Keith Foulke

Leave it to Bobby Orr to help deliver another title to Boston. As Keith Foulke weighed his options last winter -- stay put in Oakland or come to Boston -- the closer received a call from one of the city's greatest lobbyists. "[Orr] left a message saying that you win in this town and you are forever idolized," Foulke said last December. Who'd know better than No. 4? The greatest defenseman who ever lived delivered a pair of Stanley Cups to town in the early 1970s and is still mobbed wherever he goes.

Leave it to Bobby Orr to help deliver another title to Boston. As Keith Foulke weighed his options last winter -- stay put in Oakland or come to Boston -- the closer received a call from one of the city's greatest lobbyists. "[Orr] left a message saying that you win in this town and you are forever idolized," Foulke said last December. Who'd know better than No. 4? The greatest defenseman who ever lived delivered a pair of Stanley Cups to town in the early 1970s and is still mobbed wherever he goes.

SEATTLE -- Potential winning run standing at home plate. Coming up: two exceptional professional hitters and a lumberjack rookie flirting with cult status. Ballpark shaking. Fans back home quaking. Strikeout. Strikeout. Strikeout. Another day in the life of a closer. Keith Foulke shut down the Mariners in the ninth inning yesterday, preserving a sloppy, face-saving 9-7 victory for the Sons of Tito and mercifully drawing the curtain on another infuriating, mediocre road trip for a baseball team that is underachieving in a big way. "We got a long flight back and a lot of baseball...

NEWARK - It's spitting rain in the nearly deserted ballpark. Frank Kois of Middletown, N.J., buttons up his Yankee windbreaker and ducks under his Yankee umbrella. The public address system blares raucous can-can music, and out in the home bullpen, a middle-age pitcher wearing a gray Newark Bears sweatshirt dances merrily along with it. It is the very same guy who was on the mound when the Red Sox ended an 86-year drought and won the World Series in 2004. "Keith Foulke?" says Kois, fumbling through his program.

ARLINGTON, Texas -- Talk about your short leashes. It looks like Keith Foulke lost his job on the basis of a garbage-time ninth inning Opening Day. The conventional thinking was that the Red Sox would let Foulkie pitch himself out of the closer role by mid-May. Late April at the earliest. Well, it turns out that the Sox pulled the trigger before the end of their first series. Leading, 2-1, going into the bottom of the ninth last night, manager Terry Francona called for kid gunslinger Jonathan Papelbon to close out the game.

It was David Wells's night, but the bonus for the Red Sox is that the Keith Foulke who resurfaced last night after barely pitching for a week bore a strong resemblance to the Keith Foulke who owned last October. Funny how three days -- three well-pitched games by Sox starters, home runs in all three by Manny Ramirez, and last night a dominating ninth inning by Foulke (11 pitches, 10 strikes) -- can make a off-and-on team look like a club that will blow by Baltimore before the All-Star break and win the division by a Secretariat margin.

Randy Johnson is headed back to the Arizona Diamondbacks after two unfulfilling years with the New York Yankees that began with a nasty sidewalk confrontation and ended with a messy playoff loss. The Yankees reached a tentative agreement yesterday to trade Johnson to Arizona for reliever Luis Vizcaino and three minor leaguers, a move that allows the Big Unit's agents to get him a contract extension. Arizona general manager Josh Byrnes confirmed what he called "an agreement in principle" but did not identify the players who would go to the Yankees.

Death and taxes aside, Curt Schilling's trips to the mound at Fenway Park had become one of life's certainties. Ten times this season, Schilling had climbed the little hill on the emerald lawn in the Fens, and 10 times the Red Sox had departed winners. No more. After the Sox staged a rousing comeback from a 7-4 deficit powered by a memorable three-homer game by Kevin Millar, the Yankees ended the streak as Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez cracked consecutive hits off the Green Monster against recently embattled closer Keith Foulke in the ninth inning to break a 7-7 deadlock and steal an 8-7 victory...

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Opening Day is three weeks from today and Red Sox closer Keith Foulke still hasn't pitched in a spring training game. He's coming back from two knee surgeries and yesterday he got two more injections of Synvisc, a lubricant believed to be similar to what was used on the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz. " Somehow this doesn't seem like an ideal situation. Every other contender in the American League East knows what to expect from its closer. The Yankees go into the season pretty darn sure they're going to get good work from Mariano Rivera at the end of the...

No offense, but baseball bores Keith Foulke. The Red Sox closer, one of the hottest new stars in the baseball-crazy Hub, wouldn't pay to watch a game. Heck, he wouldn't even watch one for free on television. As much as Foulke loves pitching, baseball has appealed to him less and less since he signed his first contract with the San Francisco Giants a decade ago. "Once I got into pro ball and found out what a grind it is and found out some of the other things about baseball, that's when I started to lose interest in it a little bit," he said.

