Who's your daddy?

Now that we know Teixeira's dad was a Yankees fan...

From now on, please, can we ask this of all future Red Sox free-agent potentials?

It seems to me, that we've lost more than a couple of free agents to the Yankees due to which team they were fans of when they were kids. Now it comes out that Teixeira too grew up in a Yankee household.

Read More - Who's Your Daddy? (Red Sox Commentary)

New Sources added to Red Sox Rumors website

New Sources added to Red Sox Rumors website:

Fenway West

Wicked Clevah

Papelbon and Youkilis dancing a jig!

Youk (Kevin Youkilis) and (Jonathon) Papelbon Dance-off

(Jonathon) Papelbon Riverdances

both posted by: stu960193

Spring Training starts in Fort Myers this week

This is a sample post - resuming blogging this week with the start of the season!!

Gammons adds sources to ESPN report on Matsuzaka to the Red Sox

While waiting for official word, still, which may not come until tomorrow... ESPN TV and ESPN.com are adding to Buster Olney's original report that the Red Sox are the high bidders.

And now Peter Gammons is stating information from his sources that the Red Sox were the highest bidder, by far, and the bid was $42 million.

Off-season baseball schedule: free agency filing complete

In an article about the Yankees likely trading Jared Wright, ESPN confirms that essentially all players eligible for free agency have completed their filing as of Saturday's deadline on 11/11/06.

Colorado third baseman Vinny Castilla also filed for free agency Saturday, the last possible day, raising the total to 178. Free agents could start negotiating money with all teams starting Sunday.
The Los Angeles Angels' Tim Salmon was the only player eligible for free agency who didn't file.

But, since we know that Tim Salmon has retired from baseball, the mention of Salmon not filing is a non-issue.

Keith Foulke decides... he's out

Keith Foulke has decided not to return to Boston... he's not coming back to the land of Johnny from Burger King because he wants to be closer to his family.

I find this decision rather surprising, from a monetary standpoint at least. Foulke always said that if he left baseball "today" that he wouldn't miss it and would move on with his life. He's a hockey fan and baseball to him is not a passion - it's a job.

The money is/was nice, but there are more important things in life to him. Cheers, Keith, on that one.

Now, he's not retiring, we assume, but he definitely is taking a pay cut this year. He just left a guaranteed $3.75 million on the table. Maybe the money isn't that important.

We can also assume that emotions (besides those re: family) played into this a bit too, like pride. Foulke was relegated to setup roles and has been the subject of many rants from the Boston media and citizenry over the past two years whilst dealing with injuries and an overall loss of ability and/or under-performance issues.

After performing superb his 1st year on the team and like an MVP in the World Series, he clearly had issues upon following the short off-season into 2005. In 2006, he lost his closer role just days in to the season only to continue to struggle and eventually leave for more surgeries.

Foulke was never going to be comfortable again here. While the team was probably willing to give him yet another chance to redeem himself, and would have been contractually obligated to let him try, he knew that many team officials wanted to move in different directions and certainly the media and fans would so far gone that it'd be near impossible to regain their respect. (Ed note: Is that ever possible in a market such as Boston? And Foulke isn't the kind of guy to try, at least off the field PR-wise.)

Put that all aside: Let's ignore his poor choice of words, bad quotes, lack of honesty or lack of being forthcoming to the media, and we'll definitly skip the topic of who should "own" the famous World Series last out ball, for now - Let's give credit to Keith for putting his money, and in fact himself, where his mouth was and taking his game out of town - And thank him for his service.

Keith: we thank you and wish you well!