Aceves back in camp

In case (by some miracle) you haven't seen this yet, I give you the video of the brawl that took place between the Mexico and Canada World Baseball Classic teams. As far as baseball brawls go, this one is actually pretty intense - less standing around and puffing up of chests and more actual contact than I'm used to seeing. Who knew Canadians harbored that much aggression?

In totally unsurprising news, Red Sox pitcher Alfredo Aceves was mixing it up with Canada's Tyson Gillies, a player he'd never met:

"What can I say? It didn't surprise me. He threw me to the floor. I stood up and I reacted, too," Aceves said. "I didn't do nothing to him. I was just calming [others] down. The fighting was with the pitcher and the hitter. I was saying, 'Calm down, man. Calm down. Come on. Calm down.' He just grabbed me and threw me on the floor. I was like, 'I want to throw you on the floor.' Then when I jumped in to this guy, I got seven guys against me.  You’re locked in. You’re just trying to defend and knock them out. That’s it. We were trying to [defend] ourselves. We didn’t do nothing to him. He just threw me," he said.

Mexico has been eliminated from the WBC, and Aceves is back in camp, relatively unharmed and ready to pitch. Given Aceves' history of surliness and griping about his role, it will be interesting to see how things pan out in camp: though he has always wanted a spot in the rotation, there's simply no room. He'll probably end up in the bullpen, in a much less glamorous spot than last year, and hopefully he'll handle that with some maturity.

Quote of the Day

When asked about the conditions yesterday, Jason Bay admitted they were formidable. However, he felt the need to remind us of something, and that something is the quote of the day:

"I grew up in Canada. I've played in worse."
This is an actual picture of Jason Bay playing baseball in his hometown... In July.

In all seriousness, I get where he's coming from. I grew up in northern New Hampshire, and played high school softball in western Maine. It is often very difficult to get a game in, and for that reason, Little League seasons in my region are much shorter than those in other parts of the country. This explains the preposterous lack of baseball superstars from New England and Canada (try naming five), as most boys choose sports like hockey or skiing, something they can play for more than three months at a time.

Bay's emergence as a bonafide star is thus even more impressive. He didn't have the opportunity to train in baseball for twelve months a year like teammates Dustin Pedroia (California) or Mike Lowell (Florida). So hats off to Jason Bay, the token Canadian... Is anyone surprised that he was the lone player to go yard last night? It was obviously all that training in the snow.



By the way, I was totally kidding about the picture... it's May.

Around the Horn: Jason Bay

"Jason Bay is like the dutiful, pretty second wife who does everything right … and yet, I can't stop thinking about the soul-wrenching tramp who married me first and broke my heart." - Bill Simmons

I think that about sums it up. As good a player as our favorite Canadian is [and he's good], he'll never be what Manny was. But would we want him to be? I'm on the fence on that one: on the one hand, some of the things Manny pulled were hilarious and endearing, but they just got to be too much.

The Boston media was skeptical of Jason Bay at first.  They knew that he couldn't replace Manny, but let's face it, we didn't want Manny, at least not the way he was behaving.  We were looking for vintage Manny, before he turned into a prima-donna.  However, what's most remarkable about the Jason Bay trade is that we got almost identical production out for Bay that we could have predicted from Manny [assuming, of course, that he decided to play].

In 100 games for Boston last season, Manny hit .299, .398 OBP, .529 SLG, with 20 HRs and 68 RBI.  In just under half that many games [49] Bay hit .293, .370 OBP, .527 SLG, with 9 HRs and 37 RBI.  Now, I understand that Manny was dogging it on his way out of town, however, if he hadn't been traded, I can only assume he would have quit for the rest of the season.  There's no way to prove such a thing, of course, and I hope winning meant more to him than that...

There's also the small fact that Jason Bay is a good defensive outfielder, and a consummate professional.  A lesser man would have gotten all worked up about replacing one of the greates right-handed hitters in the game.  Not Jason.  He knew that he wasn't there to be Manny... he was just their to play baseball, cooperate with his new teammates, and go for a championship.  All of these things Jason Bay has done, all we can hope for is that he'll keep it up, and since his carreer stats are similar to what he produced down the stretch, and he's almost as well liked in the clubhouse as Sean Casey, I'll hazard a guess that he has a productive 2009.

I'll end this with my apologies to Jason Bay [even though he'll never read it]: in making this entry about why Bay shouldn't be compared to Manny, all I did was compare him to Manny [oops].  However, I will end with the best Jason Bay quote I've encountered thus far.

"It's just a tiny little nick, but it hurts when I get champagne in their." - Jason Bay, after scoring the winning run in Game 4 of the ALDS, the first postseason series he ever played in.  I love this guy.