Jason Bay had seen the Florida Marlins Josh Beckett from afar, running into the pitcher on occasion while both were living their National League lives. Now he's getting an up-close view of the ace.
The verdict?
"He's a guy you hate to play against," said Bay, "but love to have on your team."
But then came even higher -- and perhaps more enlightening -- praise from the Red Sox' left fielder.
"He's a d--- when he needs to be," Bay said.
And with that one good-natured salvo Bay summed up what many, including the pitcher himself, believe is the difference between Beckett then and Beckett now. He is whatever he needs to be when he needs to be it, not when he wants to be it.
"I guess we all learn from mistakes and being young in general," said Beckett before the start of the Red Sox' series against the hurler's old team, the Marlins. "I never got a chance to be what I am here. Obviously I'm not a 23-year-old kid anymore. Before it was, 'Oh, you guys are young, you guys make mistakes.' And now, as we get older, it's not that we don't make mistakes, but we've already made mistakes in the past and we know what we have to do to fix them."
Analysis of the 2005 trade that brought Beckett and Mike Lowell to the Red Sox has been flying fast and furious in the days leading up to the Marlins' series. The overriding opinion is that it proved to be a good baseball deal, with Florida getting kudos for identifying the talents of shortstop Hanley Ramirez in return for the pair of veterans.
But while everybody was focusing in on the emergence of Ramirez after he left the Sox' organization having hit just .270 with six homers in his final season before heading to Florida, it should be pointed out the uncertainties that surrounded the centerpiece of what the Red Sox were getting back.
Not only did the then-25-year-old Beckett have questionable MRI results from his right shoulder, and recurring blister problems, but there were no guarantees he was going to become the staff leader the Sox find today.
"To make the trade work for us we had to have a high degree of confidence that he was going to pitch with us for a while," said Red Sox' assistant general manger Ben Cherington, who helped pull off the deal while current GM Theo Epstein was on hiatus due to contract negotiations.
"The talent we were giving up made sense if we were getting a good Josh Beckett for a considerable amount of time, and in our minds that would only be partly dependent on him taking care of himself. Putting him in this environment would be a good environment for him, but he would have to buy in. That was a big part of the trade, knowing he was going to buy in.
"It was right around then he was really motivated to be good and healthy. He was recognizing that if he wanted to accomplish the things he wanted to on the field he was going to have to be motivated on how to do that. We felt felt like we had the structure if he was motivated to come in and do that."
To Beckett's credit, he took advantage of the resources afforded him once with the Red Sox. His commitment to the strength and conditioning program has set an example for many of the Sox' younger pitchers, including the hurler with whom he now shares the role of staff anchor, Jon Lester.
And there was also the ability to utilize the lessons passed along by some of the staff's elder statesmen at the time, such as Tim Wakefield and Curt Schilling.
They were opportunities that simply weren't available for the most part on a Florida staff that was built more on talent and youthful resilience than experience.
"I've learned a lot from being here. Now I have guys who have already known what to do. We had to learn kind of on our own," said the 29-year-old Beckett. "We didn't have a guy we could go to when there was some little idiotic thing going on. Over there we just never had that guy. I think I learned a lot from guys like Wakey and Schill, just being around guys who have been doing this a lot longer than I have.
"I had the work ethic, I didn't always apply it. I knew the things I needed to do, but I didn't realize it at the time how crucial it was to be in the right frame of mind to do the things in between starts because you have so much down-time between starts that you have to fill that with something. Your mind wanders and you start thinking about stuff that doesn't help you. One thing my dad used to always tell me is if it doesn't help you it hurts you, one way or another. So if you're not doing someting that is helping yourself, then it's hurting you in some way, whether it be wasting time, or whatever."
Beckett might not have aged that much since leaving Miami -- still the third-oldest member of the Sox staff, and just five months older than Daisuke Matsuzaka -- but the last few years have clearly left an impression.
The diligence might have started when Dr. James Andrews perhaps saved Beckett's career back in 2000 by insisting that he didn't need the labrum surgery suggested by another physician, but has picked up exponentially with each season's different highs and lows.
"I'm just getting older and I start thinking about, 'Well, if I do this it will make me feel better and put me in a better position come my start day.' I don't think I always applied it," said Beckett. "I always had the work ethic I had. I never wanted people making excuses for me or anything like that. Now it's a little bit different because of how crucial that stuff is.
"I had already been through the stuff with my shoulder where it scared me into knowing ... since 2000 I've always applied myself to the work ethic and knowing how crucial the shoulder work is since I went through the scare I went through in 2000. That part wasn't lacking. But coming in the day after you pitch and not feeling that good and sometimes maybe when I was younger, 'Maybe I'll just do half of this, or half of that.' Now I don't think that way. That doesn't even cross my mind. When you're young you get away with those things. It might not hurt you right away, but as you get older you realize this is part of the routine. The routine is not fly by the seat of your pants, and thats how it was before: fly by the seat of the pants. The routine is do what you have to do to get through your workouts, the media, everything. As I've gotten older I realize that is what puts me in position to be successful every single day."
And now Beckett finds himself in the place both he and the Red Sox had hoped he would be when moving from league to league.
The pitcher understands not only what it takes to be successful on a start-to-start basis, but also how to handle games like Sunday, when things don't go quite as planned.
"For me, and this is what I tell a lot our younger guys, the only thing you can ask for is to be healthy, because when you're healthy you can work on stuff," Beckett said. "You can throw bullpens, you can work on fastball location, or whatever you want to work on. When you're not healthy those are the times it's hard to struggle because you can't work on stuff. Like I would tell Jon [Lester] when he had his couple of struggles, 'OK, you've got today, one day, whatever you want, but tomorrow it's back to business.'
"You don't want to be Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. I've been pretty good about that my whole career."
As Bay pointed out, Beckett is now whatever he needs to be, when he needs to be it.
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