“I think a lot of people that came here understood what happened last year,” Lester said. “We wanted to be a blip in the radar, and I think those guys saw that and said, ‘These guys’ track record speaks for themselves. We’re not going to base our decision on one down year.’ We have a good core, a good group of guys who know how to win and want to win (emphasis added), and I think that helped get some of these guys over here.”

“It’s tough,” Lester insisted Wednesday about having to throw baseballs in Boston for six innings every five days. Like “quality starts,” that depends on your point of view.

According to the website Oddee, Ramesh Sahu works as a sewer cleaner in Calcutta. When the sewers back up it’s his job to climb down there and fill buckets with human waste that are pulled to the surface with a rope. He does this job with no mask and no safety apparatus and earns about $100 a month. That’s a tough workplace. Fenway Park? Ah, no.

So which Jon Lester do we believe? Is he the mea culpa man who “loves baseball and loves Boston” even though every time we see him he looks like someone returning from a double root canal or is he the guy who five days earlier declared himself an ace?

Which one he really is will go a long way in determining the quality of his starts this summer.