One Year Ago Today

“We’re deep. We’ve got some really good players hitting in that bottom third of the lineup,” said Lackey. “It’s going to be a fun place to be this year. It’s going to be a situation, I think, [where with] the starting pitcher kind of outlasting the other the guy, you might run into several wins.”

“Today I pitched more like I would during the season,” Lackey said. “I incorporated a lot more pitches today as opposed to the first two times, I was pretty fastball-heavy. Today was more like a regular season start and I was able to throw some offspeed pitches behind in the count and do some things that I need to do in the season.”

“It feels good,” said Gonzalez, who had sat out the first two weeks of spring games while recovering from offseason shoulder surgery. “At BP the first couple of days, I made a conscious effort to let it go and swing hard to see how it would respond. You can’t take it easy and swing hard in the game and then you feel something. You’d rather swing hard in a more controlled environment in a sense. It responded well, so I went to more of a game mentality today and yesterday and made sure to put good swings on the ball.” 

Terry Francona on Adrian Gonzalez: "You'd think that after long a wait and coming off an injury, he'd be a little jumpy. He was probably anything but that. Nice little liner to left and then had a nice at-bat when he had the sac fly. So it's a good start. He wanted to stay in and that's also good. But we have time to not rush things."