Ready to start anew

Kim is anxious to help shoulder load in Boston

February 23, 2004|Globe Staff

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- It was so out of character, this impetuous act of astonishing directness for a private man so isolated by language and culture and unfamiliarity with a new team and a new city that he seldom gave voice to his feelings. But at that moment, with his shoulder aching and his heart brimming with frustration that even when he did pitch his manager had little confidence in him and the fans even less, he raised his middle finger in a universal gesture of contempt, anger, and disrespect, when just about everyone who mattered in his world was watching. It is four months later. The apologies since have been spoken, the embarrassment has receded, and the pledge has been made that nothing like it will happen again.

"I was kind of joking," Red Sox pitcher Byung Hyun Kim said yesterday, with Chang Lee, the Sox assistant trainer, acting as translator. "I wasn't trying to flip all the fans off. I don't worry about that now, because I know if I pitch well, the fans will support me, and if I pitch bad, then they have the right to boo me. Last year, when I flipped off the crowd, it wasn't funny. I did it once, and I won't do it again."

It would be tempting to define Kim's first season with the Red Sox by that gesture, made as he was being introduced to the Fenway Park crowd before Game 3 of the American League division playoffs against the Oakland A's. A relationship that had begun with such promise at the outset, when he was acquired from Arizona in a trade for Shea Hillenbrand and had immediately righted a bullpen that was badly listing, had turned sour by September, when Grady Little made it clear he'd lost faith in Kim's ability to close. He hit what he considered bottom in Cleveland, getting yanked one out away from a save after he hit two batters, and took another bad turn in October in Oakland, when he was lifted again just an out away from a save, after a walk and a hit batsman, and Alan Embree gave up a tying hit in a game the Sox ultimately would lose.

When the American League Championship Series began, when the tightness in his shoulder (which had begun in Arizona after he was struck in the ankle by a broken bat and had relied too much on his upper body to throw) had become so great he told the trainers he no longer could pitch, he was scratched against the Yankees, the team he could not conquer.

When the Yankees rallied, five outs away from defeat, to win Game 7 of the ALCS, Kim, whom the Sox once had envisioned for just such a scenario, wasn't even in uniform. And more than a few fans may have felt the temptation to answer him in kind.

As a closing act, Kim appeared finished.