Quick quiz. You're a major league pitcher. Your wife is expecting. Your team is faltering. You make a ton of money. Where should your focus be?
A) Baseball. All baseball and nothing but baseball.
B) Family. Wife and child have to come first.
C) The caloric count of your last meal.
The baseball-centric of my mind would like to believe the answer is A, but the logical side of me realizes that it's really B. I wanted the Red Sox to do well last season as much as any fan, but I will never EVER fault Josh Beckett for saying that his wife and daughter became his number one priority last season. I'm sure traveling with the team when your wife is eight or nine months pregnant must be hard. Especially for the first child. I would (and I'm sure he would) think less of him as a human being if he weren't slightly distracted. And he should never have to apologize for that.
It's nice that Josh came out and responded to so much of the criticism against him. Not for nothing, I think he did a damn good job hiding the fact that he had an ankle injury. Some may question the validity of the ankle problems, (and I may be one hundred percent wrong about this) but Beckett really doesn't strike me as the type to lie over something like that. Straight shooter is the phrase that comes to mind when thinking about him. He's crass and grumpy. If you're going to be crass and grumpy and tell people things they don't want to hear, you're probably not making up an ankle injury to use as a scapegoat. Again, I could be wrong. That's how I feel.
We're going into a new season. Josh is coming off the best year of his career. He's had time to rehab any lingering issues with that ankle. His wife and daughter are both presumably healthy, and he seems to have his head in the right place. Media, please stop asking Josh to apologize for last year. Let's just let him get on with THIS season and be happy with that.
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