Okay…a few notes from me because I have obsessed on this enough and we still haven’t heard from Arroyo or his ‘camp’…so I’m choosing to just ignore this for an hour or two after I finish typing this.
1. I think Theo did a slimy thing. And according to a boston.com poll in which 25,000+ people have participated thus far, so do 60% of the folks who cared enough to vote. I understand the business of baseball as well as anyone, but the Red Sox didn’t have some burning need for a back-up outfielder. This wasn’t a trade that had to be made for the good of the team. This is a trade that Theo decided to make for whatever his reasons are which certainly don’t include "because we desperately needed another outfielder".
2. I never thought Bronson was anything more than mediocre on the mound. But he was flexible and he is a lot more consistent and proven than what we have in the bullpen right now (excluding Mike Timlin). My sadness and outrage at this trade isn’t that we lost the next Josh Beckett…but we lost a solid player who was great with the fans, wanted to be here and didn’t cost all that much. And we lost him, because he was naive enough to trust the front office.
3. Life will go on. I’ll still be a Red Sox fan and I’ll still cheer for my team…but I will never ‘trust’ the front office, including and especially Theo, again – and for me that is sad. I never trusted a Red Sox front office until this one – so it’s significant for me to feel this way. At least it is to me.
4. I hold none of this ‘against’ Wily Mo Pena, but going by his past numbers he has a lot to prove to me.
5. My friend Cynthia pointed out to me that if you Google Wily Mo Pena’s name and spell it wrong (with two ls), a link to a picture of him with Papi that I took last year and posted on Yahoo comes up. The Baseball Gods think they’re funny.
6. Maybe having Bronson the party animal off the team this year will bode well for the likes of Kevin Youkilis and Lenny Dinardo. That makes me sad to write, but the realist in me knows it is probably true. Doesn’t make it much easier right now, but I think it will – eventually.
7. WBC finals tonight and the Yanks play the Sox on Wednesday. Baseball goes on and I will too. Begrudgingly for a while…but I’ll survive. 🙂
and 8. My friend Lynn was one of a group of my friends who went to Spring Training last week and while there she took a picture of Bronson for me. That is the picture that accompanies this post. Thanks, Lynn!
5 comments for “This and That”