The All-Time Red Sox All-Dirtbag Team

These are the good ol' days for Red Sox fans. Not only is the ball club a perennial contender well on its way to another compelling autumn, but it seems the ownership emphasizes character in its players. Oh sure, Curt Schilling is something of a blowhard, and we're still not really sure what happened with Julio Lugo in Houston. But for the most part, we can feel pretty good about rooting for this group of players. It's funny, a buddy of mine mentioned the other day that he likes the personality of this team even better than that of the World Series champs of '04. While I consider that statement borderline blasphemous - I ate up the Cowboy Up antics, Cabrera's handshakes, etc., and given the tense atmosphere in Boston at that time, I don't think they would have won without being so ridiculously loose - I certainly understand why someone would admire the professionalism (not to mention the starting pitching) of this crew. But our appreciation for these recent Sox teams got us talking (reminiscing certainly is not the right word) about the days when we didn't have it so good, when Dan Duquette annually failed chemistry and the clubhouse was populated with more Dirtbags than Dirt Dogs. Coincidentally, I also received an email Thursday morning from a reader suggesting I write about my least favorite Red Sox of all-time. And so, with all of this considered and the people demanding some negativity, we offer you this, our All-Time All-Dirtbag team. Try to enjoy it more than you did when these bums actually played here.

CATCHER
Jim Leyritz: The embedded Yankee started the '98 season as the starting catcher, but griped and moaned his way out of town after losing playing time to some kid named Varitek. Good. Riddance. Honorable mention here goes to Rick Cerone, another all-talk, no-action type like Leyritz who was more interested in playing clubhouse lawyer than actually playing the game.

FIRST BASE
Tony Clark: Bright, friendly, and respected, he makes our anti-team for spending '02 seeming more concerned with baseball's labor strife than with helping the Sox win some freakin' ballgames. With co-conspirator Grady Little's help, he deftly sabotaged the Red Sox offense in '02, hitting three homers in 275 at-bats for a whopping .556 OPS. (For perspective, that's two points higher than Cesar Crespo's career OPS.) Frankly, after what I saw that season, I'm shocked he's still in the bigs.

SECOND BASE
Jose Offerman: Believe it or not, he's still playing, for the Atlantic League's Long Island Ducks, and as evidenced by this piece by ESPN's Jeff Pearlman, he's still in denial about the decline of his own skills. Says the perpetually sour Offerman, now 38: "A baseball player knows when his time is up. And I still have three years left in me." Say whaaaaat?

SHORTSTOP
Mike Lansing: I suppose it's somewhat of a copout to put this All-Universe jerk at shortstop since second base was the primary place he stunk it up for the 2000-01 Sox. But he did fill in during Nomar's various forays to the disabled list, and there simply must be a spot on the team for a player who was so delusional about his own abilities that he once tore the lineup card off the dugout wall and shredded it in full view of the media after discovering his name wasn't on it.

THIRD BASE
Shea Hillenbrand: Arrived in 2001 as a wide-eyed, gosh-I'm-just-happy-to-be-here kid, a ballplayer version of Opie Taylor. Departed in 2003 as a loudmouthed, overly entitled lunkhead with a vocabulary that would make John Rocker blush. Okay, maybe that's a little exaggerated, but honestly, I've never heard more horror stories about a player's public conduct than I have about Hillenbrand.

OUTFIELD
Wil Cordero: You know the reason. Let's move on . . .

OUTFIELD
Carl Everett: Our team captain, this dinosaur-doubtin', Kulpa's-melon-buttin', Globe-hatin' blockhead remains the epitome of the 2001 Sox, a collection of individuals so despicable (Manny, Pedro, Lowe, Varitek, and a few others excluded) that I actually quit watching baseball for awhile. God, I hated that team.

OUTFIELD
Dante Bichette: By the time he loafed his way to Boston, this chronic whiner was more slug than slugger. (As you probably figured, he did keep himself in terrific physical condition after his playing days ended. Don't click here if you're still eating your breakfast.)

RIGHTHANDED PITCHER
Roger Clemens: It's always about the money. And yet the disingenuous dope never fails to claim it's about everything else.

LEFTHANDED PITCHER
Matt Young: As long as his decision to give three years and $6.8 million to Young, a jittery lefty with a phobia about throwing to first base and a career record of 51-78, remains on Lou Gorman's resume, his decision to trade this guy will continue to rank as his second stupidest transaction as far as I'm concerned. (Upon further review, this probably isn't entirely fair to Young, who was by all accounts a gem of a guy. But man, was he terrible.)

RELIEF PITCHER
Ugueth Urbina: Depending on which version you believe, he got into either a heated argument or a rock-'em, sock-'em fistfight with Tim Wakefield over the volume of his stereo on a team flight in '01. Considering the dark developments in Urbina's life since then, Wakefield has to figure he was lucky Oogie didn't have his trusty machete on the plane with him.

DESIGNATED HITTER
Jack Clark: Strike out . . . buy a Ferrari . . . strike out . . . buy a Benz . . . ground into a double play . . . buy a Caddy. No wonder he ended up bankrupt.