Randy Johnson is headed back to the Arizona Diamondbacks after two unfulfilling years with the New York Yankees that began with a nasty sidewalk confrontation and ended with a messy playoff loss. The Yankees reached a tentative agreement yesterday to trade Johnson to Arizona for reliever Luis Vizcaino and three minor leaguers, a move that allows the Big Unit's agents to get him a contract extension. Arizona general manager Josh Byrnes confirmed what he called "an agreement in principle" but did not identify the players who would go to the Yankees.

With Jonathan Papelbon likely headed back to the starting rotation, with Mike Timlin showing his age over the last half of the season, with the youngsters yet to prove themselves as viable late-inning relievers, a vintage Keith Foulke would fill a gaping hole in the Red Sox bullpen in 2007. Not hard to imagine, right? Foulke, circa 2004, when he could easily have been World Series MVP, coming out of the pen in the late going next season. Except it's been two years. Two long years.

TORONTO -- Standing before his locker last night, Matt Clement called it "a bad day . . . inexcusable . . . very embarrassing. " He categorized his last two outings (7 2/3 IP, 16 H, 14 R) as "disastrous. " He said he feels "disappointed to the point that it's embarrassing . . . I feel like I let the team down. " He said that no matter how bad it gets -- and it's as bad as a 6.91 ERA and 101 base runners, 44 of whom have scored, in 54 2/3 innings -- "I can't feel sorry for myself. " Despite the fact that Clement was in a 6-0 crater and done for the night after just 3 1/3 innings, there was a tie game on display...

BALTIMORE -- Life is good in Red Sox Nation. A 5-1 road trip to start the '06 season has included two dominating wins by Curt Schilling, a strong start from Josh Beckett, the emergence of young closer Jonathan Papelbon, and a lineup that shows patience and gets timely hits. Yesterday Tim Wakefield, who became unglued in Game 2 in Texas, rebounded at Camden Yards with six strong innings in a 4-1 win before 37,998 fans. Many of them were members of Sox Nation, and they got to witness the finale of a three-game sweep of the Orioles.

ARLINGTON, Texas -- Talk about your short leashes. It looks like Keith Foulke lost his job on the basis of a garbage-time ninth inning Opening Day. The conventional thinking was that the Red Sox would let Foulkie pitch himself out of the closer role by mid-May. Late April at the earliest. Well, it turns out that the Sox pulled the trigger before the end of their first series. Leading, 2-1, going into the bottom of the ninth last night, manager Terry Francona called for kid gunslinger Jonathan Papelbon to close out the game.

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Earlier this week, when asked what he hoped to accomplish in his first spring outing, Keith Foulke said, "Go out and strike three guys out on 12 pitches and call it day. " Yesterday, in his spring debut, albeit against Baltimore's top minor league club, the Red Sox closer did what he said he would, except he needed one additional pitch. His line: 1 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 3 K's, and a "W. " He got those three whiffs on three types of pitches (high fastball, low splitter, diving changeup)

TORONTO -- Maybe the capricious forces that rule the baseball universe, the ones that so far this summer have dictated that 26 of the 30 teams in the major leagues would have won more one-run games than the Red Sox, finally are tilting in the Sox' favor. After last night's 5-4 escape over the Toronto Blue Jays, the one in which Ramiro Mendoza was the unlikely bridge between Mike Timlin's man-the-barricades heroics in the sixth and Keith Foulke's say-goodnight-Canada lullaby at the end, the Sox have now won their last three games decided by a run, and four of their last five one-run decisions.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Odd to be back here. It was 11 months ago that Derek Lowe punched out Terrence Long and performed a regrettable salute to cap the Red Sox' comeback victory over the Oakland A's in the Division Series. Last night the Red Sox beat the A's, 8-3, in their first appearance in Al Davis's playpen since the stunning October series. In a battle between the two hottest teams in baseball, Boston prevailed on the strength of more timely hitting and a solid outing from Bronson Arroyo.

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Tedious sameness has become the theme here, where some mornings the manager doesn't know the opponent, only whether the game is home or away. But yesterday was a day of decision-making, or, at least, a day for announcing key decisions. Terry Francona, at long last, revealed the makeup of his bullpen, and what matters is this: Jonathan Papelbon has been told he will pitch out of the pen, and Keith Foulke, who has yet to pitch in a game this spring, will get the ball Opening Day in Texas if the Red Sox have a lead entering the ninth.

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Opening Day is three weeks from today and Red Sox closer Keith Foulke still hasn't pitched in a spring training game. He's coming back from two knee surgeries and yesterday he got two more injections of Synvisc, a lubricant believed to be similar to what was used on the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz. " Somehow this doesn't seem like an ideal situation. Every other contender in the American League East knows what to expect from its closer. The Yankees go into the season pretty darn sure they're going to get good work from Mariano Rivera at the...