I
didn’t write about the Paxton
Crawford (subs. req.) news today, partly because I was pretty bummed out
about it, especially after such a great win last night, and partly because I
don’t really know what to say, except that it sucks.
I not
bummed out about it because of any lingering personal affection for an entirely mediocre pitcher
who threw a whopping 65 innings over two seasons for us five years ago. I’m
upset because now — based on his allegations, at least — the chickens seem to have
come home to roost at Yawkey way just as they have in San Francisco and Baltimore and the
Bronx. For Crawford to taint an entire team, half a decade
after he’s severed his last tenuous ties with it — really, really sucks.
As
Terry Francona told the
Herald: “I’ve had the opportunity and delight to see how these guys work
their butts off.... Now these guys are, I don’t know if implicated is the right
word, associated with all of that. My disappointment is for those guys.”
Mine too. We
have no idea who Crawford’s talking about from those 2000 and 2001 teams he was on, contributing for 11 starts and 4 relief appearances. All we know for sure is that, for a couple cups of coffee,
he shared a clubhouse with five guys from the current team: Trot Nixon, Tim Wakefield, Jason
Varitek, Manny Ramirez, and, for part of ’01, Doug Mirabelli.
That’s
it.
And,
let’s keep in mind that the dude could be completely full of shit. He certainly
doesn’t seem like one of the “character” guys the new ownership has made it a
point to stock their roster with the last few years. The
Globe mentions a dubious story of falling out of bed onto a drinking glass
(a mishap that leeched him of two pints of blood) in 2000, and of another murky
transgression in the McCoy Stadium parking lot, during a game, for which he was
disciplined in 2002.
And
when told by Globe the about this Crawford quote from the ESPN mag article...
“One time, I walked right into the Red Sox clubhouse with a
bunch of needles wrapped in a towel and left them on my chair. A few minutes
later, one of my teammates came running over, saying, 'Paxton, someone knocked
your chair over and your freaking needles are all over the floor!' Man, we just
died about that. He said it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen, told me I
was nuts. But that's the way it was back then.”
...both
Wakefield and Varitek said it sounded “difficult to believe.”
Indeed,
it would seem to take a loudmouth jerk of the highest order to get Wake — a/k/a The Nicest Guy in the World — as steamed as he seemed to be when interviewed by the
Herald:
“I think it’s ridiculous that a guy who was here for two months
is . . . I don’t know what he’s trying to do,” Wakefield said. “If he admits to
taking steroids, that’s his fault. He shouldn’t deface the organization by
saying someone else told him to take it. That’s stupid.... I remember him not
being too bright. That’s what I remember about him.”
Wow.
Varitek
is right, of course, when he tells the Herald that “these types of things
need to come out right now.... It doesn’t matter if someone was wearing a
purple uniform, a red one or a navy blue one. It happened. I’m eager for us to
take the steps to get past this as a game.”
But we've got to steel ourselves for what might leap from this Pandora's box. Given
this latest revelation, and this news, and this and this and this, it seems
we’re getting closer, inch by inch, to "getting past it as a game" every day.
That
doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. And it’s going to get a lot worse, for some
teams at least, before it gets better.
We all know that in Red Sox Nation, any worse would be very,
very bad.
As
Seth
Mnookin writes in his
blog today:
In Boston, where baseball is more a religion than a pastime, the
effects of these revelations would be absolutely devastating. Take a look at
what’s happened to the Diamondbacks following the Jason Grimsley affidavit
and think for a second about how much less suffocating Phoenix is than Boston.
Recall the round-the-clock coverage of Theo Epstein’s interregnum last winter.
And now imagine the feeding frenzy that would occur if a hero of the 2004 World
Series team is revealed to be a user. It could take months, if not years, to
deal with the fallout.
God
forbid.