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Arroyo strikes out in Red Sox trade

The pitcher says he dreamed of retiring from Boston. Now he heads to Sarasota to train with the Cincinnati Reds.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published March 21, 2006

BROOKSVILLE - The boy from Brooksville wanted to play baseball in Boston forever.

On Jan. 19, Bronson Arroyo, local kid made good, made a decision against the financial advice of his agent and took less money than he could have had just so he could stay where he was. His market value, based on his statistics and his potential, was about $15-million for three years. Arroyo took $11.25-million.

He cut the Red Sox a deal. Then, on Monday, the Red Sox cut him loose.

The 2004 world champions traded the right-handed pitcher to the Cincinnati Reds for an outfielder named Wily Mo Pena and some cash.

Arroyo, 29, Hernando High Class of '95, was at his home off Croom Road east of Brooksville on a day off from Sox spring training in Fort Myers when he found out. Boston general manager Theo Epstein called him on his cell phone and told him about the trade just before it showed up on ESPN.

"I did the right thing that I thought was right for me," he said Monday afternoon in his living room. "They're doing what they think is right for them.

"I told them straight up what I wanted to do: I wanted to retire a Red Sox, and I want to be a Red Sox, but it doesn't always work like that."

"People are always getting on players for not having any loyalty," said his agent, Terry Bross, reached in Scottsdale, Ariz., on his cell phone, "but here a player goes in the opposite direction."

Arroyo is the son of a Cuban-born construction worker and a Pasco County nurse. He grew up in a one-story house with a tin roof set back from a thin road with tall oaks with Spanish moss. His father built a batting cage in the back yard and rigged up some lights and used to pitch to him and play catch in the evenings.

The boy's first date with the former Aimee Faught was at the Wendy's on U.S. 41. She is now his wife. He still shops at the Publix and gets gas at the Circle K in the off-season.

But he became a bona fide big-leaguer in Boston.

Arroyo broke into the major leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2000 and pitched for them for parts of three seasons before being released. The Red Sox signed him in 2003. He pitched for them the next year when they won the World Series for the first time since 1918.

The Red Sox were big before. Now they're absolutely huge.

Boston's Fenway Park has been sold out for three straight years. Last year, at spring training, someone posted on eBay a half-drunk protein shake the seller said Arroyo's lips had touched. In Boston, he didn't have to wait for tables at restaurants, but he couldn't really walk down the street anymore, anyway.

He put out a CD of cover songs last summer. It debuted on the Billboard Top 200 chart.

"Right now, being a ballplayer in Boston," Jeff Stevenson, the Warner Music New England marketing man, said last summer, "it's like winning the lottery."

Arroyo didn't want to leave. He set career bests last season with 32 starts, 14 wins and 100 strikeouts, then signed the undermarket deal for three years.

"You don't have to be greedy just because everyone else is," he said Monday.

In Boston, he used to live in a $3,400-a-month apartment in a fancy stone building with a doorman downstairs. It was just a few blocks off ritzy Newbury Street.

He just bought a place in that neighborhood last month. He had a truck all ready to take his stuff up there - until Monday.

This year in spring training, he struggled early. But in his start on Sunday, he pitched five innings and didn't allow a run. Scouts from many teams, including the Reds, were in the stands watching.

Late Monday morning, his mother, Julie Arroyo, logged on to the Red Sox Web site, redsox.com, to see how her son had pitched. That's when she saw the headline.

"He gave them a deal in order to stay there," she said. "There's no loyalty. You can understand why players go for as much money as they can - because the owners have no loyalty, either."

Mike Steele was watching ESPN in his double-wide west of Brooksville when he saw the news crawl across the ticker on the bottom of the screen.

"That's what happens in the good ol' world of business," said Steele, one of Arroyo's buddies still living in Hernando. "Nice guys finish last.

"It's the big buzz around town. My phone started ringing, ringing, ringing."

His wasn't the only one. Arroyo's cell phone mailbox was full.

Over at his house, though, he had had the exterminator over earlier in the morning to take care of a rice weevil problem he's having in his pantry. He took out the trash. He vacuumed the living room.

"I knew this was a possibility," he said of his deal with Boston management and a potential trade. "I told them, I'm signing this to be a Red Sox. ... They said we don't foresee a trade going down for you in the near future.

"But near future is relative. What's near future?"

It turned out to be exactly two months and a day.

"I really admire Bronson and have gotten to know him really well," Epstein, the general manager, told the Associated Press on Monday in Fort Myers. But "if I allowed my personal feelings about a player or recognition that this player would prefer to stay in Boston ... affect our judgment in what we thought was best for the organization, then I wouldn't be doing my job."

Arroyo said he would report Tuesday evening to the Reds' spring training site in Sarasota.

"All you can do is pitch," he said. "You've got to get people out wherever they send you."

He finishes his Red Sox career with 24 wins and 19 losses in 61 starts.

The walls of the press box high above the field at Fenway are lined with the framed fronts of sports sections from around New England from the morning after the Red Sox won the World Series. On many of them is Bronson Arroyo, smack in the center, blond cornrows, big little-boy smile, jumping onto the top of the champions' pig pile. Those pictures in the press box likely will be there for quite some time.

--Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified March 21, 2006, 02:30:40]