How the Red Sox Got Their Groove Back
In the half decade since John Henry and Tom Werner bought the team, public reaction to the owners (and the front office) has been ping-ponging between extremes. When the Sox didn’t bring Cliff Floyd back in 2003, they were cheapskates. When a bunch of garbage-heap pickups—Bill Mueller, David Ortiz, et al.—powered that season’s prodigious, record-setting offense, they were geniuses. Screwing up the A-Rod negotiations: moronic. Convincing Curt to come to Boston: brilliant. Alienating Nomar: inexcusable. Bringing in Orlando Cabrera and Dave Roberts: exemplary. Hell, in less than a year, the Edgar Renteria acquisition was evidence of the team’s sagacity and its stupidity.
Just on the basis of that brief history, you’d have thunk the team’s new leaders would have realized that, for all our promises that a single World Series win would bring endless goodwill, local reaction still will virtually always be dictated by whatever has transpired most recently. And yet somehow, beginning in 2005, the team’s executives actually made things worse. Larry Lucchino, perhaps the most creative CEO in baseball, continued to pursue his small-market pragmatism in a region that was already deeply in love with its local nine, amping up the team’s marketing efforts and thereby transforming the existing fever pitch into a full-on frenzy freckled by pink hats and $200 first dates on the Budweiser pavilion. (Rest assured that if there’s a way to monetize urinal cakes, the Sox will figure out what it is.) Meanwhile, Epstein, whose shrewdness belied his age, tried in vain to educate the team’s mushrooming fan base on the importance of a long-term game plan that favored less expensive young lions over brand-name all-stars whose best years are behind them.
All of which was a little confusing for your average sports-radio listener, who, let’s be honest, doesn’t have the longest attention span to begin with. Should we expect the world? Or focus on the future? Somehow, it seemed, the Sox thought they could up the ante and tamp down expectations at the same time. And if you don’t stay on message, as any good politician will tell you, you lose control of the story line.
The schism created by these dueling public relations strategies—one designed to keep the money flowing into the team’s coffers, the other an effort to give the team’s baseball ops crew the freedom to make decisions they were convinced would lead to enduring success—was on ample display in the days and weeks after the Red Sox’s three-and-out exit from the 2005 playoffs. Epstein left the team less than a month later largely due to strains in his relationship with Lucchino, and the notion that an unbridgeable philosophical gap regarding roster construction had been the cause of Epstein’s departure hardened into something approaching conventional wisdom.
That was never really what the problems were about, but no matter. When Epstein returned to the Sox early last year, those folks convinced that the two executives’ difficulties centered on whether to lard the team with expensive stars or stock it with scrappy pups couldn’t help but conclude it was the GM who’d come out on top. The Sox replaced 32-year-old folk hero Johnny Damon with the 26-year-old, publicity-averse Coco Crisp. Bronson “Saturn Nuts” Arroyo was swapped out for the 24-year-old Wily Mo Pena. And trade deadline deals that would have brought all-stars Roy Oswalt and Andruw Jones to Boston reportedly collapsed because the Sox were unwilling to give up the young pitching that the Astros and the Braves craved.
After the season went down the toilet, the snipers that constantly circle around the team took aim at Theo’s head, which served to only heighten the tension inside the front office. (Some of Epstein’s confidants are still stewing about an item that ran in the Herald last year in which an anonymous source said that Lucchino was gleefully laying the team’s struggles at Epstein’s feet, a juicy nugget that no one in the Sox camp ever really denied.) The focus was once again on what was going on inside the team’s Yawkey Way headquarters, which meant the organization’s full attention wasn’t directed toward what was happening on the field.
Just on the basis of that brief history, you’d have thunk the team’s new leaders would have realized that, for all our promises that a single World Series win would bring endless goodwill, local reaction still will virtually always be dictated by whatever has transpired most recently. And yet somehow, beginning in 2005, the team’s executives actually made things worse. Larry Lucchino, perhaps the most creative CEO in baseball, continued to pursue his small-market pragmatism in a region that was already deeply in love with its local nine, amping up the team’s marketing efforts and thereby transforming the existing fever pitch into a full-on frenzy freckled by pink hats and $200 first dates on the Budweiser pavilion. (Rest assured that if there’s a way to monetize urinal cakes, the Sox will figure out what it is.) Meanwhile, Epstein, whose shrewdness belied his age, tried in vain to educate the team’s mushrooming fan base on the importance of a long-term game plan that favored less expensive young lions over brand-name all-stars whose best years are behind them.
All of which was a little confusing for your average sports-radio listener, who, let’s be honest, doesn’t have the longest attention span to begin with. Should we expect the world? Or focus on the future? Somehow, it seemed, the Sox thought they could up the ante and tamp down expectations at the same time. And if you don’t stay on message, as any good politician will tell you, you lose control of the story line.
The schism created by these dueling public relations strategies—one designed to keep the money flowing into the team’s coffers, the other an effort to give the team’s baseball ops crew the freedom to make decisions they were convinced would lead to enduring success—was on ample display in the days and weeks after the Red Sox’s three-and-out exit from the 2005 playoffs. Epstein left the team less than a month later largely due to strains in his relationship with Lucchino, and the notion that an unbridgeable philosophical gap regarding roster construction had been the cause of Epstein’s departure hardened into something approaching conventional wisdom.
That was never really what the problems were about, but no matter. When Epstein returned to the Sox early last year, those folks convinced that the two executives’ difficulties centered on whether to lard the team with expensive stars or stock it with scrappy pups couldn’t help but conclude it was the GM who’d come out on top. The Sox replaced 32-year-old folk hero Johnny Damon with the 26-year-old, publicity-averse Coco Crisp. Bronson “Saturn Nuts” Arroyo was swapped out for the 24-year-old Wily Mo Pena. And trade deadline deals that would have brought all-stars Roy Oswalt and Andruw Jones to Boston reportedly collapsed because the Sox were unwilling to give up the young pitching that the Astros and the Braves craved.
After the season went down the toilet, the snipers that constantly circle around the team took aim at Theo’s head, which served to only heighten the tension inside the front office. (Some of Epstein’s confidants are still stewing about an item that ran in the Herald last year in which an anonymous source said that Lucchino was gleefully laying the team’s struggles at Epstein’s feet, a juicy nugget that no one in the Sox camp ever really denied.) The focus was once again on what was going on inside the team’s Yawkey Way headquarters, which meant the organization’s full attention wasn’t directed toward what was happening on the field.
