15. Bill Mueller
It’s difficult to say that anyone on the 2004 Boston Red Sox is underrated—hell, little used reliever Curtis Leskanic receives hosannas when he comes back to town. This is all deserved, that team fucking rules.
But one of the more under appreciated, anonymous players was third baseman Bill Mueller. Yes, everyone knows about the glorious hit through the box against Mariano Rivera driving in Dave Roberts in the ninth inning of Game Four of the ALCS. That’s the hit that exposed a chink in the armor of the great beast. That's the hit that showed the Sox that the Russian can bleed. That’s the hit that began the greatest comeback in all of sports history.
But while absolutely amazing, that hit shouldn't have been a surprise. Mueller was a professional hitter. All he did was hit He hit at home. He hit on the road. Day games, he hit. Night games too. He pounded out hits against the American League. When it was time for interleague games, he hammered National League pitching. He hit in Spring Training, during the regular season and the post season.
During the ARod glove to the face game, who won that game with a ninth inning ding dong johnson off Rivera? Bill fucking Mueller did, that’s who.
Mueller came to the Sox in the 2002-03 offseason with David Ortiz, Kevin Millar and Jeremy Giambi. The Sox already had the immortal Shea Hillenbrand at third. Epstein wanted to improve production at first, third and DH. He figured that three of those five guys would solve those problems.
And he was right.
The first year Mueller was in Boston, the switch hitter lead the league in batting average. The second year he became the first hitter ever to hit two grand slams from each side of the plate in one game.
On a team full of extra large personalities, Mueller went about his work and perfected his craft. Hit after hit, game after game, season after season. He was a metronome. Not only could he hit for average and power but he was a damn fine third baseman. Did Mueller ever make an error? I’m sure he did. Do I remember any? No I don’t.
You may have heard of a comedian’s comedian or a writer’s writer, Bill Mueller was a ball player’s ball player. Everything he did was just right.
I loved watching him play.
Lester is the best left handed that the Sox drafted and developed since Bruce Hurst and is probably the overall best pitcher to come out of their system since Roger Clemens.
It always sucks when the Sox (or any pro team) low balls a player, but it especially sucked with Lester. It was just weird for them to do that. He’s a home grown player that was beloved by the fans. Due to his battle with lymphoma, he was a tireless worker for the Jimmy Fund. Both his illness and charity work have increased his standing with the Boston fans and the Sox were like, “nah, we’ll move on”.
I get that pro sports is a business but I think that there are players you make an exception for. Jon Lester was one of those guys.
Lester came up in 2005 and had a pretty good year, he was 7-2 with a high ERA but there was enough there to think that he’d be a player. His sophomore season was interrupted when he was diagnosed with lymphoma.
After treatments he came back in the middle of 2007 season and provided a shot in the arm for the Sox pitching staff. He started—and won—Game 4 of the World Series, which happened to be the day my eldest daughter was born. It was a remarkable comeback and Lester kept rolling.
2008 saw him throw a no-hitter, and after two very solid seasons, he was named an All-Star in 2010. 2011 was a mixed bag for both the Sox and Lester as the team gagged a big lead and Lester was implicated in the “chicken and beer” fiasco that vilified 3/5s of the starting pitching staff.
The other two “culprits” Josh Beckett and John Lackey got far more scrutiny than Lester did but he got a bit. This was sort of a strange era for Lester. He was born and lived most of his life in Washington state but for some reason he began speaking with a Texas accent around this time. It was kinda like when Madonna married Guy Ritchie and she thought she was English. I don’t know whether it was because he wanted to impress the Texas born Beckett but it was annoying. I think he dropped it after Beckett was sent to LA as part of the Punto trade.
Dumb voice choices aside, in 2013 he was part of another World Series championship and the following year he was sent to the Oakland Athletics when he couldn’t come to terms with Boston on a contract extension.
Seeing Lester as an A was just strange, seeing him as a Cub wasn’t as strange but it didn’t look right either. Seeing him as a National or a Cardinal was not as jarring because I don’t recall these stops very much.
The Red Sox are like any other franchise, they make good moves and bad ones. Not signing Jon Lester was a particularly dumb one that took the Sox a few years to repair. There’s a cliche that says, “if the front office listens to the fans, they’ll soon be sitting with the fans” and that’s probably correct more times than it’s not.
This time, it wasn’t.
13. Dustin Pedroia
Baseball is the most democratic (small d) of all sports. What I mean by this is that it doesn’t matter how big you are, how fast you are, how tall you are; if you have great hand-eye coordination you will play. Chances are, you'll play well.
Dustin Pedroia is about a foot shorter than current star Aaron Judge. Despite their height differences both are former MVPs and both are Hall of Fame candidates. I think that many fans gravitate towards the Pedroia types because they see themselves in him.
It’s hard to see yourself as a football player, you have to be the size of a fridge and run faster than a Ferrari. Basketball? Only if you’re freakishly tall. Hockey player. Do you have world class hand-eye coordination? Cool. Can you do it on a millimeter thick piece of metal on ice?
Even someone like Judge is tough to relate to because he’s incredibly athletic for his height. But Pedroia? He’s 5’7”, I’m taller than 5’7”. Not only that but Pedroia played the game the way we think we’d play: all-out hustle, dirty uniform, getting your nose in everything.
