Let’s just state this simply: the Red Sox are currently in a state of civil war.
Not that you need to know this – or care – but I’m out of the country. And when I saw this comment from Garrett Whitlock in a story posted by Tim Healey of The Boston Globe, I came to the simple conclusion that the proverbial gloves were off, which is probably just as well. After all, they weren’t doing the Red Sox much good on the field anyway.
Said Whitlock when asked about the meeting with chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, team president Sam Kennedy and principal owner John Henry after the firing of manager Alex Cora and his loyalists on the coaching staff: “Listen, they made it very clear that we get paid to play baseball and (that) we need to just focus on playing baseball.”
Translation: SHUT UP AND PLAY.
So there you go: seven or eight years of frustration, anger and disappointment rolled into four words (albeit mine) that reveal so many problems within the fabled walls of America’s most beloved and dysfunctional ballpark.
For starters, ownership and management are angry. Finally. And it only took nearly a decade. Red Sox leadership has had its head up its collective ass for a while now, whether they want to admit it or not. Kennedy and Breslow said a whole lot of nothin’ on Sunday, as usual, but at least Smilin’ Sam wasn’t smilin’. The Sox looked serious, finally, and they seem genuinely wounded by the laughingstock their organization has become.
Know how you should feel about this? Good. Maybe great. Most of you have been screaming for years that the Red Sox’ new approach to team building is self-defeating, that it indicates passivity and complacency. Alex Bregman saw that and told the Sox to stuff it, leaving Henry, Kennedy and Breslow with their (base)balls in their hands.
His message to them? Something like this: SHUT UP AND PAY.
Here’s the problem now: the Red Sox are in so deep on this mid-market, risk-averse philosophy that they’ve declared war over it. This is really the story now. When Cora was brought here, the Red Sox added J.D. Martinez with him with one objective/ to out the Sox over the top. The Red Sox went 108-54 – 119-57 including playoffs – to win the World Series going away in 2018. And the haven’t really been the same since.
Since that time, the Sox have held clandestine meetings with the media – larger groups and smaller ones – and revealed they were going to do things differently. They never really told you. They never really told Cora or anyone else, either, which led to the divide before the uniformed and non-uniformed. Cora’s suspension gave them leverage over the manager for a time. He was grateful when they gave him another chance.
Cora’s biggest mistake? He re-upped here, for three years and $21.5 million. The Red Sox viewed that as a sign that he, too, was on board. And he never really was. Like Chaim Bloom before him, Breslow didn’t get to pick his manager. Cora played nicely at times, but there were often messages in his comments. “The roster is the roster,” he said.
Translation: DON’T LOOK AT ME.
On Friday, in what will go down as Cora’s Waterloo, the Red Sox got their asses kicked by a 10-3 score that doesn’t do the beating justice. Starter Brayan Bello was treated like a human piñata. After the game, Cora stunningly said of his “young players” that his job was to “keep teaching them the game,” which made him sound more like a Little League coach than a big league manager. It felt like a middle finger to ownership and management.
Ownership and management’s answer: F-OFF … and take your blind lieutenants with you.
The point is this: Cora’s job was to keep the team pointed in the right direction. Too often, he helped break it apart. Since he returned in 2021, Cora was never the right guy for the Red Sox anymore. Precisely who is remains a question, but Chad Tracy might have as good a chance as anyone.
Of course, if Craig Breslow was as confident as he emptily said on Sunday, Tracy wouldn’t be wearing a label that reads: TEMPORARY.
In the end, do not be fooled about what this is all really about: Henry (and, by extension, Kennedy) dis not choose Breslow over Cora here as much as he doubled down on his new philosophy; players toting $300 million contracts aren’t coming through that door. In Henry’s mind, the manager and his coaches were getting in the way. Now he has an inexperienced chief baseball executive with an inexperienced manager overseeing a relatively inexperienced team. There is no one left to question anything anymore.
Does Cora’s departure solve the Red Sox’ problems. Hell no. The Red Sox don’t have enough good players, no longer possess the organizational drive to be great. They just want to be good enough. Henry seem to want a team that he can control – fiscally and otherwise – and he now seems hell-bent on doing it.
In that way, for the first time in a long time, he seems entirely committed.
