It’s déjà vu all over again for Travis Shaw, who returned to the Red Sox on Tuesday after playing the last four-and-a-half seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers and Toronto Blue Jays.
Prior to pinch-hitting and flying to left with nobody out and the bases loaded in the seventh inning of the opener of Tuesday’s day/night doubleheader against the Yankees in New York, Shaw last appeared for the Red Sox in the next to last game of the 2016 season. Since then there’s a new manager, a new coaching staff, a new general manager and, we’re guessing, new carpeting in the clubhouse.
Advertisem*nt
“I know a lot of the staff, but player-wise I think there’s only three guys here from when I was here and that’s Barnes, Vázquez and Bogaerts,” Shaw said. “Obviously I knew Devers in the minor leagues … but yeah, there’s not many guys left from when I was here in 2016, which doesn’t seem like it’s been that long ago.”
(It’s long enough ago that Shaw forgot Eduardo Rodriguez, who played alongside him during both 2015 and 2016, but on the rest, he’s right.)
Shaw isn’t unique in Red Sox history: The team’s all-time roster lists dozens of players who did some time with the Sox, moved on to other teams, and then returned later in their careers. We spoke to three of them: Lou Merloni and Steve Lyons, who had multiple tours with the Red Sox, and Dennis Eckersley, a starting pitcher with the Sox in his early days who returned to Boston in 1998 to close out his Hall of Fame career.
Eckersley was traded to the Cubs for Bill Buckner in 1984 and then moved on to the Oakland A’s and St. Louis Cardinals, remaking himself into one of the game’s all-time great closers. By the time he returned to the Red Sox a whopping 14 seasons later, he was 43 years old and running on fumes.
And unlike Shaw, who was welcomed back to the Sox by a small collection of friendly faces, Eck walked into a room filled with strangers.
“I wasn’t the sh*t when I got back there,” said Eckersley, now a NESN analyst. “I was kind of done. Just hanging on. Totally different feeling. Everybody treated me great, but I wasn’t an important part of that team. It would be different if I was closing games, but I wasn’t.
“It was like I had never been there,” he said. “It was just too many years in between. So much had happened after I left, but it was something I wanted to do.”
The Red Sox made the playoffs in 1998, with Eck making one relief appearance in the Division Series against Cleveland. He made 50 relief appearances during the regular season, registering one save.
Advertisem*nt
“I really don’t remember much about that season,” Eck said. “I had a locker in the middle of the room. I think I was next to Troy O’Leary. Tim Wakefield was right around there somewhere. When I was with the Sox earlier, I was up front, near where Yaz had that corner locker.
“The only thing I remember is that it was the same sh*tty clubhouse,” he said. “And the same lousy trainer’s room.”
It was a lot different for Lou Merloni, mainly because he returned to the Red Sox — twice — after not being gone very long. The Framingham native made his major-league debut with the Sox in 1998. On May 15, 1998, facing Kansas City Royals lefty José Rosado, he hit a homer in his first-ever Fenway Park at-bat. The Red Sox came out of it with a 5-2 victory. Remember that one save Eckersley had with the Red Sox in 1998? He earned it in this game, pitching a scoreless ninth for his 390th, and final, career save.
Despite many shuttles between Boston and Triple-A Pawtucket, Merloni remained with the organization through the 1999 season, after which the club sold his contract to the Yokohama Bay Stars of the Japan Central League. After playing half the 2000 season in Japan, he was re-acquired by the Red Sox in late July and finished out the year as Boston’s everyday third baseman. He remained with Boston the next two seasons, but during the last days of spring training in 2003 he was claimed on waivers by the San Diego Padres.
Yet again, Merloni didn’t stay away long: In August, the Padres traded him back to the Red Sox for minor-league pitcher Rene Miniel.
The Padres-to-Red Sox trade was a little trippy for Merloni, given the way Padres general manager Kevin Towers first told him a deal might be made.
“He said, ‘You’re going back to Fenway Park this weekend. You’re being traded,’” said Merloni, who assumed that meant he was headed back to the Red Sox.
Advertisem*nt
“Well, we don’t know yet,” Towers told him. “The Red Sox are playing the Yankees at Fenway.”
