He's had a good enough career. He can still do things on a baseball field that make you sit up and take notice. He will have made more than $100 million by the time his current contract expires after the 2011 season. He won a world championship with the Red Sox last season.
But one thing he had never done until this year was make the All-Star team.
"I had a chance in 2001 [with the Cardinals] but I broke my wrist 3 weeks before the game," he said, sitting on a raised platform at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom yesterday afternoon. "In 2004 I thought I had a chance [with the Braves] but it didn't work out.
"It's something that I didn't know if it would ever take place or not. But you play the game hard and it's just one of those things that I finally achieved it thanks to the player's vote."
He turns 33 in November. But he just may be having the best sustained run of his career.
By his own admission, he had an "up-and-down" season in 2007, his first in Boston. But he got hot in September, batting .342, and hit a pivotal grand slam in the first inning of Game 6 of the ALCS against Cleveland. Overall, he batted .314 and drove in 11 runs in 14 postseason games.
"It's just one of those things where I kind of fell into a transition late in the season," he said. "I was able to have a good playoff and have some big hits. I finally found a rhythm and carried it through. I went into spring training with a positive outlook and an idea of what I wanted to do at the plate. And it's really paid off."
Drew was named the American League's Player of the Month for June after batting .337 with 12 homers and 27 RBI in the month.
No matter how well he plays, no matter how much more he accomplishes in his career, he understands that his name will always be mud in Philadelphia, that whenever he comes to the plate he will be reminded that his last name rhymes with boo.
