Boston media take shots at Dodgers’ Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford

BOSTON — The Boston Red Sox are in the World Series, the culmination of a remarkable worst-to-first run. As the Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals opened the World Series on Wednesday at Fenway Park, the minds of the local columnists were on ... Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford.

It is taken as an article of faith in the Boston media that Gonzalez and Crawford were too soft to succeed with the Red Sox. The players, and their enormous contracts, were traded to the Dodgers last year, and apparently no high-ranking columnist here could preview the World Series without taking a shot at Gonzalez and Crawford.

In the Boston Herald, Steve Buckley wrote that the Dodgers would have brought a “Lights! Camera! Whining!” story line with them to the World Series.

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“Gonzo would have complained about World Series games being played at night,” Buckley wrote. “Crawford would have complained about how everyone in Boston was mean to him.”

In the Boston Globe, Dan Shaughnessy accused Crawford of lying about his time with the Red Sox.

“We’d have asked Carl Crawford why he made up all that stuff about a ‘toxic’ atmosphere in Boston,” Shaughnessy wrote.

So it was rather startling to walk into Kupel’s Bakery in Brookline, a long fungo hit from Fenway Park, and see sandwiches named for Gonzalez and Crawford still on the menu. The menu also offers sandwiches named for other Boston sports figures, including Red Sox stars Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, and Boston Celtics legends Larry Bird and Bill Russell.

We had one question for the guy behind the counter: Doesn’t everyone in town hate Gonzalez and Crawford?

“Not everyone,” the guy said. “That menu is an homage to Boston sports. It’s hard to take them down.”

The Gonzalez sandwich features egg salad and jalapeno cream cheese for $4.49; the Crawford sandwich includes double egg and cheese, tomato and onion for $5.99.

Veteran’s perspective

John Lackey did not break camp with the Angels in 2002. They called him up in June, and in October he was the winning pitcher in Game 7 of the World Series.

That came after 18 regular-season starts. After 305 more, Lackey finally makes another World Series start, this time Thursday for the Red Sox.

“You realize how hard it is to get here,” Lackey said. “It’s been 11 years since I’ve been here. I’ve been chasing it for a while, and you probably appreciate it more this time than you do as a rookie.”

Lackey said he was “pretty much a two-pitch pitcher back then.” He laughed off the question of what he could take from his previous World Series experience.

“Not a whole lot,” he said. “That I’m old, I guess.”

Cool compliment

Sudden fame often comes at the expense of privacy, so it would not have surprised Cardinals rookie pitcher Michael Wacha if someone at the restaurant had stopped him for an autograph.

What he did not expect was to find himself on the menu.

“I had a milk shake named after me,” Wacha said, “and that was pretty weird.”

Wacha, the National League Championship Series most valuable player, had just polished off the Dodgers when he felt like polishing off a sandwich. He walked into Fozzie’s Sandwich Emporium in suburban St. Louis, where the menu featured the “Wacha Wacha.”

“Never heard that one before,” Wacha said, laughing.

The “Wacha Wacha” had Cracker Jacks, caramel and white chocolate. Wacha was kind enough to autograph a menu — and, yes, he ordered one of the shakes.

“I had to try that out,” he said. “It was pretty good.”

bill.shaikin@latimes.com