Turns out Towers was also mulling a deal that would have sent Merloni to the Yankees.
Said Merloni to Towers: “Really, you’re going to trade me to the Yankees and send me back to Fenway for my first game?”
In the end, Merloni was sent to the Red Sox. In his first day back, he was Boston’s starting second baseman in a 10-7 loss to the Yankees.
A few days later, the Yankees, desperate for infield depth, added 38-year-old special assignment coach Luis Sojo to their active roster. Six weeks earlier, Sojo had played in the Yankees’ annual Old Timers Day game.
Now it’s a good bet Merloni would have easily acclimated himself to life as a Yankee. Heck, no less a Red Sox icon than Luis Tiant later played for the Yankees. Wade Boggs, Johnny Damon and Roger Clemens later played for the Yankees, even if it didn’t go over well in Boston. This is business. The kid from Framingham would have made it work.
But returning to the Red Sox, Merloni said, “was an added comfort level that means something. You know most of the guys on the team, you know the clubhouse guys, the parking attendants, the food attendants, you name it, and sometimes that can help bring you back to a good place.”
He believes returning to the Red Sox is going to agree with Shaw.
“Travis has been with different teams, but coming back to Boston, seeing familiar faces, sometimes that triggers some good feelings back when you were playing well,” said Merloni, now a talk-show host on WEEI and a member of the Red Sox radio play-by-play team. “I hope that’s the case, because he swung the bat well here.”
Perhaps better than anyone, Steve Lyons knows what it’s like to return to Boston — he actually had four different stints with the Red Sox:
- Drafted by the Red Sox as the 19th overall pick in 1981, he made his major-league debut in 1985. During the 1986 season, he was traded to the White Sox for one of the game’s iconic pitchers, Tom Seaver.
- In 1991, after being released by the White Sox, he was re-signed by the Red Sox.
- In 1992 he moved on to the Braves, who released him on April 30, after which he signed with the Montreal Expos. On June 27, his contract was purchased by the Red Sox.
- Lyons signed with the Cubs in February of 1993 but was released at the end of spring training. The Red Sox signed him in May. His fourth — and final — fling with the Red Sox ended on October, 3, 1993, the last game of the season, when he played both right field and second base, going 0-for-3 in Boston’s 6-3 loss to the Brewers.
The return that stands out the most for Lyons was the 1992 transaction that sent him from the Expos to the Red Sox.
“I literally traded myself to Boston,” said Lyons, a former NESN analyst who lives in Los Angeles.
How’s that again?
“Montreal was going to release me,” he said. “I had to clear waivers through the weekend, and I think they wanted to send me down.”
Advertisem*nt
Lyons said he went into the clubhouse one night after a game and saw some Red Sox highlights on TV. He remembers seeing two Sox players colliding, and thus told Expos general manager Dan Duquette that he should consider making a deal to send him back to Boston.
Duquette, who now splits time between homes on Cape Cod and Wilmington, N.C., and does consulting for a couple of big-league clubs, said, “That’s probably true. (Manager) Felipe Alou was trying to get Steve in the lineup, but he wasn’t playing very much. So Steve talked to me, and then (Red Sox general manager) Lou Gorman calls me up and he says, ‘Danny, I’ve got a job for Steve Lyons, do you want to send him back?’ I said sure, let’s do it.
“Steve was popular in Boston, and Lou liked him, so Lou got him back,” said Duquette. “Boston was a good landing place for him.”
Lyons was 32 at the time, and well into what had become a career as a journeyman.
“I knew that each time I came back to Boston later in my career, it wasn’t like they were bringing me back to be a starter,” Lyons said. “I knew I was always going to be a utility guy.
“But if Boston is the first place you played, I think it’s always going to be your baseball home,” he said. “They always knew what they were getting, and I appreciated that.”
(Photo of Shaw during his first Red Sox stint: Adam Glanzman / Getty Images)
Steve Buckley is a columnist for The Athletic. He was previously a sports columnist for the Boston Herald for nearly 24 years after spending time a columnist for the National Sports Daily and a contributor on ESPN2. Follow Steve on Twitter @BuckinBoston
