Great player.
Total fraud.
Welcome home, Nomie.
I hate to be the fly in the punch bowl here, but yesterday’s lovefest involving Nomar Garciaparra and the Red Sox was truly nauseating. If Nomar had been hooked up to a polygraph, the machine would have exploded.
Truly unbelievable. There was Nomar, seated between Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein, telling us how much he always loved the Red Sox, how much he loved the Nation.
Gag me. This was like watching Paul McCartney holding hands with Yoko Ono, telling us how much he always loved John Lennon’s wife — in a pathetic effort to sell some product, of course.
Do not be fooled. Life is long and people change. There is certainly every possibility that Nomar has matured and will henceforth pledge allegiance to Boston and spread the Gospel of the Red Sox. But it’s downright fraudulent to deny or ignore how bad this relationship was at the end. Nomar hated Boston and the Red Sox in 2004, and the Sox knew they had to get rid of him if they had a chance to win a World Series. It was nasty and personal and it was obvious to everyone who was around the team in that iconic season.
No. 5 was Positively 4th Street in 2004. It was a drag just to see him in the clubhouse. That’s why he had to go. And that’s why the Sox eventually won.
The Sox had attempted to trade him prior to the season after he turned down a four-year, $60 million contract offer. He arrived in Fort Myers with a burr in his saddle and was miserable from day one.
He developed Achilles’ tendinitis, allegedly after a ball hit him in the batting cage (nobody witnessed this). Then came the nationally televised midsummer game at Yankee Stadium, when Nomar refused to play while Derek Jeter saved the game with a face-first plunge into the stands behind third base.
It went downhill from there. On the last home weekend before the trading deadline, there was a meeting involving Nomar, agent Arn Tellem, Epstein, and the Sox owners.
“We needed to talk about how unhappy Nomar was,’’ Lucchino recalled in December of ’04. “Was there anything that could be done to change his mental state of mind, his approach to the organization, the city, and the game? We basically concluded that there was no way we were going to have a happy Nomar Garciaparra for the last couple of months of the season.’’
So Epstein made the deal, sending Garciaparra to the Cubs a week later. And then the Red Sox turned things around and won the World Series.
