And They All Lived Happily Ever After

JASON BAY was so naive to the hysteria of big-market baseball that when he landed at Boston's Logan Airport on Aug. 1 and heard the announcement over the loudspeaker—" Jason Bay, your bags from Pittsburgh are coming in on carousel 13. Welcome to Red Sox Nation"—he actually assumed that the public address announcer at Logan greeted other travelers similarly. But when Bay got to the baggage claim, and the P.A. announcer left the microphone, went to the carousel and offered to carry his luggage for him, it became clear that baseball players really are treated differently in Boston. While Bay was getting to know his new city, Bostonians were getting to know this new leftfielder, who does not bring quite as much baggage as the old one, and insists on carrying all of it himself.

The Red Sox have replaced Manny Ramirez with a dry-witted Canadian who runs out ground balls, plays on bum knees and complains only when he is forced to take a day off. Bay spent the past six seasons in Pittsburgh, where he never won more than 75 games, never sniffed a pennant race, never had protection in the lineup and never so much as implied that the Pirates did not deserve him. Sound like Manny? "They could not be more opposite," Boston first baseman Sean Casey says.

Ramirez has played 98 postseason games, and last week Bay played his first. Game 1 of the American League Division Series against the Los Angeles Angels was the biggest game of his life, or at least since he led Trail, B.C., to the 1990 Little League World Series. As the Red Sox took batting practice, about half of them watched the telecast of the Dodgers-Cubs series opener on the scoreboard at Angel Stadium. When Ramirez hit a home run into the leftfield bleachers at Wrigley Field, on a pitch so low it nearly grazed the plate, Red Sox third baseman Mike Lowell turned to Bay and asked, "Geez, did you see that?"

Bay says he is not trying to keep up with Ramirez—but that's what he's doing. He hit a two-run homer in Game 1 and a three-run shot in Game 2. On Monday night he scored the series-clinching run to close out an ALDS in which he hit .412 and slugged .882. Deals made at the trading deadline are often imbalanced and overhyped. But the three-team blockbuster that sent Bay from Pittsburgh to Boston on July 31, and Ramirez from Boston to Los Angeles, has invigorated both players, both franchises and the postseason as a whole. Bay and Ramirez, who have never met, could conceivably make each other's acquaintance at the World Series.

While Ramirez is a snug fit in L.A., a city that treasures its stars and tolerates their foibles, Bay was practically born to play leftfield at Fenway Park. When he was a baby, his father dressed him in a Red Sox T-shirt with bay on the back, over the number 1/2. Trail is a distant suburb of Red Sox Nation, but Bay had posters on his wall of Boston leftfielders Jim Rice and Carl Yastrzemski.

"He's Canadian," Red Sox reliever Justin Masterson says. "How can you not like a Canadian?" The Red Sox connection to Canada goes back to April 26, 1901, the first game in franchise history. The starting pitcher for the Boston Americans that day was Win Kellum, from Waterford, Ont. Kellum and Bay, like Ramirez and Bay, are now linked forever in club lore.

TRAIL HAS produced at least 10 current and former NHL players, an inordinate number for a town that has only 8,000 people. It also boasted that Little League powerhouse, which, under coach Andy Bilesky, went to five World Series from 1967 through '90. But when the kids grew up they either played hockey full-time or, in many cases, went to work at the Teck Cominco factory on the hill, smelting zinc and lead. The local high school, J. Lloyd Crowe Secondary, did not have a baseball team, so Bay had to drive across the border to Idaho to play American Legion. The best ballplayers in Trail were Bay and his sister, Lauren, who pitched for the Canadian softball team in the last two Olympics.

Bay played for two seasons at North Idaho College, which no longer has a baseball program. The coaches at Gonzaga University went to scout Bay in the winter of 1998, but it was so cold that they had to watch him hit in an indoor batting cage. "If you were going to map out a road to the big leagues," Bay says, "I don't think you'd choose the one I took."

Unlike Ramirez, an untouchable prospect in the Cleveland system, Bay was traded three times in his first three years of professional baseball. The Pirates acquired him from the San Diego Padres for Brian Giles in 2003, but they reportedly asked about Xavier Nady first, then settled on Bay only after the Padres refused to part with Nady. Bay made the National League All-Star team twice while with Pittsburgh, but he was always free by the first Saturday in October, when Gonzaga held its annual alumni game. "He always played," says former Bulldogs coach Steve Hertz. "And he played his ass off. You know, I'm glad he's not playing this year."

At the trading deadline this season, on July 31, the Red Sox believed that the Pirates were going to send Bay to the Rays for a package of prospects. Boston had been talking to Pittsburgh about a three-team trade involving Ramirez and Bay, but the Rays' deal was much simpler and thus more appealing with the deadline approaching. Still, the Red Sox kept calling the Pirates, and in the course of those conversations deduced that Pittsburgh wanted to be part of a Ramirez deal, believing they could land a better haul of prospects. After all, Boston was desperate to unload Ramirez but could not move him without getting a leftfielder in return, and Bay was the only leftfielder on the market who fit their criteria—a righthanded power hitter with a high on-base percentage. Granted, Bay only batted .247 last season, but the Red Sox viewed that as an aberration, the same way they viewed Lowell's .236 batting average with Florida in 2005. Lowell, of course, was a steal for the Red Sox when he was thrown into the Josh Beckett trade the following off-season.