily entertained.
Before I go on about Marco, I just have to say this…someday I’m going to buy a hard copy of the Boston Globe just so I can set it on fire. After rumors spread that the Sox were thinking about moving Dustin Pedroia to short (based on Pedroia saying it had been brought up) folks at the Globe are writing things like “The Sox have come to their senses” in regard to keeping Pedie at second (in the same article that he wrote the sense line, in the paragraph BEFORE it, Nick Cafardo admits a “Sox source” told him it was a “last resort”.
This stuff frustrates the hell out of me. You don’t come to your senses from a last resort. You make a decision that you wanted to make that would ensure you didn’t have to USE your last resort. But, no, Cafardo has to make it out that the Red Sox lost their minds collectively and were shaken into sense by the realization that Marco Scutaro was a free agent. It always has to be about how bad the decision making is in the front office, right Nicky? (In the same piece he gets his dig in that the Red Sox “botched” things with Alex Gonzalez. Yeah, that’s what they did. Gonzalez is two years younger than Scutaro, but Scutaro’s season last year was a bit more impressive than AGon’s so I can see the Sox wanting to go by the most recent past performance of a player to fill a position they only expect the player to hold for a short time (2 years with an option for a third is what Marco got). Sure folks are arguing that last year’s season for Scutaro was an anomaly but it isn’t like Scutaro OR Gonzalez was ever known as a player headed to the HoF (nor are either player considered terrible). I can’t think of a shortstop I like watching more than Alex Gonzalez, but that doesn’t mean letting him go because you don’t think he was worth the money he’d be getting and were hoping to get him for less means that anything was “botched”. I dig me Alex Gonzalez but I don’t feel like the Sox are settling by taking on Marco Scutaro.
Anyway, I’m happy about the signing and I’m not getting the negativity from some folks who think every signing needs to be a blockbuster. Signing a veteran shortstop makes me happy. The infield is, once again, set and it’s now something that doesn’t need to be focused on. Is he going to repeat the season he had last year? I sure hope so but I’m not holding my breath. That doesn’t mean he won’t be effective and a solid presence in the infield. And, really, folks, just because the Sox signed Scutaro doesn’t mean they aren’t going to get Bay back or sign Holliday or trade for Roy Halladay (three complaints I’ve seen around). True blockbuster deals don’t get made in a vacuum. It’s nice to have the little pieces fit together before you take on the big ones.
Who am I kidding? I’m just excited because I think I finally have my first binky since Kyle Snyder and Mike Timlin left Boston (and he’s not a pitcher – go figure!).
