"Mine was a pinkie. I could take my finger off the bat. His was an index finger. It's going to overlap. When he hits, there's a lot of pressure from the top hand rolling over on that finger. It hurts."
Frazier is the Red Sox minor league outfield and base-running instructor. He's 42, but when he was a kid, he was one of the fastest players in pro ball. Drafted in the first round in 1986 by Houston, Frazier stole 75 bases in the Single A Sally League in 1987, then trumped that a year later by swiping 87 in the Florida State League.
Even at age 33, he stole 42 bases in 1998, and that was after having quit baseball for a time. When he was with Montreal, manager Felipe Alou called him the best fourth outfielder in baseball. But he never became much more than a spare part; Sox fans with sharp memories may remember Frazier charging Eric Gunderson in a brawl in 1996, when he played for Texas.
The story of how Sox center fielder Crisp came to call him "Dad" begins in Cleveland in 2003, when Frazier was summoned from the minors as a coach in September to work with base-runners. The Indians had a rookie center fielder named Coco Crisp.
"He was a puppy," Frazier said. "I got to know him pretty good. He's very quiet, and a hard worker."
Frazier had hoped to return to the Indians the following spring, but when that didn't happen, he took a job with the Sox. He stayed in touch with Crisp, though, was delighted when the Sox traded for him last winter, then suffered with him through a trying first season in Boston.
Crisp sustained a non-displaced fracture of his left index finger in Baltimore diving headfirst into third base in the team's fifth game of the season, this after having a terrific spring. He missed 41 games, came back at the end of May, but while making a number of highlight-reel catches, he never came close to providing the production the Sox had hoped for at the top of the lineup.
His leadoff on-base average of .293 was the worst in the American League, and while the man he replaced, the wildly popular Johnny Damon, headed to a return trip to the playoffs with the Yankees, Crisp headed for the operating table. With the bone not having healed properly, he underwent surgery Sept. 26.
