Jack Curry, on The Times’ Bats blog, picks up a story about Tim Wakefield and his locker in the visiting clubhouse at the Yankee Stadium. Lou Cucuzza, the Yankees clubhouse manager, is giving Wakefield the 49 plaque that has, for the last 14 years, indicated the Red Sox’s knuckleballer’s spot in the room. Wakefield, who served up on the more famous home runs in recent Yankee Stadium history, speaks wistfully of Yankee Stadium, and this piece is just another hint that the crazy fans, by and large, take this rivalry way more seriously than the players.

When Craig Hansen hit Alex Rodriguez with a fastball yesterday, Fenway Park classlessly erupted in howls. It was retribution for Joba Chamberlain’s not hitting Youkilis, and my dad, watching at a bar in the Berkshires, said that a Red Sox fan near him hoped that A-Rod was hurt. Gotta love Red Sox fans. Anyway, Jack Curry checked in on this escalating situation, and I have a sinking feeling this whole ridiculous thing isn’t over yet.

A little over two weeks ago, Theo Epstein criticized Mike Mussina over his complaints — from 2004 — about the Yankees’ ill-fated trip to Japan to opening the regular season. At the time, Yankee fans were a little surprised about Theo’s seeming breach of protocol. A GM’s criticizing another team’s player for comments about an unrelated incident are exceedingly rare in sports.

Today, the shoe is squarely on the other foot, and I have to wonder if this isn’t some sort of karmic retribution. The Red Sox, you see, now view their upcoming trip to Japan as a huge inconvenience. Josh Beckett, their ace, is out indefinitely with back problems and will miss the trip. Daisuke Matsuzaka’s wife is expecting, and he may miss the trip as well. The trip — two 18-hour plane rides in four days plus two baseball games that actually count — disrupts the rhythm of Spring Training and generally messes with athletes used to routine.

Publicly, in the Boston Herald, the Red Sox are saying that they’re excited to go. They say they could sit back and complain, but they’re just going to tough it out instead. Of course, reading between the lines, complaining is exactly what they’re doing, and I don’t blame them. In this case, I completely sympathize with the players.

As for Mr. Epstein, I think he should take this one as a lesson. Internally, I’m sure there will be a lot of Boston-based grumblings about this trip both before and after. Mussina just happened to share his with the world. For that, he does not deserve the criticism he received. Enjoy your flights, Theo. I hear crossing the international date line twice in 96 hours does wonders to the body.

With Curt Schilling out indefinitely, the Red Sox needed to fill that over-the-hill, fat guy spot in their rotation. To that end, they have reportedly inked Bartolo Colon to a minor league deal. Colon, coming off a shoulder injury, was unimpressive in winter auditions and probably won’t make the Red Sox anyway. But we can still make fun of him.

Jorge Posada thinks the Yankees are underdogs this year. Since the Red Sox won the World Series, they’re the team to beat. “Yeah, well, they won. Now it’s up to us to take that away,” he said.

The Yankees have broken their own record. In 2007, they spent $218.3 million on their payroll, shattering the 2006 mark of $207.5 million. We can thank Roger Clemens for that one. Meanwhile, the Red Sox came in a far second at $155.4 million. Boston outspent the next closest team by nearly $30 million, and no team has ever spent as much as the Red Sox did to win a World Series. If you tell a Red Sox fan they bought the trophy, that fan’s head will explode.

Yeah, we all know what a Slump Buster is. Now, Kevin Youkilis is endorsing an energy drink of the same name. The name would work a lot better if it was a Sparks kinda thing.

I wonder if Slump Buster has what plants crave.

Steve notes that Kevin Kennedy said that a colleague of his told Kennedy that he saw a member of the 2004 Red Sox shooting up with a needle full of performance-enhancing drugs. While that’s a lot of “he saids,” it’s also rather damning. Clearly, the Mitchell Report missed one, two or five hundred players.

While not nearly as nifty as the dipping set, here’s another great gift idea for the baseball fan in your life: Manny Ramirez’s game-used spandex. Right now, they’re going for $120 on eBay. If that doesn’t float your boat, you can get Terry Francona’s used socks or Kevin Youkilis’ used spandex, which is just a disturbing thought.

Let’s forget for a few minutes that Curt Schilling is on the Red Sox, and let’s forget his stupid “mystique and aura” comments from 2001. Let’s instead just consider Curt Schilling to be a baseball player with strong opinions who shares those opinions on his blog. Maybe this way, we can have as unbiased a discussion about Curt as is possible on a Yankee blog.

Last week, when the Baseball Writers Association of American first instituted the Curt Schilling Rule which bans players from awards consideration if their contracts feature incentive clauses, I applauded this move. The members of the BBWAA are hardly the least biased folks in the room, and I can’t really blame them. Eight months of traveling with a team and interacting with players on a daily basis will inevitably lead to some soft feelings toward some of the players.

While the BBWAA has disappointingly tabled their resolution pending discussion with MLB and the Players Association, the man for whom the proposal was named — Mr. 38 Pitches himself — was none too happy. In a rather personal and often rambling blog post, Schilling lays into the BBWAA for many of the inconsistencies that bloggers have long noted about their voting patterns. He rails on voters omitting pitchers from MVP ballots or Hall of Fame ballots for petty reasons some years only to include them in others. He wonders why traditional print writers are any more or less qualified to vote than the writers like Buster Olney, Jayson Stark, Rob Neyer and Ken Rosenthal, to name a few, who make their living online.

All in all, Schilling makes some very valid points. But as is often the case with Curt Schilling, there’s rather big but (and it’s not his. Zing!). Schilling takes a very strong exception to BBWAA Secretary Jack O’Connell’s statement. “But the attachment of a bonus to these awards creates a perception that we’re trying to make these guys rich,” O’Connell said. Schilling starts out hot and goes from there:

Give me a break. Don’t get me wrong, 100k, 500k, 1 million dollars is a huge sum of money. But to think that these guys ever approached this as anything other than them being touted as the ‘experts’ on who wins what is crap. Add to that I seriously doubt anyone ever looked at this from a perception standpoint and thought wow, they are making this guy rich. I would disagree.

Curt Schilling may disagree, but let’s look at this from a journalistic standpoint. Curt Schilling’s new contract includes a clause where he needs to draw just one third-place vote to kick in a $1 million bonus. Do you know how many Cy Young Awards have depended upon those third-place votes? I’m leaning toward none.

So what’s from stopping one of Curt’s friends from tossing a throw-away third-place vote his way? Every voter fills out a 1-2-3 ballot, and if Curt ends up with one meager vote, the $1 million is his. That reeks of unethical journalistic behavior right there.

Schilling, in my opinion, has it wrong. This move by the BBWAA isn’t one of their efforts to steal the thunder from the players; it’s an effort to make sure that all of their voting members are following the guidelines of their profession. It’s a sad commentary on the state of journalism than such a move by the BBWAA is necessary, but it isn’t an attempt, as Schilling would have us believe, by the journalists to upstage the players.

In the end, Curt says it best himself. “It only takes 1-2 guys to screw it up and those guys exist in decent numbers,” he writes. The same holds true on the other end as well. In this case, it only takes one guy to kick back a million bucks, and any effort to end that practice should be applauded.