09:20 AM EDT on Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Boy, he doesn't look much different.

He wears glasses, and his hair and moustache are tinged with gray, and -- in keeping with the times -- he has earrings hanging from both ears . . . on the mound.

But the build, the expression, the form, they're all the same. You don't have to look twice to realize that that's Oil Can Boyd, still pitching after all these years.

He's 45, and even Carl Yastrzemski didn't play that long. But we always said The Can would be out there, somewhere, anywhere, long after his major-league days were over. His major-league days are certainly long over -- he last pitched in the big time in 1991, not counting his abortive attempt to return as a replacement player during the 1994-95 strike -- but he's still out there.

That "somewhere" is Brockton, where he pitched his first three innings Monday night for the independent Brockton Rox. His opponent, the Worcester Tornadoes, was managed by one of his former batterymates, Rich Gedman. Time marches on.

The temptation is to say The Can is timeless, but that's not true. He was made for these times, not his own. It was his misfortune to arrive on the scene about 20 years too early. Twenty years ago, baseball was still clinging to a sense of decorum and formality that Oil Can could never adhere to.

Today, we admire -- or at least tolerate -- harmless free spirits. Fist-pumps after strikeouts are commonplace, almost unnoteworthy. We don't think twice about screams of delight after successful innings. And even the worst of The Can -- the selfishness and the emotional outbursts, which culiminated in his midseason suspension in 1986 -- doesn't seem so out of the mainstream anymore.

Today he'd have teammates who'd be protective of him, a manager who'd work to understand him. That's not the way it was back then, though. The Can was the ultimate round peg, and baseball the ultimate square hole. Back then, teammates got just as upset as opponents at the on-field gesticulations; that was showing up the other team.

Managers didn't cater to individuality back then; they demanded conformity. And the Red Sox of the 1980s were a more conservative organization than most. There may have been a few teams in the baseball galaxy willing to tolerate The Can's uniqueness, but the Sox certainly weren't one of them. There was little chance such a marriage could survive, and it didn't.

"There's nothing I cherish here," he said in 1991, upon returning to Fenway as a member of the Texas Rangers. "I never wanted to pitch here again. I never wanted to play here again."

But times change. Attitudes soften. The Can's likeability is what we -- and his old teammates -- remember, not to mention his pitching skills. (He averaged 14 wins a season from 1984-86.)

It's just his timing that was off. He'd have been a perfect fit for the present-day Idiots. Can you visualize The Can on last year's champions? Comparing hair styles with Kevin Millar? Jewelry with Manny Ramirez? High-fives with Orlando Cabrera? How much fun would he have had with Nelson de la Rosa?

Doesn't seem to matter, though. For Oil Can Boyd, happiness is a baseball field. Anywhere. At any time.

Art Martone is sports editor of the Providence Journal. This is a print version of an audio blog, Art's Audio Notebook, that can be found daily with accompanying artwork at www.projo.com/redsox