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Boston Red Sox
Scouting Report
By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
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The evolving Red Sox will need more high-rise performances
from key players like shortstop Nomar
Garciaparra.
(Jed Jacobsohn/Allsport)
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The
letters
dribble in from all over New England, one or two a week,
reminders to Dan Duquette that he is not merely the general
manager of a baseball team but also the keeper of a
spiritual flame. A favorite letter, which he keeps in his
office at home, is from a
nun in Vermont who wrote that her grandfather died without
seeing the Red Sox win the World Series, that her father
died without seeing the Red Sox win the World Series and
that she is not exactly a kid. While patience is a virtue,
is there not a time
for every purpose under heaven? Duquette says, "Not a
week goes by without some letters that say we've heard the
patience spiel, that we like what you're doing, but that
I'm 80 years old and I've been a Red Sox fan since I was a
kid—and hurry
up."
Duquette, in the final season of his own five-year deal, is
hurrying. Boston, which has been rebuilding since their
last Series win, in 1918, raided the threadbare Expos for
Pedro Martinez, the National League Cy Young Award winner,
and then signed him
to a six-year,
$75 million deal. The dollars staggered the
sensibilities of the Milwaukee- and
Montreal-trained Duquette. But Boston saw no other way to get in the
game against teams with vast resources and excellent farm
systems like New York and Baltimore, fellow members of the
robust American League East. Seventy-five million was
simply the ante.
"We'd like to have a chance to win every year,"
Duquette says, "and the best way to do that and show
our fans our intentions was with Martinez. He is a key
piece to our having a good team. In a seven-game series, he
could conceivably win three games,
and there aren't many pitchers anywhere who can do that."
A team that finished six games below .500 is now
contemplating a Game 7 in late October, a leap of faith
that defies every Calvinist instinct in the six-state
region.
Martinez was a curious choice to be the shaman for a fan
base that even third baseman John Valentin refers to,
without irony, as Red Sox Nation. For one thing, the teams
with the 1997 Cy Young winners, Montreal and Toronto,
finished a combined 16 games
below .500. For another, Martinez is a slight, lithe
righthander who seems to defy physics: There is no apparent
reason a will-o'-the-wisp can hump a mid-90s fastball to
the plate and then throw a petrifying changeup off it. A
six-year deal is an
extraordinary investment in any pitcher, but especially in a power
guy who is built like your newspaper
carrier.
Still, the Red Sox are evolving. Fenway Park begs for an
offensive team—Boston hitters led the majors with a .291
average last season—but the demands of pennant-winning
baseball favor pitching and defense. Duquette's every
off-season move was designed
to shore up a defense that was last in the league and a
pitching staff that ranked 12th in ERA and was undermined
by catchers who threw out just 23.7% of base stealers. In
addition to Martinez, the Red Sox repatriated 43-year-old
Dennis Eckersley as a
setup man for closer Tom Gordon. While they traded middling
starter Aaron Sele to the Rangers, the Red Sox got back
defensive outfielder Damon Buford, who could share
centerfield with Darren Lewis, and catcher Jim Leyritz, who
was second in the American
League last year in throwing out base stealers
(43.5%).
The changes should please the most discriminating Boston
fan, who, after four generations of heartbreak, is no
longer all that discriminating. The Red Sox sold 2.2
million tickets last season—80% of all Fenway seats—for a
team that dropped out of
contention before summer. The unflagging loyalty delights but also
worries Valentin. He signed a four-year, $25 million deal
in January but grouses that first baseman Mo Vaughn, surely
one of the five scariest hitters in baseball, does not have
a contract
extension beyond
1998.
"Pedro's deal set off a chain reaction, with
management telling everybody we're trying to put a winning
team on the field," Valentin says. "But Fenway is
sold out whether we're good or bad. Am I ready to say the
Red Sox don't care about winning because
the fans are there? Sometimes. Other times I feel like they
want to win. I guarantee you this: If they don't sign Mo
Vaughn, then they're saying they don't really want to
win."
On the subject of Vaughn, Duquette
should open his mail. And his
checkbook.
—by Michael
Farber
Scouting Report | By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
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