Has there ever been a more intelligent bullpen in baseball?
Well, Mike Marshall, who won the National League Cy Young Award for the Dodgers in 1974, held three degrees from Michigan State, including a PhD in kinesiology.
But he couldn't keep the kind of company you find these days in the Red Sox bullpen. Lefthander Craig Breslow has a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale, while teammate Javier Lopez has a degree in psychology from the University of Virginia.
``Don't forget our bullpen catcher, Jason Larocque," Jonathan Papelbon said. ``He went to Harvard."
Indeed, Larocque, whose first job with the Red Sox was as a scouting intern for Wayne Britton back in the Dan Duquette days, graduated with a degree in government.
Lopez's wife, Renee, meanwhile, a former soccer player at Virginia, is working on her PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Tennessee, and currently is serving an internship at a counseling center connected to the athletic department at Texas A&M. Her area of interest is not performance enhancement counseling, but helping athletes with life stresses.
``Then you got me," said Papelbon, ``who's a [expletive] genius."
Hey, Papelbon is a college boy, too. He went to Mississippi State, where his major was educational psychology. And Craig Hansen is just a year removed from St. John's University, his education interrupted when the Sox drafted him on the first round in 2004.
Bullpens are legendary for their shenanigans. It might come as a surprise to learn that Moe Drabowsky, arguably the king of the bullpen pranksters, was from the liberal arts school Trinity College in Connecticut, alma mater of legendary sports columnist Jim Murray. Drabowsky was famous for slipping an M-80 into the bathroom stall of an unsuspecting teammate, lighting hotfoots, carrying around live snakes, stocking the bullpen water supply with goldfish, and on one occasion, conducting a mock funeral of a teammate, which was a great hoot for everyone involved until the center field camera picked it up, much to the ire of the GM of the club. Drabowsky, a stockbroker, also would use the bullpen phone to get an outside line and check on stock prices.
With the fans in such proximity to the bullpens, as at Fenway Park, relievers are often inclined to engage spectators in banter, though there hasn't been a situation odder in recent years than Papelbon's exchange last summer with a fan who hurled his prosthetic leg into the pen, asking for an autograph.
So it should be understood that smart guys and having fun are not mutually exclusive in baseball. At the same time, Lopez acknowledges that the level of conversation in the Sox bullpen tends to transcend the usual concerns of Jockworld.
