Up in arms

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Jonathan Papelbon is already receiving the magazine-cover treatment and the Rocket Redux reviews.

Jon Lester is the favorite of the scouting set, a 6-foot-2-inch, 200-pound lefthander just turned 22 who did summer stock last year in Portland but is increasingly ready for the big stage.

Manny Delcarmen is the local boy, and the man most likely to succeed Johnny Damon as the Red Sox player with the most imitated hair style.

Craig Hansen is the one whose late-inning heat should one day evoke memories of the Monster, Dick Radatz, a college boy when it wasn't as fashionable for teams to sign college boys, and who could probably teach the quiet-as-the-back-pew Hansen a thing or two about developing a persona on the hill.

But if you really want to impress the baseball cognoscenti, tell them you wouldn't dream of assembling a list of the top 10 pitching prospects in the Sox organization without the name of Felix Doubront.

Doubront sounds French but is Venezuelan, is Lester tall but was Casey Fossum skinny when he signed (166 pounds, though he's now a robust 204 after just one year with the Sox). He shares a first name with Felix Hernandez but does not have the same 98-mile-per-hour fastball as his countryman, who last summer debuted with the Mariners at age 19 and has people calling him baseball's LeBron James. King Felix, anyone?

Doubront is 18, and a long way from being big-league royalty. He made his pro debut last season in the Venezuelan Summer League. We'll let Rob Leary, the Sox' field coordinator, make the introductions.

''He's a young Venezuelan pitcher, lefthanded, who throws a 90 mile-an-hour fastball, a sharp changeup, and a curveball," Leary said. ''A real good kid."

Allow us to fill in the blanks. Doubront was the organization's Latin Pitcher of the Year in his first summer of pro ball. He was 7-1 with an 0.97 ERA in 13 starts, held opposing hitters to a .152 batting average, whiffed 58 batters, and did not allow a home run in 64 2/3 innings, and won his final seven decisions.

In short, he gave the Red Sox a little something to work with. Doubront, incidentally, was one heck of a parting gift to the Sox from Venezuelan scout Miguel Garcia, the same guy who steered All-Star Miguel Cabrera to Louie Eljaua and the Marlins. Garcia left last year to join the Tigers.

Will Doubront make it? Way too soon to tell. The plan is for him to remain in extended spring training and take part in camp games there until the Gulf Coast League season begins in mid-June.

But it should be fun to track his progress under the tutelage of Gulf Coast pitching coach Goose Gregson. Especially for a fandom that prides itself on knowing their favorites long before they arrive at Fenway (or maybe you've never visited soxprospects.com).

There was no way, for example, that Hansen was going to arrive under the radar, not with the fanfare that greeted his signing last summer. With Keith Foulke melting down, the Sox in need of relief help, and Chad Cordero (Washington) and Huston Street (Oakland) demonstrating that college closers can advance quickly, Hansen's every move came under scrutiny.

''It's like he never really had a minor league experience," said Sox vice president of player personnel Ben Cherington. ''Even when he pitched in Portland last year, his outings were on NESN and it was like, 'When's he coming up?' "

Hansen, though he did not allow an earned run in exhibition play, will begin the season in Double A, in part, Cherington said, to give him time to develop some routines that he can take back with him to the big leagues. ''We know he can get hitters out here," Sox manager Terry Francona said. ''But when he comes back, we want him to dominate."

There are other arms in an organization that seemingly broke tradition with standard ''Moneyball" dogma when scouting director Jason McLeod used one of his first five picks (out of the first 47 players taken overall) in the 2005 draft on a high school pitcher, Michael Bowden. It helped, of course, that McLeod witnessed a 19-strikeout perfect game Bowden threw for Waubonsie Valley (Ill.) High. But it turns out that whole theory about not drafting a player, especially a pitcher, unless he's set foot on a college campus is passé.

Even the Oakland Athletics, the model for Michael Lewis's musings, drafted high school pitchers with six of their first nine picks.

''It was different from what we've done the last six years," said David Forst, Billy Beane's assistant general manager who is being groomed for bigger things. ''But we never set out to draft exclusively college players. We were looking for a) low risk, and b) guys who may have been overlooked by other teams.

''Before we were getting guys with second-round value in the third or fourth rounds. But now, looking at the board, things have switched so much. Guys who were fourth-rounders five years ago are first-round guys now."

In 2002, Shane Komine, who pitched Nebraska to back-to-back College World Series, went to the A's in the ninth round. Kevin Slowey, who pitched for little Winthrop University, put up great stats, but had a fastball that usually topped out at 89, was taken in the second round last summer by the Minnesota Twins.

Cherington, who matriculated at Amherst College and collected a master's at the University of Massachusetts, agreed that the Sox have already steered clear of any rigid approaches.

''I wouldn't call it a sea change," he said. ''[GM] Theo [Epstein], we're trying to find ways to exploit inefficiencies in the market. Five years ago, maybe that was drafting college players, an area of the market we could take advantage of. It's changing now. We don't stop drafting college players, because we know there are some big leaguers playing in college, but now we're trying to find what's the next thing to take advantage of."

But in the meantime, the Sox have been stockpiling pitchers, such as David Pauley, a high schooler originally drafted by the Padres in 2001 who came to the Sox in the Dave Roberts deal and will likely return this season to Double A Portland only because of a crowded roster in Pawtucket. ''He's got to learn more command and setting up hitters," Cherington said. ''He's got solid stuff, but he'll need to rely on command."

Clay Buchholz, a righthander from Angelina Junior College in Texas, was taken last summer with a first-round sandwich pick by the Sox, as other teams passed because Buchholz had been arrested for stealing 29 laptops from his high school and selling them. ''The easiest thing to do is to walk away from a situation like that," Cherington said. ''But Jason McLeod and Jimmy Robinson [the scout who signed him] worked really hard to find out if this was an issue that was endemic, a predictor of future behavior, or an isolated thing. There were still concerns at the end, we still had a decision to make, but so far he's been great. He's the first one on the field in the morning, works his butt off, and asks questions of everybody."

Some pitchers have to be reinvented. Leary, who instructs the catchers, was among the first to suggest Edgar Martinez might have a better future as a pitcher than catcher, but Martinez needed some convincing. The Sox sent him to Portland in 2004, knowing he wasn't ready. He hit .163, and at the All-Star break, needing no further persuasion, he agreed to pitch. Last season, between Single A Wilmington and Portland, Martinez had a 1.89 ERA and 59 strikeouts in 52 1/3 innings. ''He'll begin at Portland," Cherington said of the stocky 24-year-old Venezuelan, who throws a heavy sinker, ''but he could come fast."

Will they all make it? Of course not. The attrition rate for pitchers is often staggering. Some will break down physically, others will be traded, and some will simply plateau before they set foot on Yawkey Way. The last homegrown Sox pitcher to make a measurable impact for Boston was Aaron Sele, who pitched parts of five seasons with the Sox after being a No. 1 pick in 1991 but became a big winner only after being traded to Texas. Before him, you have to go back to Roger Clemens, taken first in 1983.

But almost a quarter of a century later, it looks like harvest time again.