Gopher, deer, turkeys, whatever wanders in the crosshairs will soon find its way to Jon Lester’s wall. Lester is features in this month’s Outdoor Life magazine, and sounding quite Beckettesque.

My best fishing trophy is a 10-pound bass I caught while in High-A ball in Florida. Just yesterday I shot a bobcat with a bow here in Georgia. My buddy’s got a real cool bobcat mount in his house, so I’ve wanted to shoot one for years.


Well, cross that one off the list of things to do! At least he used a bow, check out the artillery in the photo he used to bag the deer. You could shoot the left nut off a fieldmouse from 500 yards with that thing. Why not throw a stick of dynamite into the forest and see what you get? But Lester does make it a family affair. Bowling? Hell no, the Lester’s go shootin’ animals!

Probably my favorite memory while hunting was when my wife, Farrah, shot her first deer, a doe, during the 2007 off-season in Georgia. She shot a buck that season, too. Then, in 2008, she shot both a doe and her first real big buck at Josh Beckett’s ranch in Texas. It’s exciting for me to see her do so well, since I got her into hunting.

Beckett and Lester together with women and high-powered rifles. Let’s hope there’s no booze on the ranch.

I go bass fishing whenever I can, and I enjoy wading the inshore flats in the Gulf for redfish and snook.

We had some jakes come in, but we never got a shot that morning. It didn’t matter, though, I was hooked on hunting right then and there and it’s been all downhill since.

Snook? Jakes? Have they invented new fish and animals since I was a kid?

Why can’t pitchers get normal, non-violent hobbies? Youk is out pimping his charity and trying to decide what style facial hair to sport. Lowell and Pedroia had dance-offs a couple of years ago. Tito plays cribbage.

It really wouldn’t have surprised me to read this quote in the story:

License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at kill. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit – ever. They’re like the Viet Cong – Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that’s all she wrote.

Ten more days…we can make it.