MANAGER
Joe Kerrigan: All these years later, and I still can't believe he had the audacity to ask Manny to change his swing. I mean, he won eight games as a big-league pitcher - what the hell does he know about hitting? And of course he can never be forgiven for trying to make Pedro pitch meaningless September games with a shoulder injury, one so serious that he practically had the release point of Dan Quisenberry before, in a justifiable rage, he ripped off his jersey during a workout and announced he was shutting himself down. If ever I was going to go for the R rating on this blog, it would be to describe this backstabbing, incompetent weasel.

(Special shout-out to reader Jim Bell for suggesting this topic. Now let me know in the comments who I forgot.)

Five years later

This was my first column for the Monitor in the days following 9/11. I'm not sure how well it holds up over time, but it captured my sentiments during the horrifying, heartbreaking aftermath, and I remain proud I wrote it. - CF

• • •

AMERICA'S TEAM

God, yes, I want the New York Yankees to win the World Series. How could any American not? The Yankees are America. They are capitalist, a melting pot and, in recent years, a monopoly. They are ordinary and extraordinary individuals who thrive as a team. They are arrogant and resilient and hated for their success. They are a superpower.

They are us.

No sports team is more symbolic of our nation than the Yankees. And it is sickeningly obvious that the terrorists who intended to blow our country apart had a sadistic eye for symbolism. They attacked our military center, the Pentagon. They targeted the White House. They wiped out the World Trade Center towers, the two tallest buildings in our tallest city.

It's a small miracle that the Statue of Liberty still stands. Or Yankee Stadium.

Normally, this would be grounds for treason, a Red Sox fan switching allegiances to the Yankees. But what's normal anymore? We are all numb, having wept through an impossibly sad and tragic time, one in which our games never seemed less important.

My television remote is usually locked on ESPN. It has scarcely visited there the past 10 days. The Bottom Line sports ticker was replaced by MSNBC's streaming news updates, Stuart Scott's smug self-reverence replaced with Tom Brokaw's gentle reassurance. And the scoreboard was replaced with a horrible new statistical category: the death toll.

So this is what it takes for a sports fan to gain perspective. Was it just a few weeks ago I was chiding friends for admitting they were rooting for Mike Mussina during his perfect game bid against the Red Sox? It all seems so ridiculous now, so trivial, so small. As a survivor of the bombings told ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons: Oh, for the days when my greatest fear was Derek Lowe.

Of all the brilliant political cartoons in our newspapers in recent days, few touched me as deeply as this one. It pictured two kids sitting around a playground, swapping trading cards. One kid says to the other: I'll give you two Bonds and two Jordans for one New York firefighter.

The cartoon's message is obvious, painfully so. I'll never again refer to an athlete as a hero - or, for that matter, a villain. That's been the standard term for the Yankees around here, but no more. There are no real villains, not in sports, not by the frightening parameters that define the term now. Since the attack, so many so-called bad guys, many of whom I've skewered, have revealed themselves to be goodhearted, decent, compassionate men (the despicable Carl Everett being the obvious, oblivious exception.)

More than once I've mocked Jason Sehorn, called him camera-happy, a pretty boy. Last week, Sehorn led his New York Giants teammates on a shopping spree to buy supplies for the rescue workers at "Ground Zero." Keyshawn Johnson - you know, Me-shawn - was among the first of countless NFLers to donate a week's paycheck. George Steinbrenner, derided here as Georgie Porgie, has donated a million dollars and the Yankee Stadium tarp. Bobby Valentine and his Mets have opened their stadium and their hearts to any weary folks who want nothing more than rest and reassurance.

It may seem trite, claiming a Yankee championship would be of any relevance in these solemn hours. But then, I'm reminded of something we've heard again and again this week. Sometimes, sports transcend. The U.S. hockey team's "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 raised the spirits of a nation stuck in the doldrums. Jesse Owens's four gold medals in the '36 Olympics in Berlin upstaged Hitler on his home turf.

The Yankees can transcend, too. They are a part of our fabric, certainly of New York's fabric. You can't turn on the television without seeing someone shedding a tear while holding a picture of a missing loved one. Usually, one or the other is wearing a Yankees cap. Sometimes, both.

The day will come when every plane in the sky no longer draws a wary second glance, when every song's lyrics no longer seem more poignant than you remember. The day will come when the tangle is gone from our throats, the ache from our hearts and the sorrow from our eyes.

The day will come when we're again cheering the Red Sox and jeering the Yankees. Oh, how I look forward to that day.
But right now, there are no rivalries. The only team that matters not only wears stripes, it is representing them.

So I want to see a parade down New York's Canyon of Heroes, what's left of it. I want to see firefighters and policemen and ordinary, extraordinary New York citizens cheering and saluting Roger and Derek and Bernie and Tino, and I damn sure want to see them cheering and saluting back.

I want the Yankees to say, in that symbolic language those terrorists understand, that we are as strong as ever. I want the Yankees to transcend.

God, yes, I want a Yankee victory.

Because a Yankee - an American - is what I am.