Baseball is AWESOME! - Canadian hurler wins Red Sox debut

This is the first in my series of Baseball is Awesome off-season posts.  Something to read and keep you looking forward to those first days of spring when baseball season starts and anything can happen.  Most of these stories will not show up on The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told.  But they will be interesting to any baseball fan, and as this series focuses on Red Sox related moments with some Canadian content, I hope in particular Red Sox and/or Canadian fans enjoy them.

On September 8th, 1990 Mike Gardiner made his MLB debut, at Fenway.   He had languished in the Mariners farm system for a while, never getting above AA, but was rewarded with a September call up.  In a blowout game he came in to pitch with 2 outs in the bottom of the 8th with his team losing 9-2. He gave up a hit allowing an inherited runner to score, but then struck out Randy Kutcher to end the inning.  It was a fairly unremarkable appearance, not noted by many, except me.  You see, Mike Gardiner was not only one of the handful of Canadians in the MLB, he was from my hometown of Sarnia.  I did everything I could to follow his career path (which was difficult in those pre-internet days).  Once he made that first appearance in the show, I told everyone how great he was going to be, and how proud I was that someone from my little hometown was going to make it big.   It mainly fell on deaf ears.   And this post is not about this first appearance anyways....

Canadian Red Sox

Today I received a bunch of baseball cards that I won in a contest.   As I was flipping through them I saw a George Kottaras card and started thinking about what Canadians are currently on the roster, or even at Spring Training as non-roster invitees.  After all, in the recent past, we have had players such as Jason Bay, Matt Stairs, Eric Gagne, Adam Stern and Rheal Cormier as Canadian fulltime members of the Red Sox.