If you didn't know any better, the view Tuesday morning could be deceptive. There was Lowe, playing catch alongside Trot Nixon in City of Palms Park, as much at home here as he had been the last seven springs, spent preparing for a new baseball season as a member of the Red Sox.
But Lowe plays for the Dodgers now, soon headed west for Chavez Ravine instead of north to Yawkey Way. Eric Gagne will be saving his games now, not Keith Foulke. No longer will he be throwing to Jason Varitek. His new catchers' names are David Ross and Paul Bako.
He was here Tuesday morning because his offseason home is nearby, and the Sox extended their former employee the courtesy of continuing his winter workouts here with physical therapist Chris Correnti, a handful of minor leaguers, and a few recent arrivals, like former teammate Nixon and pitchers Matt Mantei and Wade Miller, newcomers to the Sox staff.
If Lowe returns to the World Series next fall, it won't be because Curt Schilling's ankle is OK. "For us," Lowe said, employing that pronoun to refer to someone other than the Sox for the first time since Dan Duquette's franchise-shaking swap of Heathcliff Slocumb to Seattle for Lowe and Varitek in July 1997, "the big question is Brad Penny's health. If his shoulder is healthy, we can be a World Series team. His health will determine how far we go."
But Lowe, whose parting gifts to Boston were clinching victories in each of the three rounds of the playoffs that propelled the Sox to their first World Series title in 86 years -- an act of unprecedented largesse that was rewarded not with a new contract but a one-way ticket out of town, one that he had all but punched himself months before -- has not purged his thoughts of all things Red Sox.
"I'm not one of those guys who leaves and roots against his old team, sits in front of the TV and hopes they fail," he said. "I still have a lot of friends over here, and I don't believe in bitterness when you leave a place.
"We could sit here forever and talk about what really happened -- we could sit with Theo [Epstein] and talk about it -- but what makes it easier to leave is the fact we won the World Series. Your worst fear as a player is that they win after you leave. It must have killed Nomar [Garciaparra] to watch.
