Boston baseball was well served by Larry Lucchino, and other thoughtsHigh praise indeed!
Picked-up pieces while pondering the life and times of Larry Lucchino …
▪ He was the last of a kind — a personable, hard-charging baseball executive who demanded results, never suffered fools, and most of the time made things better for fans. He should be in Cooperstown simply for Camden Yards (which changed everything about the fan experience in every ballpark built after 1993), and he could have been commissioner of baseball, but Boston was best served because Lucchino ran the Red Sox from 2002-15.
The Sox haven’t been the same since he “retired,” and you can be sure Lucchino wouldn’t have tolerated the “let the fans eat cake” message ownership delivered in the recent non-full-throttle offseason.
Larry Lucchino. Think Harry Sinden with a law degree. Think Red Auerbach brawling with NBA owners at Board of Governors meetings. Think Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard in “The Fugitive.”
It's clear Shank 'sampled' many of his previous columns about Lucchino, and I'm still amused by his use of 'the Nixon White House' when the first thing Shank ever said to me was whether I was recording the phone call. I'll give him some credit for briefly mentioning the conflict / falling out he eventually had with Lucchino and didn't completely duck any of the bad stuff, unlike his shameless Bill Buckner eulogy.
Unlike that pathetic buckner column at least this fraud admits for once about what happened between him and lucchino
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