Things continue to move along. I spoke with a St. Louis ESPN affiliate today. Still a very passionate fan base out there and it was pretty cool of them to act as excited as they did about the potential of playing there.

I also wanted to mention something else. For anyone interested please just assume things are happening with Boston without me mentioning it. Theo and I have spoken more than once but there will be no details or updates of these discussions. I am in contact with the Sox and talking.

Received a call from another of the teams on our list yesterday and played phone tag with 2 teams that had made prior inquiries as well.

Funny how things shake out. Shonda is always trying to get me to ‘clean up’, as I’m a collector. I hate throwing things away. Found a stack of papers yesterday, that I didn’t even look at until this morning, and in the stack was all of my notes and documents from the winter of 2003 negotiations with the Sox. I will talk to Theo at some point soon and if he and Mr Lucchino are ok with it I will post the letter the Sox sent to me, ahead of their visit. I think it’s incredibly insightful to the front office and how they approach dealing with players. It’s certainly different than most other teams I’ve played with.

Update! I wanted to add something at the top here in case he’s reading. Sgt. Michael Grimm of the 5th Ranger Training Battalion sent me a Rangers Lead the Way hat, and T-shirt along with an awesome letter. Thank you Sgt. Grimm and every other man and woman serving in the Armed Forces of the United States and every other freedom seeking country on this planet. You make this world a better place! Hello as well to SOSH’er Baghdad Jamie and his wife Kristine! Hope you got a chance to see the post game shout out! 

So the first day of Free Agency begins. I cannot divulge names because the teams involved asked that I not do so at this point, but the first day resulted in initial contact with 3 teams. Kind of weird to be doing this with no agent but at the same time pretty cool. All three discussions were very informal, with the clubs expressing interest in potentially working together next year. Two of the teams were on the list of teams mentioned earlier, one was not.

I made it clear to all three teams that my intent was to do whatever I could to resolve this and remain in Boston for the final year of my career. The only question asked beyond the initial conversations were to my desires about the contract, and whether or not I truly wanted a one year deal or was looking for more. Read the rest of this entry »

Hard to believe that after 21 years in professional baseball, the first day of free agency would come when I was 40 years old. I’ve not been a free agent for one day of my career before today…… Read the rest of this entry »

“God has his fingerprints all over this game.”

I stole it. Clint Hurdle said that about game 4 and it resonated with me all day long. What Aaron Cook and Jon Lester went through to get to this point, to get the ball, was God’s work. What they did after “Play Ball” was awe inspiring in a million ways.

Hate to see the cheap shots taken by fans and writers at what went down over the last 5 days with regards to the series and Colorado’s team. They may not use it as an excuse, I certainly don’t expect to hear it from Helton, Holliday Hurdle or any others, but the 8 days between games, in my opinion, had a negative effect on them. I still believe we are the best team in the world, and 8 days or not we would have won, but I think it did impact them in many different ways. 8 days off and then you step in the box and have to face the best pitcher on the planet? Hats off to the NL Champions for redefining comeback and “against all odds”. What they did to even get to the 2007 World Series needs to be etched in stone. I think it will be lost over the next few months because of the outcome of the Series but it shouldn’t be, they did it with class and style. They played the game right and hard. Seeing true, old school, blue collar guys like Todd Helton finally getting into the World Series after putting up Hall worthy numbers his whole career is a cool thing. Read the rest of this entry »

We landed in Denver around 4:45am this morning. Needless to say the flight felt a lot shorter after the win than it otherwise might have.

Papajima, that’s mine. It was that or Okibon. Whatever you want to call it those two guys, along with the HORRIBLY unheralded Mike Lowell, were pretty much completely responsible for the 2-1 game 2 win. If you go back and watch Okie’s 2 1/3 innings I think you’ll agree that it was pretty much as perfect and dominating a relief appearance as you could ever expect or imagine on the October stage. Paps was flat out dominating in finishing it up too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to Josh Beckett, 2007 ALCS MVP. I don’t doubt for a second that we don’t get here if he doesn’t clutch up with arguably the most dominating post season start in my lifetime. So many guys came up huge but the awesome part of this was that I don’t think at any time after game 4 did we think about the deficit as anything other than a number.

After game 4 it got very easy in the sense that there was zero gray area, it was win or go home. That’s not to make it sound trivial but game 5 was truly the first time this entire season when we had our backs to the wall for real, and the team responded as a championship team has to, and will.

Read the rest of this entry »

They may have been banged up, no denying that, but regardless of the 3-0 result that’s a good team. To say anything else diminishes the incredible job done by a lot of people, some not wearing uniforms.

Regular season or post season the guy that starts a series on the mound has a chance to set a tone that opponents can’t shake off, or that gives momentum to his team that carries over. Josh’s effort in game 1 certainly did that for me. I still think that was one of the most dominating games I’ve ever seen pitched at any level. I think that game put them on their heels (which any loss will do in game 1 of a best of 5) in ways that a 7-5 or 5-3 game might not have. Read the rest of this entry »

The resident “expert” at EEI was throttled once again by a dumb jock. The third week of the season saw these lineups..

  Read the rest of this entry »

Contrary to some local beliefs, we didn’t fold and we didn’t screw it up. We made the post season. Not to belittle any of the other major sports, more because I never played hockey or basketball seriously, but I can’t imagine a more grinding schedule than the MLB schedule. Not really for pitchers, though I certainly feel a lot different in September than I did in February, but more the position players.

If you get to the dance and play all the way through you pretty much play close to 200 games in about 225 days. Most of those off days are spent traveling or at the park receiving treatment or working on your swing or something. Deion Sanders and Brian Jordan, both All Pro NFL players and damn good major leaguers said that the ML season and the NFL season weren’t even close. The MLB schedule was 10 times the grind of the NFL schedule. It’s not any one thing, but the fact is, aches, pains and bruises aside, you suit up every single day and compete against the best players in the world once every twenty four hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Ouch. I certainly envisioned the start on Sunday ending in a much different manner than it did, but it didn’t. For those second guessing anything, from me being in the game to my throwing a ‘hanging’ fastball, don’t. At 69 pitches I was fine, it came down to two horribly executed split fingered fastballs that both got whacked. I had Jason in a spot to do a bunch of different things to end the AB, and didn’t. Same with Derek. Two strikes and a litany of options, none of them being a split hanging on the inside corner.

As for the Toronto series all I will say is we ran into two guys that couldn’t have been more dominating. McGowen had as good a stuff as anyone we’ve seen this year. He was hitting the upper 90’s most of the night and his slider/cutter was hovering between 90-95mph from the first inning on. Burnett, well when AJ’s on he can dominate any lineup any day. Read the rest of this entry »