Sox have replaced whiners with winners
BY ART MARTONE
Journal Sports Editor
BOSTON
-- Johnny Damon may have spent last season with the Oakland Athletics, but he paid a lot of attention to the Red Sox.
"We [the A's] felt they were the team to beat in the wild-card race," Damon admitted.
So he felt a certain amount of relief when the Sox found themselves ravaged by injuries as the season went along. First Nomar Garciaparra. Then Pedro Martinez and Jason Varitek. Carl Everett tried -- unsuccessfully -- to play with a bad knee. The Sox dropped like a stone in the second half and Oakland, overcoming a horrific start, pulled away and easily won the wild-card berth.
Damon, looking at things from the outside, saw injuries as the key element to the fall of the 2001 Red Sox.
Trot Nixon and Brian Daubach, looking at things from the inside, had a different view.
For them, the overriding problem wasn't so much the injuries but how some of their teammates reacted to what Nixon called the "frustration" of having the injuries sabotage the season.
"You should always respect the jersey," said Nixon, "because you never know when it's going to be taken away or when you won't be able to wear it any longer.
"I think some players [on the Sox] forgot that last year. Some of them not only disrespected the Red Sox uniform, but they disrespected themselves."
And Daubach, for one, is glad they're gone.
"The guys who are here now are guys who want to be here," he said. "They have the pride of being on the Red Sox, and the pride to wear the Red Sox uniform."
Damon is one of those guys, having signed with Boston as a free agent last month. He joined many of his new teammates last night at the annual Boston Baseball Writers Dinner, attended by about 1,000 at the Sheraton Boston Hotel.
He agrees that chemistry -- that nebulous quality that everyone agrees abandoned the Sox in the second half of the season -- is important.
"Last year wasn't a lot of fun for a lot of guys with the Red Sox," he said.
And he knows of one sure-fire way to improve the mix.
"Winning makes a big difference," he said with a grin.
Nixon agrees. He thinks the lack of success, especially in the second half, was the trigger to a lot of the team's internal strife.
"We had high expectations last year, expectations that we could win the World Series," he said. "A lot of what happened at the end of the season came from frustration, frustration over all the injuries, frustration from losing, frustration from a lot of things."
General manager Dan Duquette may not survive the prospective ownership change, but his offseason moves have attempted to remedy the frustration.
Gone are people like Everett and Mike Lansing and Troy O'Leary and Dante Bichette, who were vocal in their criticisms of the way the team was run last season. In their place are veterans like Damon, first baseman Tony Clark and pitchers John Burkett and Dustin Hermanson, who were acquired as much for their character as their skills.
"One of the things we've done this offseason is bring in players who will help in the clubhouse," said John Henry, one of the prospective new owners of the team.
Some scoff at the notion that the atmosphere in the clubhouse should be mentioned in the same breath as the talent on the field. Daubach isn't one of them.
"Look at our team in 1999," he said, talking of the team that won the A.L. wild-card and made it to the American League Championship Series. "We didn't have a whole lot of talent. I batted third, for goodness sakes. But we played hard, we played together, and we made it to the ALCS."
Not that anyone thinks the Sox don't have talent.
"This is a good team," said Damon. "If we stay healthy, we're going to be tough to beat."
Nixon also remembers '99 fondly, and thinks the '02 Sox can take a lesson from them.
"You can have one guy step up and be a leader, or you can have 25 guys step up and be leaders," he said. "I'd rather have 25 guys step up and be leaders."
And if they do?
"Let people write us off, " he said. "That's fine with me. The more they write us off, the more we'll make them eat their words."
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