Letter from Brevard: Baseball and Drag Racing, from Florida's Space Coast

Leave it to the Boston Red Sox to be one of the busiest teams in the off-season. They do it every year. It's a tired old gag from a washed-up comedian at this juncture. "Where ya from? What sign are you? What are your hobbies, (Ron) darling?"

Oh, another Red Sox transaction and nostalgic coaching appointment of some kind? Wicked. Enjoy third place again. As if the Red Sox need any more coverage in the op-ed columns and signed editorials that dot the scummy slough of Biff and Muffy periodicals up and down this rotting, stinking seaboard. With the acquisitions of the annoying tilted-hat second baseman Pokey Reese and Dawson's Creek stunt double Johnny Damon, the word out of Logan Airport these days is SPEED. Apparently, the Sox learned nothing from the long-awaited failures of speed-demon Donnie Sadler.

In Brevard County, FL, don't bring up "speed" to Sadler's former teammate, the white elephant Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield. He just spent much of December in the spectator's gallery of a county courthouse outside of Melbourne watching the trial of the man accused of vehicular manslaughter in the death of his grandmother. (This is not meant as fodder for the inevitable heckling of Wakefield at Yankee Stadium, by the way.) Seems the suspect was out drag racing near the Marlins' spring training camp and plowed over the 79-year-old granny, who was crossing the road on foot.

He beat the manslaughter rap but was slapped with a lesser charge. The story ran prominently in the local USA Today Gannett clone, boldly called Florida Today. The reporter left any references to the courtroom presence of local hero Wakefield to the bottom grafs, apparently none too familiar with his baseball rosters or scandals, or maybe he's just too p.c. and wants to respect the privacy of a washed-up hurler who is bound to frustrate the bunch of New England tightwads known as Red Sox Nation more than ever in 2002.

Consider this, however: Wakefield himself had been struck by a car a few offseasons ago while jogging near his home in this Florida area, dubbed the "Space Coast" thanks to the presence of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. And the go-at-throttle-up car madness doesn't stop there. Cecil Fielder's wife was involved in some car jabberwocky when she struck a pedestrian and then a few months later stormed the scene of a car accident involving the Fielder's chip-off-the-old-block son. The incident, which turned "racial" for a brief spell, led to the Fielder family being ostracized among their highbrow golf-course community with the saccharine moniker of Suntree.

And there was the time Bruce Dern had a run-in with some state troopers due north of Melbourne while he was in town filming the Michener tv pic called Space. So it is apparent, like frozen O-rings on the Challenger, that cars, ballplayers and even onscreen killers of John Wayne do not mix well in East Central Florida.

But it doesn't stop with ballplayers. Rednecks and Miami residents are also getting in on the act. The night after the Wakefield-grandma trial, just 20 miles west of the courthouse, there was another drag-racing fatality. This time it was a guy who was doing the rockabilly-greaser thing and veered off into the path of an oncoming car, killing the driver. When the metal was unfolded and the upturned tires finished spinning, it turns out the dead driver was none other than the mother of the drag racer. She was out giving a senior citizen a nighttime ride to see the pretty Christmas lights. Four days later, a drag-racing sting in Miami involved police stopping 350 cars in the wee small hours and making 172 arrests for reckless driving. The newswires described the Florida drag-racing scene as "mushrooming and sometimes deadly." Do you do the shrooms before or after the races?

No one had any answers, not even at a joint along highway A1A called Poor Paul's Pourhouse. Pick up a local shopper and peruse, get a beer from a crispy bartender named Autumn and read the ads for the those Gentle Ben airboat rides. One of the airboat tour companies is actually called "Cracker AirBoat Tours." Release a cashewy laugh that darts for the open door and makes it two feet onto the actual highway where it is plowed over by a rusty Sentra. The bar is so close to the road that it's as if a double-wide trailer was jettisoned off a flatbed by a sunstroked driver who thought Key West was just around the next nonexistent curve in the highway.

Poor Paul's used to be called the Pelican Lounge and was owned and operated by an Elvis impersonator. He sold it, Autumn says, but he still comes in now and again.

Autumn takes no shit, nor will she be coerced into making peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The next day she's talking about a recent airboat accident that involved a strapped-in capsized passenger, swampwater with a deadly surface coat of flaming gasoline and a helicopter airlift to a hospital in Orlando. Where's Swamp Thing when you need him? Perhaps warming his mossy hands on the blazing hot stove of offseason baseball transactions, the agate RSVPs of a Kip Wells-for-Todd Ritchie deal or the series of personnel larcenies recently pulled off by Mets GM Steve Phillips out at the old World's Fair site in Queens. Mo Vaughn, yet another famous Red Sox moving-violation specialist, should be fun to watch at Shea. Mets brass should remind Todd Zeile that when using the chamois on Mo's Mercedes A Class vehicle, he should always wipe the finish counterclockwise and that the rims need buffering and don't forget to use Armor All on the Michelins. They should also adjust Mo's strip club compass?he must now drive north on I-95 to reach the Foxy Lady in Providence. One other thing, Mr. Vaughn: the Pope has destroyed the awesome metal radio station of your alma-mater as WSOU out at Seton Hall has gone from Slayer and Cannibal Corpse to a boatload of Creed and other mainstream crappe.

As for the Juan Gonzalez snub?the spoiled child Phillips has finally not been spared the rod. Can't have everything, lad. For Juan G., it's all about his entourage. Do the Mets really want a player who insists that his own personal hair stylist be with him at all times?

It is then you realize that these were not holidays but mere postponements of winter chills aided and abetted oh-so-briefly by the subterfuge of a dollhouse of bargain-priced Busch beer. It's enough to make you want to buy a Dale Earnhardt memoriam classified and then go to the greyhound track in Melbourne for a stale pretzel that leads to the loss of a fast c-note on some of the most depressing, underattended, low-handle "races" known to man?or beast.

Consider it done.