Jim Rice Bumbaye

What would you say if I told you there was a place where Pumpsie Green, Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, Jim Rice and other black Red Sox players past and present could finally get their props? Would you say, "No! Surely you jest!"? Would you ask where? Roxbury? Hartford? Martha's Vineyard? Naw dawg. The Motherland.

Thanks to a former Bangor High School tennis player with a thing for baseball, the borders of Red Sox Nation have expanded even more.

They expanded into Burkina Faso like the Belgians into the Congo or the Portuguese into Angola.

Peace Corps volunteer Josh Yardley went to Africa because "he didn't know what to do with his degree" like everyone else. Instead of going to find himself and stall entry into the real world like other Peace Corps volunteers, he took it upon himself to indoctrinate the people of Burkina Faso like a Scottish Presbyterian missionary.

Instead of being upfront about his motives, Yardley used deceit and trickery meet his ends. He started off by painting the Red Sox logo on the side of his hut and soon people came and started asking about it. I'm sure he started withholding food and medicine until villagers could recite the 2004 World Series winning roster from memory.

If the Red Sox helped Yardley get his foot in the door, he returned the favor by preaching Red Sox lore, legend and loyalty to the Bomborokuy natives, whose curiosity had been piqued by the man they named Wendpanga, which Yardley said roughly translates into "The Force of God"

They were primitive and backwards with soccer and political logos on their houses and flesh. They soon forgot their old ways and their old sports. They began fighting with each other, adopting horrible Boston accents, and praying to a picture of Carl Yastremski eating a wicked large grinder. Neo-colonialism at its worst.

"In my village, I definitely converted some people..."

"...Maybe I didn't take a lot of Yankee shirts off the market, but I did get rid of a few."

"He was also the coach for our village's soccer team and they won the championship for the entire region this past season," Yardley said. "I don't know what they were before, but he told me they changed their name to the Bambiroqui Red Sox."

It's unlikely Yardley told them about the quota system or black players not getting invitations to Elk dinners.

"Have you forgotten that once we were brought here we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language? We lost our religion, our culture, our God - and many of us by the way we acted, we even lost our minds."

Only Rickey Henderson can save the people of Bomborokuy before they fall too far into the abyss.