David Ortiz Ate Here: Confessions of a Grown-Up Red Sox Fanboy

Read “I Am a Red Sox Fanboy,” my column for CNN.com, by double clicking Dustin Pedroia’s beard.

Journalism has brought me close up with political leaders, CEOs, inventors, scientists, actors, musicians and even Squiggy from “Laverne & Shirley” fame.

But only baseball players can make me feel 12 years old again.

Timed for the World Series, I wrote a fun column for CNN.com about the thrill of spotting Red Sox players out of uniform — without the help of baseball cards.

Here’s a sneak peek:

“Is baseball hothead David Price right? Are the millions of us who never pitched beyond Little League just a bunch of starstruck wannabes?

During the American League Divisional Series, the Tampa Bay Rays star lashed out at the media after giving up seven earned runs in seven innings. “Nice questions, nerds!” he hissed at reporters. Then Price got mean. On Twitter, he called Sports Illustrated scribe Tom Verducci a nerd who “wasn’t even a water boy in high school.” He stopped there, passing up the temptation to mock Verducci’s prom date or how much he can bench press.

Price’s snotty attitude exists for one reason. Many of my fellow baseball nuts DO think players are cooler than the rest of us. The fact is, no matter how successful we may be in our professional lives, many of us would instantly trade in our careers for a (your team here) uniform.”

Oddly, a tongue-in-cheek column like this has attracted some angry comments directed at Boston and Bostonians. I know writers are advised to NEVER read the anonymous comments beneath their stories, but I always touch the Third Rail.

Check out my column, “I am a Red Sox Fanboy,” and please share it with fellow baseball fans. Even though it’s focused on the Sox, you really could fill in the blanks with players from your favorite team — or characters from any celebrity watching endeavor for that matter.

Classy thank you notes and ungrateful Gitmo ingrates

St. Petersburg Times advertisement

New Red Sox outfielder Rocco Baldelli, who left the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as a free agent after battling chronic injuries, just took out a newspaper ad in the St. Petersburg Times thanking the fans for their warmth and support.

C-L-A-S-S-Y.

Regardless of whether his mother reminded him to send a thank you note or not, Baldelli cemented his Good Guy Legacy.

His note:

Baldelli is the antithesis of ungrateful Guantanamo Bay prisoners, who today slapped their greatest friend in the face.  Within the first 48 hours on the job, probably before he even looked around every room in the White House, Barack Obama signed an order to shut down Gitmo and its worldwide franchise of lesser-branded foreign prisons.

Did the Gitmo Alumni Association take out a full page ad in the Washington Post or Fidel Castro’s Granma newspaper?  Nope.

According to Reuters, freed Gitmo veterans scoff that the upcoming closure is “too little, too late.”

“The prison in Guantanamo is a flagrant violation of international and American laws,” said Lal Gul Lal, the head of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organisation, an independent non-governmental organization.

“If Obama’s administration wants to get rid of the criticism and wants to implement justice then it should hand over to their respective countries all the prisoners it has in various prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere,” he said. “If that does not happen the closure of Guantanamo will have no meaning.”

Yup, either we free every thug right now OR the Gitmo shutdown will have “no meaning.” Precious stuff. I’m guessing this guy perfected his rhetoric on the Student Union steps at UMass-Amherst.

But back to the classy trend of professional baseball players writing thank you notes.

Kerry Wood also just wrote one to Chicago Cubs fans. Fellow pitcher C.C. Sabathia wrote one to Cleveland Indians fans. Barry Zito did the same for Oakland A’s fans a few years back — even though he was just going a few miles to play for the San Francisco Giants.

I wonder what baseball guru Alyssa Milano would have to say about this resurgence of politeness and etiquette.  I also wonder about Milano’s position on Gitmo.

Perhaps more important is the faint hope that more paid thank you notes from ballplayers could save the struggling newspaper industry — a theory put forth by clever Tampa Bay cheerleader Jonah Keri.

Keri, editor of Baseball Between the Numbers, thinks that Tampa Bay is going to finish ahead of Boston in 2009.  He’s almost as delusional as those ungrateful Gitmo inmates.