But no one worries too much about stuff like that on a day like this. It’s only the second game-day of the short spring season, the weather’s beautiful, and everyone’s loose. Around the fourth inning, Red Sox radio broadcaster Joe Castiglione comes down and sits with Stewart and me for a little while. Like the players, Joe looks trim, tanned and relaxed. He has his own book coming out in a month or so, a wonderful, anecdote-crammed tripdown memory lane called Broadcast Rites and Sites, subtitled I Saw It on the Radio with the Boston Red Sox. (One of the best is about the grand slam Boston catcher Rich Gedman hit off Detroit screwballer Willie Hernandez back in ’86.) He tells us more stories as he sits on the step at the end of the aisle, watching Boston College bat in the top of the fifth. Baseball is a leisurely game, and those of us who love it fill its pauses with stories of other games and other years. When I mention how hard I’m pulling for Brian Daubach to find a home with the ’04 Red Sox, Joe tells us how he set Dauber up with the woman who became his wife. “She said she didn’t like ballplayers because they were always hitting on her,” Joe says, smiling in the warm afternoon sun. “I told her she ought to meet this guy. I told her he was really different. Really nice.” Joe’s smile widens into a grin. “Then I sent Dauber in to get his hair cut,” he finishes. “Case closed.”
Stew and I look at each other and say the same thing at exactly the same moment: What hair? The Dauber’s got a quarter of an inch, at most. And we all laugh. It’s good to be laughing at a baseball game again. God knows the laughs were hard to come by last October.