Josh Beckett opining on various topics in a long interview he did for WEEI.com:

On how the media ran him out of town: “Once they want you out of there, they want you out of there. By them, I don’t necessarily mean the fans. There are certain people in the media who painted me out to be a monster with horns, and that’s just not the case. I said that in my press conference, people out here hear from certain media members that [portrayal].”

On whether he’d do anything differently: “You just try and be yourself, and if that’s not enough, what are you supposed to do? Act like somebody else?”

On his “We get 18 days off a year” excuse for when he played 27 holes of golf while getting skipped in the rotation with a pulled lat:  “I never feel like I need to explain myself…. That’s why whenever anything like that came up I didn’t flinch, I didn’t make an excuse, I just said, ‘This is me and this is how I am.’ If somebody else wants to clarify that, they can. I don’t need to clarify anything. I know who I am.”

On what his ex-teammates think of him: “Pretty much everything I heard when I left was, ‘Hey man, you’re going to be missed.’ That’s enough for me. My teammates know who I am. That was all that mattered to me. As long as they knew I had their back, and I knew they had my back, we were going to be fine. I can take the brunt of that other [expletive] and just move past it because I know who I am.”

On why he quit answering question: “Whenever I was on that good stretch and I was still getting beat down about velocity and strikeouts, that’s why I stopped talking to the media for a month, because I got tired of answering the same questions start after start. Whether it was good start, bad start, indifferent start, I had to answer the same questions every time.”

On getting booed: “That’s what I keep saying when they were asking, ‘Do you care that you get booed?’ I was like, ‘No. If I pitch better you don’t get [expletive] booed. It’s pretty simple.’ They don’t boo guys who went eight innings. They just don’t. It just doesn’t happen. You just never see it. So you pitch better, and that wasn’t what was happening. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to.”

On the Red Sox in general: “I love that organization and I did everything I could to help that organization grow.”

On whether he gets enough credit for helping win a World Series: “If I saw anything that was similar to what I went through this year it was Keith Foulke in 2006, because 2004 he was a monster. Then two years later … I’m sure everybody has a reason why they did that to Keith Foulke, but this guy won the World Series for you and you hadn’t won one in 86 years and he got painted the same way.”

On Boston fans: “Even during the tough times I met so many people who were just awesome. They were real fans. I think there’s the real fans and there’s the guys who go there to watch somebody fail. I get that sense. I don’t know what the percentage of each one is, but there are certain people who don’t want to see anybody succeed.”

On whether he’s a team guy: “I’ve never said ‘me.’ I’ve never said ‘I.’ It’s always been ‘us.’ I give credit when we win in every press conference. I take blame when we lose. That’s who I am.”

So what we can take from this is Beckett is either A) Delusional or B) Completely full of shit.  And I don’t know which is worse; which is a bigger insult to our intelligence.  I’ll eliminate A) since that sort of lets him off the hook.  It implies he’s  Shallow Hal-ing the last calendar year.  Looking at the bloated, cankled carcass of going 19 games under .500 since last August 31st and seeing Gwyneth Paltrow.  So it has to be B).  I just can’t believe that after 6 years in Boston, Beckett could think so little of us that he’d believe for one second any of us would buy this claptrap.  I mean, it’s one thing to hand out a few “The Bachelor” roses, look us in the eyes and tell us how special ’07 was and how much he loves the organization and how awesome we were.  And saying how he deserved to get booed because he pitched like crap is almost an admission of guilt, I guess.  But how does he expect us to swallow this stuff about him being a great teammate when he was gorging on chicken and beer in the middle of games with the team fighting for its playoff life?  When he was getting so fat he had to decide whether to hold his hands above or below his frum?  When he was constantly skipping workouts and golfing when he couldn’t pitch?  When his team was going 7-14 in games he started?

Look, we’ve seen guys get run out of town by the media.  Nomar being the most notable example.  If anyone ever had the right to make those first comments, it was him.  All he ever did was work hard, stay in shape and appreciate the fans.  But the press didn’t like him so they harped on him the way they had a steady line of star players from Mo Vaughn to Jim Rice, Yaz… all the way back to Ted Williams.  Nomar could make that case.  Josh Beckett can’t.  Him claiming he’s a victim in this shitshow he created is like a kid killing his parents then asking for mercy because he’s an orphan.  @JerryThornton1