FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) – The Boston Red Sox assembled a team of barrel-chested, veteran sluggers this offseason. The plan is for them to bash pitches off Fenway Park’s oddly shaped walls, not steal bases and play “small ball.”

But that doesn’t mean manager Grady Little hasn’t been thinking hard about baserunning this spring.

Little wants to take advantage of the speed he has in Johnny Damon and Nomar Garciaparra, and make sure his slower players don’t run the team out of the big innings Boston’s sluggers are capable of producing.

The Red Sox staff spent more than an hour Monday morning working on baserunning. But no running was involved – just an extended lecture on the fundamentals that lasted about 20 minutes at each base.

Boston just isn’t fast enough to make mental mistakes this year, Little said.

“When you play in Fenway Park, you do run into some outs on the bases, and usually they’re careless mistakes,” he said. “We’ve got to eliminate as many of those as we can.”

So far, so good, Little insists.

“We’ve run the bases fairly well this spring,” he said. “We’ve been very aggressive on the bases, sometimes so aggressive we’ve run into some outs. It’s mostly just spring training, aggressive kind of mistakes, mostly by players who are new to the organization trying to make a good impression.”

After the lesson Monday, Shea Hillenbrand was picked off first base and Bill Mueller was thrown out trying to tag up in Boston’s 9-4 win over Cleveland. But Trot Nixon and Justin Sherrod each squeezed an extra base out of Nixon’s sixth-inning single to left and later scored in a 9-4 Boston win.

“We made one mistake and we had about six baserunning plusses out there today, so I’ll talk about those if you want to,” Little said when asked about the pick-off of Hillen-

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