Kuzul

I was thinking World Series this year, but the dysfunction of last September was too much. The owners decided to blow everything up and start over.

This piece isn’t going to be about who’s gone. This is going to be about who stays behind and what kind of team the Red Sox will have when 2013 rolls around.

Now they can throw a lot of money at Jacoby Ellsbury to stay and not test the free-agent market in 2014. The complication here is that his agent, Scott Boras, will go for max money for his client. If there is no extension for Ellsbury by spring, Sox management could walk away from this player as well.

Dustin Pedroia will be back in his usual spot in the two-hole now that Carl Crawford is gone. This pretty much guarantees a return of David Ortiz in the three-hole, and there is an outside chance he finally gets that two-year deal he is craving so he can retire a Red Sox. The wise money is on a one-year deal with maybe an option for the second one.

Cleanup should go to Will Middlebrooks, who basically showed he could rake and make the adjustments to hit big league pitching. I think the Sox would prefer a more established hitter to protect Ortiz, a right-handed bat that would reprise the role of a Manny Ramirez in 2004 and 2007 when the club swept to the World title.

That would allow them to push Middlebrooks down to the five-hole, and he could switch positions in the order with Jarrod Saltalamacchia. You could also throw Cody Ross in the mix here.

That’s one through six. As is always the case, seven through nine is often a headache in the hitter-happy AL.

Mike Aviles and Pedro Ciriaco—a combination of occasional pop and speed—should bring up the No. 7 and No. 8 holes. Ryan Kalish should be in the running here. Next year could also be the start of the Jose Iglesias era at shortstop, and he would be the ninth hitter for the team. The only problem here is that Aviles, Ciriaco and Iglesias play similar positions in the infield.

Ryan Lavarnway is the backup catcher, but if he hits his way into the lineup, he could provide relief to Salty and spell Ortiz as the DH.

For the starting rotation, 2013 is the drop-dead year for Jon Lester. With the other guy gone, he badly needs to step up and show that all the talk of him being an ace is for real. He can easily rebound in 2013, and you just do not give up on a power lefty who won the clinching game of the World Series in 2007 and should be coming into his prime.

Clay Buchholz is a wonderful pitcher who could be an ace, but he is really a No. 2 at this point in his career.

Felix Doubront is a No. 4 pitcher at this time, but he could easily make the jump to No. 3. Lefties are like that. Chances are, they look at the free-agent market for another hurler who is a legit No. 3 pitcher.

Which brings us to John Lackey. The debate is whether or not you throw him out as well. The answer will have to be wait and see. If he does a decent job, then he would not be a bad No. 3 or No. 4 pitcher. Franklin Morales and Aaron Cook can duke it out for the last spot in the rotation.

It is a lineup that has holes from four through nine and a rotation full of question marks. Many of the top prospects in the minors are a few years away.

The big mistakes of the Theo Epstein regime have been cast aside by the Red Sox. The team is going back to an approach that netted grinding gamers like Ross and developing players through astute scouting—see Pedroia and Middlebrooks. 

The reset button has been pushed. Now we see if getting payroll flexibility of over $200 million is worth it.

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Steroids are like the ghosts of Christmas past in baseball.

Now that testing is solidly in place—even for human growth hormone—the league and possibly the players would probably look at the steroid issue as very old, unwelcome news. They would rather it be swept under a rock—or better, forgotten.

Like the boogeyman or the endless variations of Chucky the killer doll, the issue pops up like an unwanted toy when players from that era come up for the Hall of Fame.

Angst-driven, the writers and former players who follow the game are twisted into all sorts of shapes in trying to come up with their own position over the issue.

Keith Olbermann, who cut his teeth on ESPN before becoming a political commentator, told MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential that it is an “awful thing,” but there will be players who will not go into the Hall because of “an assumption” that they were not clean. “But that is going to be the case,” he concluded.

One of the more popular outs is to say that a player was a Hall of Famer before he turned—Darth Vader-like—to the dark side of the game. That’s what some are saying about Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez.

Clemens, who has a 354-184 win-loss mark and a bucket of Cy Youngs, insists he never used ‘roids, no matter what his former trainer says.

Bonds, who has 762 dingers, seven MVP awards and is a 14-time All-Star, said he used a cream but never knowingly juiced.

A-Rod, a career .302 hitter with 629 homers, said he used them in Texas, but never with the Yankees.

One of the tragedies in this whole sorry mess is that a lot of people don’t believe them. The face value of what they say has more holes than the Titanic.

A lot of people think of it this way:

“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

That came from Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner put in place after the Black Sox scandal almost a century ago. If you put in that statement a phrase that no player who uses steroids will ever be part of baseball, well, you get the idea.

I just cannot chop a player’s career like a pork chop, divvying up the Hall of Fame part where he is clean and the part where he looked like he was juiced, and chuck that into the garbage bin.

These players are all of a piece and not detachable like Lego parts.

The steroid era really jacks up your level of appreciation for a player like Derek Jeter or Pedro Martinez. Their bodies never ballooned like the Michelin man. They aged when they were supposed to and you never got the sense they were cheating the game. 

Pedro put it well when he recently told writers at an event at the Liberty Hotel in Boston:

“I’m glad I didn’t do [steroids], even though I was criticized for missing one or two or three starts a year for sometimes being in pain and expressing it.” (He pointed out how player recovery times were significantly less when they were using steroids.)

“I’m glad I did it clean, and I’m really extremely sorry for those guys that have to make that decision to go the wrong way, because I know baseball is hard enough to play by itself, and now carrying over such a bad reputation is not anything you want to have after such a beautiful job and a beautiful career. It’s sad but it’s your choice and you’re responsible for the steps you take.”

Like the houses, plumbing fixtures and what-have-you from the massive earthquake in Japan that is starting to wash up in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., the fallout of the steroids era is oozing out of a history that the league would rather forget.

Why is this issue so important?

Playing fair and with honor should matter because the numbers are the only tangible legacy a player leaves behind. And those are numbers compiled by players going back to the late 19th century.

Simply put, they are sacred to the game.

Football may be the most popular sport in the country—but baseball is part of the soul and fabric of the United States. 

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