Boston Red Sox

"Don't do it," Steve Avery's friend told him. "I'm telling you, Don't do it." What sort of hazardous undertaking would prompt a buddy to issue that sort of warning? Skydiving? Bungee-jumping? No; the caveat referred to pitching in the American League. The advice came from Avery's former Braves teammate Kent Mercker, who was tattooed regularly with the Orioles and the Indians in 1996. "He told me the American League was a beer league," Avery says, "where guys just go up there hacking for the fences. We'll see."

In January, Avery signed a one-year, $4.85 million free-agent contract with the Red Sox that includes two option years, the first one belonging to Avery. "I would have signed a one-year deal wherever I went," he says. "I wanted to make sure I liked the city and the league, and I wanted to see what direction the team was going."

In truth, this former member of Atlanta's Fab Four rotation had fewer opportunities than he figured he'd have to seize a big-money, long-term deal. "I expected more interest from contending teams," he says. And why not? Today's market brings three-year, $13 million deals to pitchers such as David Wells, a 33-year-old lefthander with a weight problem. He had a losing record last year despite playing for Baltimore, the best home-run-hitting team of all time. Avery, a 26-year-old lefthander, is a two-time 18-game winner who has pitched in 18 postseason games. He threw eight shutout innings on the road in the 1991 National League Championship Series with the Braves facing elimination against the Pirates. But Avery also is 14-23 over the past two years with a 4.57 ERA and suffering from an obvious decrease in velocity. The last pitch he threw in an Atlanta uniform resulted in a bases-loaded walk to Wade Boggs of the Yankees that decided Game 4 of the '96 World Series. "I tried to throw a slider down the middle, and I just couldn't do it," says Avery, who was limited to 23 starts last year because of a muscle strain in his side. "At that point I just couldn't give it my best shot."

Though he was signed by Boston to replace Roger Clemens at the front of the Sox rotation, Avery is, in truth, a reclamation project. He needed such a mechanical overhaul upon arriving at Boston's spring training camp that pitching coach Joe Kerrigan started playing catch with Avery in the outfield, eventually retooling Avery's delivery so that he brings his hands over his head and uses a shorter stride. "Over the years his motion had gotten bigger and bigger, and he had more moving parts," Kerrigan says. "That's not uncommon for pitchers as they grow."

After Avery's first time trying the new delivery on the mound, Kerrigan gushed, "The ball was jumping out of his hand. It's the best I've seen him throw in two or three years." Still, Avery rarely cracked the upper 80s on the radar gun in spring games.

Avery picked a difficult place to get himself straightened out. For one, he's stepping into Clemens's shoes. For another, pitchers at Boston's Fenway Park yielded the second-highest batting average (.292) in baseball last year. As Mercker would attest, rock climbing may have been a safer pick.

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