Good judgment, or a Shanktastic oversight?
Either way, The Boston Globe dissed The CHB's memoir with Terry Francona, as it failed to make the Globe's top sports books of the year.
Perhaps the 2013 Series win undercut just a little of Francona/Shaughnessy's argument that management cared more about marketing than on-field results.
2 comments:
Actually the 2013 series merely showed that the owners had indeed cared more about marketing than winning. What happened in 2013 was the owners actually listened to the critics and figured out Francona et al had been right all along. They hired Farrell and actually let their baseball people do their job where the five or so years before all they did was meddle, engage in drama queenery that made Billy Sullivan look like a competent team owner, and push The Brand on an audience that didn't want it.
The question now becomes this - John Henry et al were exposed as Jerry Jones/Daniel Snyder wannabes before; now that the Red Sox are champions again, are they going to stay out of the way and let the team do what it's supposed to do?
Hmm...as I recall, the owners wanted Farrell for 2012 but were rebuffed. So I wouldn't want to speculate as to how 2012 would have gone under someone other than Bobby V.
What I think happened was that Theo fell into the Dan Duquette trap, which is to say once he had tasted success + money, it became easier to try to buy the talent than to keep growing it. Case in point: Carl Crawford (whom John Henry did NOT want). And then Theo looked back at what had happened and he realized, "oh crap, now how am I going to fix this," and suddenly being GM of the Red Sox got a lot less fun. So he bails and the Sox tank and the owners -- who had brought 2 more World Series championships than we had won in the previous 80 years -- suddenly become ... incompetent? That seems a stretch.
I don't know that the Jones/Snyder comparisons work, however, because 1. Snyder has never won anything and 2. George Steinbrenner.
Yep, you read that right. No baseball team was as successful the Yankees were under the Boss. And he was as bombastic, interfering, overspending and meddling as they come.
Point being, there are many different ways to be successful. When it works, you're a genius. When it doesn't, you're an idiot.
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