If ever a guy had a right to gloat, it is Francona. The manager pulled the full Tammy Wynette in April, when his little second sacker was going 5 for 48 in one stretch of 18 games. Day after day, Francona stood by his man, even on days when Cora was doing things like hitting a triple and a homer in the same game at Yankee Stadium.
The kid is our second baseman, he kept saying. The scouts say he'll hit, so he'll hit. Cora is here to back us up at short and second. That's his job. No, I'm not contemplating a switch.
But as April rolled into May, the kid did not hit. And you had to wonder if he ever would hit, since he did not hit when he was called up last September (.191 in 89 at-bats) and he did not hit in Florida, either. Sometimes scouts are wrong.
It now looks as if maybe they weren't wrong, and Francona was wise to believe them. For the past three weeks, no batter, not even Ichiro Suzuki (well, perhaps Kevin Youkilis) has been harder to get out than Pedroia. Facts are facts.
"You want me to say, 'I told you so'?" said Francona. "OK, I told you so. But, no, it was just the right thing to do. We had a young player the organization said can do certain things. We just hadn't seen him do them yet at the major league level. We didn't see it in September, and we didn't see it in spring training. Now he's doing it. For me not to see it would have been a mistake."
At 5 feet 9 inches and a listed 180 pounds, Pedroia sure looks like a second baseman. He was a very good one at Arizona State, where he was a three-time All-Pac-10 selection, the 2003 Pac-10 co-Player of the Year, the 2003 National Defensive Player of the Year, and one of five finalists for the 2004 Golden Spikes Award. In the collegiate world he was a major Somebody, and he was a second-round selection of the Red Sox (their first available selection and No. 65 overall) in the 2004 draft.
In other words, this was no scrappy, overachieving 29th-round pick coming out of nowhere. This was a marquee prospect. And Francona knew that.
