As sweet as it gets

One of the dirty little secrets connected to the nightly playing of ``Sweet Caroline'' at Fenway Park is that opposing players don't much like it. Think about it: The joint is overstuffed with hardcore denizens representing a make-believe place called Red Sox Nation, and ``Sweet Caroline'' is their anthem. And as soon as Neil Diamond starts to do his thing, everyone uses it as an excuse to stand up and pretend they're coming into the home stretch on ``American Idol,'' making with the ``so-good, so-good, so-good'' right up till a Sox player steps up to the plate to lead off the bottom of the eighth inning. If you play for the Red Sox , OK, sure, it's cute. But if you're sitting in the third-base dugout, you just want to say, ``Enough already.'' Just ask Adam LaRoche. ``When you're playing for the other team, it just ticks you off,'' he said. ``It's never the same when you're the visitor. You don't feel the home crowd. You don't get pulled in by the tradition. You just want it to stop.'' But it's funny how life can turn a guy around. See, somebody tapped LaRoche on the shoulder a couple of days back and told him he'd been traded by the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Red Sox . Now Pittsburgh was once a great hardball town, and over the years it has given the likes of Honus Wagner, Bill Mazeroski, Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell to history. But lately? We will resist the urge to make cheap jokes about the current state of Pirate affairs. So LaRoche gets airlifted out of boredom-torn Pittsburgh and dropped smack-dab into the nightly bedlam of Fenway Park, and guess what? It didn't really hit him how much his life had changed until the middle of the eighth inning of last night's 7-2 win against the Baltimore Orioles when, as he trotted back to the dugout, Boston's very own ``Beer Barrel Polka'' began to scream from the public-address system. ``When it started to play, I kind of took a second and looked around and said, `This is it,' '' LaRoche said. ``I said to myself, `I've arrived. This is the pinnacle.' '' Last night was LaRoche's first start in a Sox uniform, playing first base, and the new guy had gone hitless in three previous at-bats. But in the bottom of the eighth, he strode to the plate after Mike Lowell led off with a single. LaRoche swung on the first offering from Orioles reliever Mark Hendrickson, and directed the lefty's pitch to left field for a two-run homer to cap the victory. ``It feels like I was in the playoffs tonight,'' said LaRoche, who had been hitless in 14 career Fenway at-bats until his homer. ``And I'm jealous that these guys . . . the guys that have been here for a while . . . have gotten a chance to do this every night,'' he said. ``If you can't find energy out there, there's something wrong with you.'' Suddenly, all is right with the Red Sox . They have won two in a row, the Yankees lost yesterday, and Jim Rice is in Cooperstown, N.Y., ready for his Hall of Fame close-up today. Now there's this: A guy who admits he once hated ``Sweet Caroline'' now derives inspiration from it. - sbuckley@bostonherald.com