"So finally, I said to him, 'What are you doing, trying to get votes? Who are you, the mayor?' "
It might have been Mosiello who ran with it. Or maybe it was his assistant, Mike Kirby. Either way, the nickname stuck. Sean Casey, the extroverted communications major, was now "The Mayor." Turns out he was something else, too.
"They forced me to take him," said Mosiello, now an assistant coach at Auburn, "and he turned out to be the best player I ever had on the Cape."
That was 1994. Fourteen years later, the last 10 spent in the big leagues, Casey comes to the Red Sox still reigning as Mayor, the guy who easily won a Sports Illustrated poll of players asking them to name the nicest guy in baseball.
"So real, so sincere, the greatest kid ever, absolutely genuine," Mosiello said the other day by telephone. "I still stay in touch with him, he's got a special place in my heart.
"Tough for him to get back to me, though. The guy has about five million friends. I tell people, 'He treats me great.' Well, he's great to everybody."
Joan Casey, Sean's mother, came to Boston long before her son. "I was a student at Katharine Gibbs," she said on the January day the news broke her son had signed with the Sox, referring to the famed secretarial school.
"I lived on the Fenway in a boarding house," she said, "and used to see the Red Sox play. My favorite player was Bill Monbouquette. Who'd ever thought that I'd have a son who would play for the Red Sox?"
