It just keeps getting worse. The general manager has the look of a man who'd rather be working at Wrigley Field. The ex-manager tells us that his players weren't committed to one another and that they showed their true colors when things went south. We get no denial that starting pitchers were drinking in the clubhouse on days when they were not scheduled to pitch. The ex-manager tells us he didn't have the support of ownership.I wonder how many columns he can wring out of this mess?
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Sunday, October 02, 2011
Piling On
The worse things get for the Red Sox, the better it is for our man Shank. Read this column and compare it to the crap he churned out last week. There's no question he puts forth a better effort with this column, and I love how he uses 'the fans' as a shield to criticize John Henry, et. al., like he ever gave two shits about 'the fans'.
Spoken like a man who spent the entire season watching the games in The Fours.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to minorities (including Jews), the CHB is just right of Tom Yawkey. They can do no right in his book. But the bigger nonsense is that somehow Francona did everything right this season. He didn't. He lost control of the team. That's on him, not the front office. Beckett, Wakefield, Youklis and Varitek are guys who have each won two World Series. If you can't get them motivated, you probably can't be effective anymore.
The Toilet is Broken
ReplyDeleteWhat amazes me is how there are "reporters" on the payrolls of many fine established entities that could've picked up on the team discord early in the season. But they didn't.
I find it hard to believe that all the bull crap being let loose just appeared during the last month of the season.
Where was the Shank, the self-proclaimed "leading sportswriter in Boston" when all this was building up as the season turned?
g
mike b1 is flat wrong. "He lost control of the team." We're talking about a manager who kept Manny Ramirez in as much percentage of line as anyone ever can, kept the 2006 squad from exploding that September, and kept the Sox competitive amid mounting free-agent failures hoisted on him by Theo. By now we've seen how meddlesome Theo and JWH can be in baseball matters and how Theo operates with the Moneyball philosophy even though it has always been superior pitching, not sabermetrics, that won. To put this on Francona is wrong. He got hosed by ownership.
ReplyDelete@MonkeesFan:
ReplyDeleteSo Tito says, "I have to own a lot of the responsibility for what happened. It was my responsibility to not let what happened happen. I had a responsibility to get something done and it didn't get done. ...
... I wanted the guys that weren't down on the bench I wanted them on the bench, I wanted them to support their teammates. ... It was more of an attitude toward our team that distressed me."
and
"The personal goals were outweighing some of the team goals. That's my responsibility to change that. That falls on me. I was distraught that I wasn't able to change that all the time."
So Tito is saying the team didn't gel and pull together, and that it was his fault for that.
I think the other relevant quote was this: "Some things I felt like was able to get done in the past, I wasn't able to quite get done this year, especially at the end."
In other words, just because he was able to keep Manny in line (sort of) five years ago doesn't mean he was able to keep Youk and Lester and Beckett in line this year.
If I'm flat wrong, so is Tito himself.