I know almost everyone out there who is a fan of the Boston Red Sox is not very happy with what transpired at the end of the season especially with the things that have come out so far. I know I’m not still.
But I will say this. I’m glad that Jon Lester took responsibility for his actions in “Fried Chicken and BeerGate”.
Here’s a little of what Lester had to say to the Boston Globe about it:
“There’s a perception out there that we were up there getting hammered and that wasn’t the case,” Lester told The Globe via telephone from his home in Georgia. “Was it a bad habit? Yes. I should have been on the bench more than I was. But we just played bad baseball as a team in September. We stunk. To be honest, we were doing the same things all season when we had the best record in baseball.”
Lester said the drinking was confined to starting pitchers who weren’t in the game that day.
“It was a ninth-inning rally beer,” he said. “We probably ordered chicken from Popeye’s like once a month. That happened. But that’s not the reason we lost.
“Most of the times it was one beer, a beer. It was like having a Coke in terms of how it affected you mentally or physically. I know how it looks to people and it probably looks bad. But we weren’t up there just drinking and eating and nobody played video games. We watched the game.”
Now I could understand if he had a beer in the clubhouse after his start. I’ve seen it before even in the minor leagues. But the pitchers who should be on the bench supporting their team during the game had no reason to be up there even if they were doing it while the team was winning.
Couldn’t they all wait until the end of the game to have a beer together?
I’ve said this once before.
The Red Sox are really going to need a manager who runs a tight ship. Someone who is not going tolerate the frat boy behavior in the clubhouse, at least during games.
Otherwise, what’s to say this type of thing doesn’t happen again all season long in 2012.
By the way, if you missed the Taiwanese animation of what happened in the clubhouse, you really need to check that out.