Pedroia was more than that, of course. He could flat out rake and he was nails at second base. A leader on the team, he was acerbic and funny and he seemed like a genuinely cool guy. Everyone loved him from Terry Francona to David Ortiz to Alex Cora. The only person who didn’t seem to love him was Bobby Valentine, who was about as popular as rug burn in Boston.
He won an MVP award, Rookie of the Year, was a multiple All-Star and was part of three World Championship teams. So Pedroia was a mirage, right? Due to his height you may think you’re as good as him but you’re not. You’re nowhere near his level.
That’s okay. The world has use for mirages, it does the opposite of grounding us, it gives us hope. Without ballplayers like Dustin Pedroia, how are we to dream that we can do anything? Pedroia is essential to the MLB fan experience.
12. Jim Rice
Whenever you started following sports, you always had a first favorite player. Someone who was larger than life and could do no wrong. For me, that was Jim Rice. He was the first player that I can remember seeing on TV. In my mind’s eye, I can picture him at bat: 12 feet tall, weighing about 500 pounds gripping his bat like a toothpick just daring a pitcher to make a mistake.
By the time I started following the Sox, he was settling into a part of his career when the Fenway Faithful sorta took him for granted. This is an era that happens with all Boston greats where if they don’t deliver every. Single. Time. They’re overpaid bums. People used to joke that Rice’s license plate was 6-4-3, for his seeming propensity to bounce into double-plays “when the team needed him the most”. Of course, that’s not true, Rice delivered more times than not.
In 1986 Rice had his last really great year, leading (with Roger Clemens) the Sox to the World Series against the Mets. I think the Sox won that year but I also passed out for two weeks after the top of the tenth of Game 6, so who knows?
Speaking of World Series, in late 1975 Rice broke a bone when he was hit with a pitch by Angels pitcher Vern Ruhle. Considering how close that Series was without the slugger, could history have been different if a healthy Rice was in the lineup?
From all accounts Rice was considered “the most feared slugger in the American League” and he rode that perception into the Hall of Fame on his last year on the ballot. Should Jim Rice be in Cooperstown? I don't know. If you’re a small hall person who didn’t grow up with him, no. But I’m a big hall guy whose first favorite player was Jim Rice, so I definitely think he deserves it.
Rice has settled into a role with the Sox where he shows up at Spring Training (gets yelled at by shithead front office types) and is on NESN during the regular season. For a guy who was notoriously prickly to the media, I’m glad that Rice never faded away.
To me he’s a great reminder of my childhood and why I loved baseball.
Like I’ve said a million times, I began seriously watching baseball in 1986 which, the way 99.8% of the season went, was a pretty awesome introduction to the sport.
Aside from one night in October, the one thing that sucked was that it impacted how I thought roster construction should be. That year the Sox’ philosophy was to get a bunch of big dudes and try to hit the ball out of the park. Speed was not part of the equation at all. It would taker an on-base machine like Wade Boggs three singles to score if he walked.
But pretty much everywhere aside from Boston, teams were promoting athletes—players who could hit and run as well as field. Eric Davis in Cincinnati. Rickey in New York. Darryl Strawberry also in New York. Kirby Puckett in Minnesota Jose Canseco in Oakland. Tim Raines in Montreal. And there was also a push towards dudes who could run and catch: Willie Wilson in Kansas City, practically everyone in St. Louis.
The point is, baseball was moving towards athletes. Boston was firm in not doing that. Over 30, old guys was what they were going to build around. Flipping from a Sox game to a Cardinals game was like going from Earth to Neptune.
When Ellis Burks was promoted from Pawtucket, Red Sox nation collective exclaimed, “finally, we have our athlete!” Burks showed up and he was fast, he had power, he could hit for average and he could field. He was a four-tool player (I don’t think his arm was that great) but it didn’t matter, we finally had our Willie Mays!
Burks had several solid seasons with Boston but the problem was, he was always getting hurt. That tends to happen when Mike Greenwell is playing on your right, but there were still plenty of non-Gator injuries.
I remember being bummed out when Burks was elected to the 1990 All-Star but he couldn’t play because he was hurt. I recall Burks jogging out to the first base line in Wrigley and thinking, “so close, man. This sucks for him.” After a few more injury plagued seasons, the Sox let him go. This is when Burks flipped the switch and became a star. First in Chicago, then Colorado, then San Francisco and Cleveland before coming back to Boston in 2004. Every stop aside from his last never ended in a Championship.
But, I’m not sure if you heard this before, the Boston Red Sox won it all in 2004. Did Ellis Burks play? Of course not. But the coolest thing was when the plane landed in Boston after their flight from home from St. Louis, who was the person walking out the door with the trophy? Burks.
Burks always represented the future. From the time he showed up at Fenway, Boston is taking part in the modern game! To his injuries, just wait until Burks comes back, then we’ll be clicking. Until he didn’t.
And ironically, that's when he had his most success, when he wasn't in Boston. However when he joined the team in 2004 it was a link to the past. Burks seemed to represent all of the players who were on those close-but-no-cigar teams, the teams that were out of it by Memorial Day, the teams that were good but never great.
Ellis was our avatar. I can’t prove this but for a lot of people my age, Ellis Burks was their favorite player because he was the future and at that time, we were too. Over his 17 seasons we grew, changed, had families, excelled, failed, reached some of our potential and fell short in other places. Just like Gen-X hero Burks. So when Ellis walked off that plane, brother that was all of us. That’s how we want to go out, a champion!
How can you not relate to that?
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