It’s become one of my favorite pastimes to watch the interplay between Red Sox ownership, General Manager Theo Epstein and the players during the World Series ring ceremonies, and Tuesday’s proceedings were a fun exercise in the unique relationships.



One of my favorites was Julian Tavarez and his Japanese-style bow to Sox Principal Owner John Henry, which might have been a not-so-subtle thank you from the players for sending them on their 19-day odyssey to Tokyo and back.

Another might have been the almost total lack of interaction between Epstein and Sox right-hander Curt Schilling when the bloody-socked hero went out to pick up his ring with the dual World Series trophies on it. The blink-and-you-missed-it exchange was very similar to the frosty exchange between Epstein and the Big Schill during the opening days of spring training.

Schill says he is over the disagreement that he had with the Sox medical staff in February over their course of treatment of his right shoulder/biceps, but I don’t buy it. The Big Schill still looked like he was holding a big grudge.

The most interesting, to me, was the slow strut by outfielder Coco Crisp down the red carpet on the way to pick up his little piece of World Series jewelry. I took it to mean that Crisp was kind of slowly taking everything in for perhaps one of his last big moments at Fenway as a member of the Olde Towne Team, but here’s what Crisp said:

“Maybe I just walk slow, I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about it. I just waved and once I got my hand up there then I really wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do after that. I almost got into a kind of a pageant wave down there and I didn’t want to get into that. I can’t do that. A guy with braids can’t do a pageant wave, but I did a little so I stopped that really quickly and I walked.

I don’t know what was going on. The main thing was not tripping going out of the dugout. I didn’t really imagine what the ceremony was going to be like beforehand. For some reason, the big things in life I don’t get touched by them. I can go and get touched by a little thing in a movie and shed a tear or something, but not the big things.

My parents bought me a car for my 16th birthday and everyone was so excited for me to go out there and check out the car, and I went out and looked at it. And it was a really nice car, and I was like ‘Oh, thank you.’
But then my dad got me a Nintendo video game out of the blue that I had wanted for like two years, and I just started crying and going on about it. The ring was kinda like the car where I just didn’t get all that super-emotional.”

Interesting, and not at all what I thought might be going through his mind. The Nintendo Video Game that got Crisp all emotional: Track and Field 2. That’s right. I was wrong when I guessed RBI Baseball. More Later.