It’s “Official”

As they’ve been reporting for a while, the Red Sox and my man Mike came to an agreement on a one-year contract worth, reportedly, three million dollars.

There were times when I wasn’t sure he’d be back.  I thought maybe he’d thought about it and decided to retire to Colorado and hunt and fish all year long (and I wouldn’t have blamed him) or I thought that Theo had seen enough and wanted to go younger.  So to find out that not only is Mike coming back, but with a raise…well, hell, that makes me happier than pretty much anything else baseball-related has since the Sox won the World Series!

“I didn’t really feel like it was something where I was going to have to go somewhere else (to keep pitching). That never occurred to me,” Timlin said. “The only thing that occurred to me was that I need to pitch better where I am.”

"We know the organization, we know the people in the organization. They know what my family is about, what we consider important to us. We kind of fall along the same lines in our thinking. We’re comfortable there and that’s a huge part. If you’re comfortable playing somewhere and you’re having success, there’s not a whole lot of reason to change."

 I know he’s been in baseball a long time and I know he never reached ‘superstar’ status, but Mike is, undeniably, my favorite player.  And not just because I think he’s a good player.  I think he’s a good man.  And when he says things like this, especially where there were other offers out there, he just reinforces that, once in a while, a player shows up who isn’t all about finding new ways to make more money.  I feel fortunate that the team I follow has a nice handful of players who feel that the game is a little bigger than their wallets.

Photo lifted from RedSox.comAnd speaking of good guys…Kyle Snyder, Bryan Corey, Julian Tavarez and Brandon Moss visited the Children’s Hospital today as well as the Dana Farber Cancer Institute along with other reps from the team and the two World Series trophies.  It’s a small gesture that doesn’t take much time, but I’m sure it meant the world to the kids/young people they visited.

I had some time off at the end of last week and enjoyed it thoroughly.  It reminded me that I’m blessed to have such wonderful friends but it also reinforced that I’m terribly overdue for a real vacation.  🙂