Homegrown: a Review

For Boston Red Sox fans, the 2018 was truly an unbelievable season. From start to finish, the team was a machine rolling over every challenge in its way to a team-record 108 victories in the regular season and 11 more in the post season for their fourth World Series championship this century. 

For the front office and on-field personnel of the Boston Red Sox, it wasn't unbelievable at all. Maybe the exaggerated win total caused some mouths to drop, but the way that this particular Red Sox team dismantled and destroyed every major league team was not unexpected. 

In "Homegrown", Boston Globe baseball writer Alex Speier goes into great detail about the 2018 team, but also widens the lens to determine how the team was created. Through in-depth profiles on stars such as 2018 American League most valuable player Mookie Betts, 2018 ALCS MVP Jackie Bradley Jr., outfielder Andrew Benintendi, shortstop Xander Bogaerts, third baseman Rafael Devers and more, Speier chronicles how each of the Red Sox heroes were drafted, came up through the minor leagues and became MLB stars. 

He contrasts the Boston drafted hitters with the pitchers who seemed to be found on the trade market and free agent pool but also the nooks and crannies of baseball. You read about how the deal for Chris Sale came into being and how (now former) Sox President Dave Dombrowski was able to target who he wanted and crafted a deal that allowed him to get it. Free agent acquisition David Price, sometimes maligned by the Boston fans for a number of reasons, goes through his thought process when he chose the Sox over the Cardinals in the winter of 2016. 

You also get a view into a lesser-known, but important pitcher, Ryan Brasier and how his baseball journey included a stop in Japan before being one of rookie manager's Alex Cora's most trusted October firemen. Cora also goes into detail about he handled perennial All-Star closer Craig Kimbrel's hot-and-cold appearances in the postseason and how a former teammate of Cora's was able to alert the manager that his relief ace was tipping his pitches.

Speier is a new kind of baseball writer in that he's unafraid of statistics that are a bit more complex than wins and losses, batting average and RBIs, so he goes into great detail about the numbers behind what the Sox brain trust was thinking in key moments of the 2018 season. However, this is not a numbers books as Speier made sure to do his homework by talking to the grizzled scouts of the team who are more apt to use other less scientific methods to evaluate a player. 

If you're a fan of the Boston Red Sox, you should have this book in your library. It's a compelling and quick read that's almost impossible to put down. I've followed the Red Sox since I was nine-years-old and last season was the most fun that I've had watching a Boston team--they were a wagon that would not slow down. So having a smart and talented writer like Speier chronicle  the ups and (few) downs of my favorite team as they marched their way to the division title, the American League pennant and ultimately the World Series championship is perfect as far as I'm concerned. 

Also, reading this book during a disappointing 2019 made me a little nostalgic for a team that still had most of the same cast, but was missing that 2018 pizazz. 

If you're a fan of the Red Sox, this is definitely a must-have, but even if you're a fan of a well-written book on professional athletes, this is a great book to get too. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes access that Speier is granted and interviews with a lot of the people who make the most important decisions for a professional ball club. You'll be intrigued into their thought processes and how some moves worked and others did not. Also, there is a few interesting stories about the player who got away and a peek down the road not travelled. 

Check it out and keep warm reading it this winter!

BTW, the picture that was used as the front cover for the book might be one of my favorite baseball images ever. Benitendi is poetry in motion there and if that was a picture of me, it would be plastered on every wall in my home. 

I was sent Homegrown free to review and comment on. This did not have any effect on my review. 

Joe Price 1990 Fleer

On December 24, 2018 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: A new BCB came on Friday and my brother in law John Manasso has the privilege of opening up the envelope. 

Today’s card is Joe Price, who is not to be confused with his name doppelgänger David Price. Joe hasn’t made the amount of money in his whole career as David gets in a quarter of the season, but he also hasn’t has the same success either. 

I don’t recall much about Joe. He was with the Sox for a little more than half the season and he was just there. He wasn’t anything special at all. He wasn’t really good and he wasn’t really bad. He just was. 

He finished his decade-plus career with the Orioles the following year. 

What’s interesting about Joe Price is the philosophical debate he encapsulates. Price was released by the Giants in May 1989. San Francisco went on to the World Series five months later—this is one of my favorite teams BTW. Kevin Mitchell, Will Clark and Matt Williams made up a killer middle of the order. 

I digress. 

When Price settles in to watch the Series, who did he root for? The team that he once belonged to, the one with some of his friends still on the roster? Or did he root against the team that rudely released him on the way to a special season?

We’ve all been fired or dumped or told that you aren’t worth it and it sucks. No matter how much you want to take the high road, there’s a gnawing feeling that you want to see that organization or person fail without you around. And no matter how strong of a relationship you have with the person/people who left you behind, it can be tough to see them succeed without you. 

Did you hold them back? Was it your fault they didn’t reach these heights? Thoughts like that run through your head. 

But these are guys you competed with day after day. You sat in the bullpen with them and swapped stories, learned about their families and spit sunflower seeds at them. They didn’t release you, upper management did. Why should you root against them? They didn’t do anything to you. 

It’s a quandary. 

Joe Price, a really ordinary pitcher but a nice Rorschach Test on how one feels about rejection and putting things behind you. 

Merry Christmas, everyone.

2019 Notes: This is the last card that I received from the BCB. It's been about two months and I'm not sure if I'll ever get another one. But fear not! I found four more cards that I've picked up that I'll write about as if they were sent to me by the Baseball Card Bandit. Just know that they weren't. 

As far as Joe Price goes, every time I think of him (which isn't too much) I think of one of the last Spider-Man stories that Steve Ditko drew. It was called, "Just a Guy Named Joe" and that's kind of how I look at Price. He played for the Reds for a while, the aforementioned Giants and Red Sox before finishing his career as an Oriole. 

He debuted with Cincinnati after the Big Red Machine broke up, yet he played with a lot of the guys that dominated that team, only they were shadows of themselves. Johnny Bench, Dave Concepcion, Pete Rose, Tony Perez, among others were all teammates of Price. I wonder what that was like, playing with men who you expect to be great but because of age, just weren't the same as they used to be. 

And imagine being a pitcher managed by Rose when he was heavily betting? I'm surprised there hasn't been a class-action suit against him. 

Price was as ordinary as his first name, he never led the league in anything, didn't appear in an All-Star Game and got into two games in the 1987 National League Championship series, winning one. It appears that he stuck around long enough to get a pension, which is something pretty cool. But his career was just okay. 

And like I keep saying in these blogs, a mediocre or even poor career in the big leagues is a huge success. To be able to compete with the best of the best at a high level with the scrutiny of your team, the press and the fans; that takes a lot of mental toughness to finish four games below .500 in the win-loss column (Price's career record is 45-49). 

Joe Price was a major league pitcher for ten years. That's a pretty incredible thing to say.