Dustin Pedroia Boots One in the Hometown Press

The current American League Most Valuable Player, Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia, has created quite a furor in his hometown of Woodland, CA., where he was the Sacramento Bee's 2001 High School Player of the Year. In an interview for Boston magazine, he was quoted as calling the city, which some might consider quaint or picturesque, "a dump." He continued, adding, "Everyone wants to get out of there. You don't want to stay in Woodland. What do you want to stay in Woodland for? The place stinks..."

Woodland is about 20 miles north of Sacramento, a part of the Central Valley mostly dedicated to fields of alfalfa and orchards producing nuts and fruits. Rice, tomatoes, and all sorts of field crops also come from the area. It's possible to stay on I-5 and blow right past the place, but to cruise its quiet main street is a bit like returning to the 1950s or an earlier era. The buildings are mostly older, some vacant, but in general they are aesthetically pleasing.

There may be odors drifting through during harvests, but when I've been there I haven't noticed any unpleasant smells. In fact I find Woodland a peaceful retreat from the urban pressures of larger cities like Sacramento.

But to a youngster like Pedroia, the place is obviously dull. He got himself a ticket out of town in the form of a lucrative pro baseball career, a path not open to the majority of Woodlanders. Living in Boston is easily more interesting than living in a flat little valley town. Looking back with scorn is a surprisingly common sentiment among people who grow up in small towns: there's nothing to do there, it's dull, etc. For the most part, people who really want to get out go to school and enter a career field that allows them the chance to live in a larger city; someplace they find more exciting.

To be fair, Pedroia has since apologized to the city of Woodland, but not before police arrested Kenneth Samuels, 47, of Woodland, for making a series of phone calls threatening to kill any and all males of the Pedroia family.

Pedroia probably didn't realize that what he said to Boston would become fodder for the national press, but he should have realized the effect it would have on the place he grew up, where his family operates a tire business. But, as he explained later, "I trust everybody. It's something I've got to work on. I'm a young guy." That is to say, he feels free to say what he pleases, and trusts the press not to blow it out of proportion. The Bee calls him naïve, and that's probably accurate. After all, he grew up in Woodland.

Unlike most of his classmates from Woodland High, he moved quickly from small-town kid to ultra-wealthy cosmopolite. That he failed to develop perspective along the way shouldn't come as a surprise. If you asked 90% of small-town-raised Americans what they thought of the places they grew up in, they'd probably come up with similar adjectives. I blame the media for this.

Americans in general are so closely tied to the media-created myth of the booming American city that ideas about rural life are distorted beyond all recognition, even, frequently, to the people in those rural towns. They sit in living rooms watching big-screen TVs and ignoring the world outside. They're more interested in larger issues, like who's going to be the next American Idol, than in what's going on right outside.

Give a twenty-year old kid a few million dollars and send him to the big city, and this is what you get.

Sacramento Bee, Boston magazine