Pedroia: "I can't read or write good, but I'll hit more homeruns"

I'm pretty sure Dustin Pedroia could walk across the street and I'd find it hilarious, but still, love him or hate him, you've gotta respect his confidence and desire to win. In an interview with WEEI this morning, Pedey defended the Red Sox offense:

"We'll see," Pedroia said on Sunday morning. "We haven't even had a spring training practice but guys are going to have to step up. I'm going to have to step up, everyone is. That's how it goes during the season. Everyone is going to have to have good at-bats and put them together in a row to score a lot of runs. We'll do that. We'll be better than a lot of people think." Reminded that the lineup has lost Jason Bay and likely will see the departure of Mike Lowell, Pedroia quipped, "I'll hit more home runs, then."

Pedroia downplayed the significance the team has placed on new age terms like run-prevention and UZR [Ultimate Zone Rating] to value players.

“I don’t even buy into that stuff,” Pedroia said. “We have great pitching, we have great defense and we have good offensive players. I don’t even know what run prevention is. I’m kind of a baseball players. I don’t know how to read very good. I don’t know how to write very good. We just go play. We’ll be fine."

“I’m excited, I think everyone is. I think we’ve got a lot of good players. Obviously, we’ve got a great pitching staff. We just have to find a way to go out there and score runs for them and I think we’re going to be fine.”

With Pedroia, you can't help but laugh at him, but at the same time, you take everything he says serious. He'll do everything he can to put this team on his tiny back, but he'll need a lot of help from the guys around him for this lineup to win ballgames like years past. As a result, his message to the rest of the lineup is apparently to "Man up".

A few weeks from now I'm going to try to track him down in Ft. Myers, and see what kind of ridiculous quotes I can get out of him.