Wednesday, April 1, 2009

BREAKING NEWS: Buchholz Asks Sox for Trade

Just heard on EEI and Boston.com that Sox righthander Clay Buchholz has asked for a trade this morning after finding out he was being sent back to the minors.

Apparently, Clay was livid after his meeting with manager Terry Francona and GM Theo Epstein, a meeting in which he was informed that it would be Brad Penny, not he, who takes the turn as the club’s 5th starter on April 12.

“I’m just going to take it as it was out of my power and they had their mind made up," Buchholz told The Globe. “Because I don’t think I could have pitched any better than I did pitch, coming into spring training with all the expectations from last year and coming in. I feel like I did a pretty good job with it coming to this year.”

Before yesterday’s outing, when a clearly distracted Buchholz surrendered 9 hits and six runs over 5 1/3 innings, the Clay man carried at 0.49 ERA in spring training.

Francona, in his usual fashion, downplayed the incident: "I'll tell you what -- I think all spring he set out to make decisions hard for us, and I mean that in a good way. He's done a terrific job. We're really pleased with him. We’ll deal with this. Theo, Jed [Hoyer], and Ben [Cherrington] have some tough decisions to make."

Before storming out of the Sox complex in Fort Myers in his SUV, Buchholz had one final thing to say to reporters: “I’ll still be playing ball. I’ll be up in the major leagues sooner or later. It will just be with another club. You'll see. Roger Clemens. Clay Buchholz. Remember the names because they’re both going to haunt you forever."

Sox might have made the wrong decision with this one. Gonna be fun to watch at least.

Click here for the full story/quotes.


--Nick

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