Manny being Manny: Hyde Park’s Delcarmen perfectly at home with Sox
By Steve Buckley
Boston Herald General Sports Columnist

Sunday, February 26, 2006 - Updated: 10:07 AM EST

FORT MYERS -- Following his first taste of the big leagues last season, Red Sox rookie pitcher Jonathan Papelbon returned home to Jacksonville. Outfielder Adam Stern, having enjoyed his first cup of coffee in the big leagues, went home to London, Ontario. Catcher Kelly Shoppach headed for Fort Worth, Texas, Alejandro Machado to Caracas, Venezuela.

    And then there was Manny Delcarmen. When his first season in the major leagues was jotted into the history books, he could have hopped into his car and been home in minutes. Heck, he could have walked home.

    Better yet, he could have taken the T: When one of your best friends is an MBTA bus driver, all it takes is a quick call on the cell phone to get the latest route schedule.

    As all Red Sox fans know by now, Manny Delcarmen is a local kid. Born in Boston, raised in Jamaica Plain and Hyde Park, he made a name for himself as the ace of the staff at West Roxbury High School. This makes him that rare Red Sox player who understands the quirky Boston accent, who knows where to get a slice of pizza at 1 a.m., and, perhaps most importantly, he understands and respects the dreaded New England candlepin, which over the years has doomed many an outsider who simply couldn’t figure out what to do with all that deadwood.

    “People know him as a baseball player, but I also know him as a candlepin bowler,” Jose “Macho” Diaz, 29, a union sprinkler fitter for Local 550 in West Roxbury, said of his friend Delcarmen. “When he’s out bowling candlepins, he’s in a different world. He has this little shimmy he does after he gets a strike. You have to see it to believe it.”

    There are those who believe getting a strike in candlepin bowling is harder than throwing a strike in a big league ballgame. Delcarmen, who turned 24 last week, has managed to do both.

    In a 2005 Red Sox season that dissolved into the fog of a three-game sweep at the hands of the Chicago White Sox in the first round of the playoffs, the emergence of Manny Delcarmen was one of the year’s best stories. Summoned from Triple-A Pawtucket on July 26, he made his debut in the eighth inning of a game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. He recorded a 1-2-3 eighth, striking out the first batter he faced, Johnny Gomes. In a game perhaps best remembered for the Carl Crawford line drive that crashed into the head of Red Sox starter Matt Clement, Delcarmen will always remember it as the day he was so edgy that his new teammates had to remind him what his lungs are used for.

    “I was nervous enough to begin with, but you get a little more nervous when you show up in the big leagues for the first time and don’t have your own equipment,” he said. “My equipment bag finally arrived, and I settled down once I was able to get my own glove and cleats.

    “I’m sitting out there in the bullpen, eating seeds, chewing gum, breathing hard, and all these veterans are out there, (Mike) Timlin and (Curt) Schilling. It was Schilling who said, ’Hey, relax! Breathe!’ And you could see me on TV when they showed me, sucking in as much air as I could.”

     Delcarmen was eventually sent back to Pawtucket, but was twice more called up to the Red Sox. He appeared in 10 games overall, going 0-0 with a 3.00 ERA.

    But for Delcarmen, the fame of being a big leaguer was just the beginning. Unable to sink back into the shadows of some faraway hometown, the local kid remained local, and visible. Just a year earlier, he could ease around the city without being recognized. Now, he was being stopped by strangers.

    “I’d be out and about with my friends, and you could hear random people say, ’Is that him? We have to go up and see if that’s him,’ ” Delcarmen said. “And they’d walk right up and say, ’Hey, are you Manny Delcarmen?’ It was kind of cool.”

    But, so far, it has been just a taste of the big time. . He is almost certainly ticketed to open this season back at Pawtucket, but everyone recognizes he is a part of the future at Fenway Park. A big part. During this offseason, the Cleveland Indians tried to hold up the Sox’ acquisition of center fielder Coco Crisp unless Delcarmen was included in the deal. The Sox held the line, insisting on keeping the kid from Hyde Park.

    Now the question is this: When Delcarmen makes it to the big leagues for good, will he be able to balance his career with his hometown roots? It’s hard enough to play for the Red Sox when you have the luxury of going home when the season is over. What happens when Boston is your home?

    “We already talked to him about that the first time we called him up,” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. “We recognize what it means for a kid from Boston to play for the Red Sox. Our job was to keep an eye on him and make sure he’s not overwhelmed by the experience.

    “I honestly believe he’s going to be able to make it work. He’s shown the personality of a Boston kid without getting caught up in it.”

    Home-field advantage

    Delcarmen believes he has played on every baseball field in Boston, as well as a number of parks in the suburbs and beyond. He knows which parks have the best mounds, the smoothest infields, the greenest grass. He knows which parks have lights. He knows all this because he has played on these diamonds at every level from tee-ball to Little League to high school. He played for the South End Astros in the Yawkey League, and, briefly, for Mass. Envelope in the Park League.

    To this day, he says he can close his eyes, take a deep breath, and literally conjure memories of those old ballparks.

    “I would say Daisy Field, right off the Jamaicaway, was my favorite park,” Delcarmen said. “That’s where I first played growing up, and I know everything about it. It just has a certain smell to it that takes me right back to tee-ball. I don’t think that’s something you ever lose if you love baseball.”

    It was his father, Cookie Delcarmen, who instilled a love of baseball in his son. A native of the Dominican Republic who once played some minor league ball with the Philadelphia Phillies organization, Cookie was forever dragging his kids off to his own softball games, and it was only a matter of time before the kid picked up a baseball. And it wasn’t long after that when he figured out that a baseball is meant to be thrown, and hard.

