Day 5 Thursday Night

The Red Sox hosted a happy hour at a local restaurant, the Reserve, Thursday evening.  They handed out championship 2007 celebratory cigars and had an open bar and munchies.  It was nice.  Rich Gale, our manager, was one of the few pros to come.  Lots of the Jackals and Gulls were on hand. The Jackals pictured are JJ, Canada Dave, Haber and the catcher Moore.There is a Gulls team picture and one of Joe with roomie Paul and Tom Lynch and one of Joe with Tim Cyr and Craig Winterfeldt.  Rich Gale was relaxed and engaging and shared lots of stories with us.  We asked particularly about throwing at the other team.  He said it was an unwritten rule that if they did something dirty or hurt one of your guys, the pitcher had to make things right.  The managers and players never said anything about it; they didn't have to.  As a pitcher, if you failed to make things right, you'd loose respect in the clubhouse.  It would not have to be the next inning or even that game.  But it had to be evened up.  He specifically mentioned a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees in 04 when Jeter got hit.  He just went to first and waved his finger at his own dugout and said, "that's it; no more."  He was referring to the score being even and no need to keep it going.  Rich said the game is different today with immediate warnings and quick ejections.

Rich is deaf in one ear.  He told us that if he didn't like what a player was saying, he'd make sure to position his deaf ear to the player.  Such as, "can you catch another inning?" or, "can you go another inning?" So he said it was not uncommon to see players running around him trying to get to his good ear as he spun in place.  Rich had been kind of hard to get to know and he's certainly intimidating with his 6 foot 7 size and still being in awesome shape.  But we really got to like him and I had a great deal of respect for him how he treated me in my time of failure.  And because he didn't baby us at the plate, he really prepared us for the game against the pros.  Rich had the right mix of instruction, competing hard and playing proper baseball with an attitude of relax and have fun too.  Here's Rich with his favorite pitcher.