Day One, Day One, I'm Barely Making Sense

One would think that being around former major leaguers would be intimidating, but once you've had a pat on the back from Oil Can Boyd, showered with Butch Hobson and seen Frank Malzone's 80-year-old bits and pieces, there are no barriers anymore. What a first day of Red Sox Fantasy Camp.

The day began with a 6:00 a.m. wakeup call, barely scrounging enough energy after the Super Bowl to get dressed, and getting on a 7:00 bus to the Spring Training complex. It had just stopped raining and we were worried that we would be stuck in the clubhouse all day losing money playing poker to more experienced guys. Thankfully, the weather cleared up for most of the day. We arrived at the complex and were ushered into the clubhouse, where we found our lockers with our names on them, along with freshly washed jerseys (also with our names on them) hanging there, waiting for us. It was a little bit surreal. They also mixed in the pros with the campers, so some people had former major leaguers changing right next to them. The aforementioned Butch Hobson and Frank Malzone were in our row. Adam and I had adjacent lockers. He's wearing #14 (in honor of Nanny's birth year of 1914 and possibly also Jim Rice) and I'm wearing #42 for Jackie Robinson, who I admired greatly even though he was never a Red Sox. Mo Vaughn also wore #42, but that's just lagniappe.

After changing into our uniforms, we helped ourselves to breakfast, which consisted of bacon and eggs, as well as lighter fare such as cereal and yogurt. I opted for the cereal and an apple to go along with my coffee. No sense weighing myself down with the heavy stuff. We then had a sort of introductory meeting where we split into groups alphabetically and then rotated around 5 different skills stations for minor instruction and evaluation:

1) Baserunning, led by Dick Berardino, George Thomas and Rich Gedman. This was held indoors and they used my glove as a demo base. Former pros have stepped on my glove. Swoon.

2) Pitching, led by Spaceman Lee, Oil Can Boyd and (nominally) Luis Tiant. El Tiante didn't do much, but Lee and Boyd taught us how to throw a fastball properly (which I had apparently been doing wrong my entire illustrious career), and Oil Can taught us how to throw a slider. Kinda cool to get hands-on instruction from those guys.

3) Infield, led by Lou Merloni and John Valentin, which challenged our quads, but was mostly valuable for Merloni and Valentin's evaluation of local strip clubs and the former players who frequented them. Classy.

4) Outfield, led by Butch Hobson, who didn't really seem to want to be coaching outfield, but did it anyway. I made a nice running catch on a deep fly ball, so that felt good. Afterwards, Adam and I rubbed in the Gator football victory over Alabama in the SEC Championship game (Hobson's an Alabama alum).

5) Hitting, led by no one in particular, but I ended up in a batting cage with Chad Epperson, a minor league manager and hitting instructor, who gave me some pretty good tips. I might have gotten a little overconfident smashing balls gently lobbed toward me, as opposed to the 65-70 mph fastballs I was barely making contact with back home.

After the last drill, we had a lunch of salmon filet and salad and a pb&j sandwich (on quite possibly the worst bread ever), as well as an autograph session with Frank Viola, who mostly made his mark with the Twins, but also pitched a couple of years for the Sox toward the end of his career.

After lunch, we stretched and then split up into teams, again alphabetically, for evaluation games. Adam and I were of course paired up on the same team, but that didn't help our team's cause much. I played a sorry rightfield, with two balls going over my head, and popped up to the infield on all three of my at-bats. Adam helped turn my last pop out into the rare double play by getting doubled off first base after going too far off first. I batted righty on the first at-bat and then lefty on the last two, but it didn't seem to make a difference. There was a hellacious wind blowing in the entire game, but that's no excuse. They were crappy at-bats. I definitely fulfilled Spaceman's desire for me to "shit the bed" during the evaluation sessions, so we'll see where we get drafted later tonight.