    “He’s younger than me, so I remember him as this little kid when my dad and his dad were playing softball,” said Diaz. “You knew he loved the game, right from the beginning. I used to toss him the ball underhand. Now, whenever he sees me, he holds up three fingers -- that’s his way of saying how many pitches he’d need to strike me out.”

    Once he latched on to baseball -- physically, emotionally -- it was only natural to dream about playing for the Red Sox. It has been the dream of New England schoolboys for generations, a dream that lures them to Fenway, entices them to lean over the railing for autographs. A tiny fraction of them go on to play any pro ball at all, and only a fraction of those make it to the big leagues. Just a few locals -- a Tony Conigliaro, a Rich Gedman, a Carlton Fisk, a Skip Lockwood -- ever pull on a Red Sox uniform.

    And, now, Manny Delcarmen.

    “My dream was to be like a Manny Ramirez or a David Ortiz and have people recognize me,” he said. “I never hesitate giving autographs because growing up I was always asking for autographs when I was at Fenway Park.”

    Among his favorite players was Ken Griffey Jr., who was patrolling center field for the Seattle Mariners when Delcarmen was a kid. Though he never did get Griffey’s autograph, he did see him play at Fenway.

    As for those players whose autographs he did score, he recalls Mike Greenwell, the former Red Sox outfielder, stopping at the railing to sign. He landed the autograph of Wade Boggs, the future Hall of Fame third baseman. Mo Vaughn, too.

    “Like all kids, we’d go to the park early,” he said. “That’s always your best chance to get an autograph. Right when the park opens. We’d go on school trips and Latino youth groups.”

    Does he still have the autographs? Or were they all thrown out by Mom?

    “I know I still have the Wade Boggs autograph,” he said. “It’s in a box somewhere.

    “Once I started pitching. I idolized Pedro Martinez. My dad would make me watch him. ’He’s one of the best pitchers of all time,’ he’d say. ’Pay attention.’ The year I was hurt, I finally met Pedro. He came and talked to me. He said, ’Give it your best and you’ll be back 100 percent.’ ”

    Yet having made it with Pedro’s old team, Delcarmen has an old Pedro trait: He is fiercely devoted to his buddies from the old days. When he talks about the likes of Diaz and Javy Colon, it is as though he is not merely talking about old teammates, but family members. And, no disrespect intended to veteran Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek, Delcarmen has this to say about Diaz: “He’s one of the best catchers I ever had.”

    Said Colon: “He calls me more than I call him. He used to call a lot when he was in the low minors, especially that first full year when he was in Augusta. He just wanted to talk about home, friends, those kind of things.”

    Dealing with the talk

    The trade talk was, well how else to say it: numbing. No sooner had Delcarmen realized his dream of playing for the Red Sox, he couldn’t turn on the radio or pick up a paper without learning of the latest developments in the Red Sox-Indians talks.

    “One of the things I’ve learned the last couple of years,” he said, “is that everyone’s name gets thrown around in trades. So when I saw my name getting mentioned, I didn’t pay any attention to it. When my friends said I might get traded, I didn’t pay any attention to that, either.”

    But then Delcarmen received a telephone call from his agent, Jim Masteralexis.

    “And he said, ’Manny, you might be going to Cleveland,’ and that’s when I began to take it seriously,” Delcarmen said. “So I was biting my fingernails, hoping it wouldn’t happen. I was nervous. There aren’t many local guys who actually get to play for their hometown team, and I want to be one of them.

    “That’s the first thing that came to my mind, that I might be leaving Boston. I just bought a house with my fiancee. I’m not saying anything bad about Cleveland. They need pitching and I’d probably get a better chance to pitch in the big leagues if I were with them. But this is where we want to be.”

    The fiancee is Anaclarice Silva. Born in Brazil, she moved to the United States with her family when she was 7, settling in Roslindale. She met Delcarmen when they were classmates at West Roxbury High School, but, as she put it, “We never dated. We were each dating someone else at the time, and we just went along as friends. But I think everyone knew we liked each other -- to the point that both of our significant others didn’t really like it when we were together.”

    Later, as Delcarmen was playing minor league baseball with the Red Sox and Silva was attending Regis College in Weston, they rekindled their friendship in true 21st century fashion: On the Internet. Silva had been given Delcarmen’s screen name from a mutual friend, and the two began to instant-message each other -- with Silva doing so anonymously.

    “We were IM’ing about who we knew in high school, who we liked and all that, and finally he said, ’Who is this?’ ” said Silva. “I finally told him, and we got together for a date.”

    Silva is now a legal secretary at Dorchester District Court, working in the office of the Suffolk County District Attorney. She is happy with her job, excited about her upcoming marriage to Delcarmen, and, yes, thrilled about the new house the couple has purchased in East Bridgewater.

    But just as Delcarmen sweated out the possibility of a trade to Cleveland, so, too, did Silva. But with a twist: Though Delcarmen was hoping to remain with the Red Sox, Silva took the attitude that whatever made her future husband happy would, in turn, make her happy.

    “He told me about the opportunities he might have in Cleveland,” she said. “I know he wants to be in ’The Show,’ as he puts it. It’s all he talks about. I just want him to be happy. If you’re not happy, what’s the point? And he’d be happy pitching for the Red Sox. He gets so incredibly excited when he talks about the Red Sox.

    “He’s home,” she said. “We’re both home.”