BOSTON — You never know what happens when the dark clouds start to form.
One day, for instance, Chien-Ming Wang was going to be an anchor of the Yankees rotation for years to come, with back-to-back 19-win seasons and one of the most unhittably hard sinkers in baseball; the next day, he hurts his foot, and then his shoulder, and he spends two years out of baseball, and when he returns he’s throwing room-service fastballs to feasting big league hitters.
“Young, developing players,” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said last night. “You just have no idea how they’ll be able to respond to adversity, especially injuries.”
He was shaking his head as he said this, because he was talking about Jacoby Ellsbury, a player who has, from the start of this season, done everything possible to make those dark clouds scatter, who has put miles and miles between himself and his performance last year that helped destroy the Red Sox’s 2010 season and could have done an even worse number on his own career.
You just never know.
“I’m out there every day, playing baseball, having fun, helping this team win,” Ellsbury said after his career-high six RBIs powered the Red Sox to a 10-4 win over the Yankees yesterday at Fenway Park, and lifted Boston back into a tie for first place in the AL East. “That’s all that matters, not thinking too far ahead of myself.”
Ellsbury’s nightmare began when he collided with then-Red Sox third baseman Adrian Beltre last April. That cost him three stints on the disabled list and all but 18 games of his 2010 season. And during those interludes between stays on the DL, Ellsbury was barely a shadow of the player he had been projected as during splendid seasons in both 2008 and 2009.
There were more than a few Red Sox onlookers who last year questioned Ellsbury’s toughness, his willingness to play with pain; it’s possible those onlookers have never tried to get out of bed with five fractured ribs, let alone try to stand in against someone throwing a baseball 96 miles an hour, occasionally at those ribs.
So there was no way of knowing what kind of player the Red Sox were getting back this year, or if he would resemble the player who had hit .301 with 70 stolen bases in 2009, who had come up from Pawtucket in 2007 to be a contributing member of a championship team. Even Francona, who has defended Ellsbury to his critics for years, conceded in spring training the only way to know if Ellsbury could come back was to see it, and it was only right to have some doubt.
“Well,” Francona said yesterday smiling, “I was wrong.”
As good as Ellsbury was yesterday, it was in essence just another day at the park for him. He’s now hitting .321 with 19 homers and 72 RBIs, staggering numbers for a leadoff man and numbers that certainly would have him in the thick of the conversation for American League MVP if not for the fact Adrian Gonzalez hits two slots behind him in his own batting order.
And Ellsbury may sneak into that talk anyway.
He has been that good.
“Every day, he does something great to help us win,” said Dustin Pedroia, who has his own MVP plaque and knows a thing or three about what it takes to put one on your wall. “It’s fun to watch, it really is.”
Yesterday, Ellsbury opened the scoring by grinding through an at-bat and working CC Sabathia for a sacrifice fly in the third; then he struck the biggest blow of the day when he drilled a three-run homer off Sabathia in the fourth. For good measure, he singled up the middle against a drawn-in infield in the eighth, breaking the game open for good.
“Pretty good day,” Francona said. “And he’s had a few of those.”
