Primed for a vintage year
Insisting there are no holes in his swing, Ellsbury expects to just get better with age
FORT MYERS, Fla. - There is much time before those idle dreams can be fulfilled. Like opening a winery - Oregon Pinot Noir, of course - with the money baseball has brought. There is baseball to be played before then, a burgeoning career that gets its real start now. Not two years ago, when expectations were raised beyond capability, and not last year, when sharing a position in a rookie season left him sitting on the bench as time expired on the Red Sox.
So even though the schemes will come up again - usually as he and partner-in-crime Jed Lowrie sit down to dinner with their girlfriends and order a bottle - there are more pressing things for Jacoby Ellsbury this season. The wine can wait.
Center field is now. Leadoff is now.
"I feel more relaxed this year," Ellsbury said. "You know what to expect from a big league season. It's not going into unfamiliar territory. The pressure, the stress, it's less. I feel very comfortable. I feel very comfortable, but I'm not satisfied. I'm continuing to try to get better. That's how I'm going to be. That's who I am."
To give him that chance, the Red Sox shipped off veteran center fielder Coco Crisp to the Royals, which manager Terry Francona called the best message the team could send Ellsbury. Unlike last season, when the two entered camp with just one job to win, this year it is all Ellsbury's - even though one of the notable moments of the American League Championship Series was when Ellsbury took a seat on the bench.
"I think everybody just sees what happened at the end," Ellsbury said. "I think if I would have finished the last five games good, everybody would have been, hey, it was a great season.
"I finished third in the Rookie of the Year voting, scored 100 runs [98], stole 50 bases, but it's what everybody remembers at the end. Yeah, I thought I played well."
But the next time the Sox take the field for a game that matters, Ellsbury will be in center field.
"It feels good that the organization believes in me," said Ellsbury, 25. "I believe in myself. I didn't necessarily need the organization to believe in me, but it's good to have that.
"Right now I'm the starting center fielder, but at the same time it doesn't lessen my work ethic. It's not like I'm the starting center fielder, I stop working hard."
That's why Ellsbury spent the offseason doing two-a-days with Dustin Pedroia at Athletes Performance Institute in Arizona, working on speed and strength and baseball skills. What comes now is the test.
The job is his. The faith is in his abilities. Is he ready?
"Ellsbury is a talented young player who is ready to play every day in the big leagues," general manager Theo Epstein wrote in an e-mail. "If you don't commit to such young players - as we did to Pedroia by not bringing back [Mark] Loretta in 2007 - you don't reap the rewards.
"Ellsbury is an impact defensive center fielder and an impact baserunner. He has the physical talent and minor league track record to indicate he will hit and get on base in time. The league started pitching to his weaknesses last year, and, as with a lot of young hitters, he needs to make a counter-adjustment . . . and he will."
There was a taste of that, the tantalizing vision of a .353 hitter who could go second to home on a passed ball, in 2007. Expectations were raised. Then, even as he had an acceptable season in 2008, he needed work in some areas. Like a .324 on-base percentage out of the leadoff spot that ranked 21st in the major leagues among players with at least 250 at-bats.
He had a well-documented weakness - the inside fastball - that was exploited over and over, though adjustments did start kicking in toward the end of the season. He finished with a .280 average, .336 on-base percentage, and 98 runs.
But when asked directly about the hole in his swing, the inside fastballs that hitting coach Dave Magadan says were a problem, Ellsbury isn't prepared to admit anything. He gets slightly defensive, pointing out that he has a 20-game hitting streak still alive from the end of last season. (It's actually 18, but the point is made.) In those 18 games, Ellsbury hit .370 with an on-base percentage of .386 and scored 18 runs.
"If they just throw fastballs in," he said, "I'm going to look fastball in. I'm going to hit that ball. My hands are quick. I'm a good enough athlete to make those adjustments."
Except he wasn't last season. He was beaten repeatedly with those inside heaters, an issue that Magadan is working to correct. Ellsbury struggled as the scouting reports were needling him into poor swings and popups. His leg kick got high - "his foot was literally in the air when the ball was in the zone," Magadan said - and all of a sudden the ball would be there. And the swing would be late.
"When you're chasing a lot of high fastballs the way he was, that was kind of the book on him," Magadan said. "It's hard to hit those balls on the ground. You're going to pop a lot of balls up.
"I went back and looked at video, and he was popping up more than anybody else on the team, like infield popups, and that's a byproduct of chasing that fastball that nobody gets on."
Ellsbury got in a mode where he would take a pitch until he realized it was a strike. He would rush at the end to hit it and nothing good would result.
"There were times when he was a little frustrated," said Lowrie, who first encountered Ellsbury as an opponent in high school. "He wanted to be doing better. But that's any player. Any time you're struggling, you want to be doing better.
"I think he handled it well. I think that's the most important thing is when you're down, how are you going to handle it?
"The biggest thing is not giving anybody anything. No emotion, no matter what happens. You just don't want to give those guys any sort of edge."
And even though Ellsbury appeared loath to admit any sort of deficiency, Lowrie said, "Deep down he knows it. It's not something that I think he hides from. But he's not going to tell anybody that."
While Ellsbury shied away from the term "rock star," that was the sentiment. That - by virtue of his scene-stealing beginnings and his cover-boy looks - was quite clear by the preponderance of Ellsbury jerseys on female fans since his first days in Fenway Park.
Ah, the halcyon haze of his first weeks in the big leagues. When, it seemed, nothing could go wrong. He hit everything and looked like the perfect player in the perfect city at the perfect moment. He became a factor in the Red Sox winning their second World Series in four years, a moment that prompted Mike Lowell to good-naturedly call Ellsbury spoiled.
After all the calm, measured words, after saying all the right things to the point of monotony, Ellsbury's voice gains some emotion as he relives that moment.
He talks about his heart pounding. He talks about playing back - no doubles - with two outs in the final inning of the final game of the World Series.
"Something that you always dreamed about," he says, as if the memory seems like a dream still.
So could it happen again, with him established, with him cemented in center field? Could he win another? Could he come back and hit . 353 again? Could he do it all?
"Why not?" he said, and smiled.
Amalie Benjamin can be reached at abenjamin@globe.com. 
