By romancing A-Rod at Garciaparra's expense, the Sox have allowed Garciaparra to frame this discussion in terms of how much they want to keep him, and what reason he has to believe them even if they do. Not after listening to them for months say how their top priority was to re-sign him, then turning on the TV to find out that it was Rodriguez they really wanted.
Never mind that the Sox felt they had no choice but to explore the A-Rod avenue because they had serious doubts about their ability to keep Garciaparra in a Sox uniform -- at least, for the price they were willing to pay. This is now about their franchise player, who expended maximum effort on the field and was a model citizen off it, believing that he was blindsided, then tossed overboard.
"Can you believe after these three months I'm still here in Fort Myers?" Garciaparra said yesterday, addressing the media from the same picnic table occupied only a few minutes earlier by Pedro Martinez, another Sox superstar with an uncertain future.
"Am I still mad? Mad, all that stuff, I don't know if I'm all those things. I was definitely hurt by a lot of it."
Garciaparra would not discuss the status of his current negotiations with the club, other than to say there have been some and they will continue. His agent, Arn Tellem, is due in camp sometime in the next week or so.
Unlike Martinez last season, Garciaparra wasn't drawing any lines in the sand, setting a deadline by the end of spring training for a new deal.
"I'm not going to be saying stuff like that," he said. "Right now, I'm just focused on baseball. As far as deadlines, I'm not really worried about that. I signed a contract for the Red Sox a long time ago to play here. Now that I'm at the end of that contract, I'm going to fulfill that contract. That's what I'm about. I've done that from Day 1, and I'm still doing that."
Nor was Garciaparra admitting to having gained any advantage from A-Rod winding up in Yankee pinstripes alongside Derek Jeter.
"Does it enhance my position and everything?" he said. "It wasn't about enhancing my position. I was never about that. I'm not about enhancing my position. I've done everything I can."
