112 days until Opening Day of the 2003 season for Major League Baseball. Yes, I did count that out on my calendar. So far the only bold move the Red Sox have made in the off-season was the hiring of 28-year-old Theo Epstein as General Manager, the youngest GM in MLB history. Whether Theo will turn out to be the wunderkind promised by the team's owners or little more than cannon fodder for the sports radio blowhards remains to be seen, but one thing you can depend on is that Red Sox Nation won't be cutting him much slack, especially on the heels of such a disappointing season as last year's. Our new GM claims that baseball is "in his blood" - let's hope he has a rawhide-thick skin as well.

A less ballyhooed but more potentially interesting announcement by the folks at Yawkey Way was that they were now seeking the counsel of Bill James, the eminent baseball statistician, whom they've made their senior operations adviser. Baseball is the game of statistics, and yet very few clubs have employed mathematicians to help them divine winning patterns from the accumulated data of batting averages, E.R.A.'s, slugging percentages, and the like. Which is a shame, because the field of statistical analysis has evolved rapidly in recent years, and baseball has always been a pet field for many a math whiz (inlcuding one of my calculus professors at MIT), so the pairing seems natural to me. At any rate, getting a genius to run the numbers for us couldn't possibly hurt. We've had priests and psychics performing exorcisms at Fenway Park and a team of scuba-divers searching a pond in Sudbury for a grand piano reportedly tossed in by Babe Ruth, and God knows who else trying to ward off the Sox's bad mojo on the Mulder front; it's about time we hired ourselves a Scully, as well.