So I’m sitting in the computah lab, listening to my sportsradio addiction and checking the same four sites over and over again. Now, normally, at the beginning of every hour, the respective show’s theme song plays, and the same announcer guy says the same thing he said an hour ago, albeit slightly different from what he said 4 hours ago. In some instances, however, if a guest is waiting in the studio or on the phone, they’ll play the song quickly, with no voice-over, and cut directly to the host. So it’s 5 o’clock. And James Brown’s “Living in America” begins to play. Here’s what I’m supposed to hear.
“This is the Big Show, with the Big O!”
But I don’t hear the announcer guy. Instead, I hear Glenn Ordway himself.
“Well, this situation keeps getting more bizzarre by the minute. Channel 7 News is now reporting that Theo Epstein has resigned, and is in the process of moving out of his office as we speak. I repeat. Channel 7 News is reporting at this hour, that Theo Epstein has resigned, and is clearing his office as we speak.”
Well, shit.
It was certainly unexpected, considering the Globe had been saying all weekend that the deal was as good as done, and ESPN was putting it on their crawl as early as 9:30 this morning. So what went wrong? Money probably wasn’t an issue. Maybe he wanted 5 years instead of 3, which makes sense, since this team will be in a semi-rebuilding stage the next few years, and maybe in 2008, the team might not look so great. His value is it’s highest right now, so he’d want to cash in as much as he could right now. But I think he was making fair market value, considering Beane had been putting out winning ballclubs and developing big-time players for longer than Theo had, and his offer was comparable to his. You could say that over the last few years, Theo’s been better than Cashman and deserves his money, but George is kinda paying him not only to do his job, but handle his shit on an hourly basis, so his salary is a little inflated.
So it probably wasn’t money. Well, what could the situation be? Larry Lucchino.
For those of you who aren’t aware of the entire situation with the Boston sports media, let me give you a quick crash course. You probably know of the two major newspapers, the Globe and the Herald. As you may or may not be aware, the Red Sox are partially owned by the New York Times, who own the Boston Globe. This means that the Globe has a natural advantage in their war with the Herald, since they get the scoops first. This also means that the Red Sox can spin things any way they want, since they have the most visible media entities in their laps. There are also two major local television sports stations. NESN is owned by the Red Sox, and have broadcasting rights to (obviously) the Red Sox and also the Bruins. Their shows with talking heads usually have Boston Globe personalities, like Dan Shaughnessy, Bob Ryan and Jackie MacMullan. The other station is Fox Sports New England. They have Celtics broadcasting rights, but other than that, their only real regional programming is New England Sports Tonight, which features Herald writers like Steve Buckley and Michael Felger, as well as guys from other entities, like Sean McAdam and Tom E. Curran. Finally, rounding up the media triumvirate are the radio stations. For a long time, the battle was between two, WEEI and WWZN (The Zone). WEEI is the more popular option, with better, albeit more controversial, programming. Then, about a month ago, ESPN entered the fold. Last week, the Zone pulled all of their local programming (except Celtics pre- and postgame shows, even though they lost the rights to the actual games this offseason) due to extremely low ratings (in the last year, they’ve been reduced to selling air-time to the highest bidder).
Now, here’s where things get complicated. The Globe head honchos don’t like what WEEI has to offer, so they’ve prohibited any Globe personalities from appearing on their shows in any form. However, WEEI has the broadcasting rights to the Sox, so it’s in the best interest of both parties that WEEI gets the premiere Sox coverage. That said, WEEI personalities don’t appear on NESN (except John Dennis, who hosts a weekly golf show, although to be fair, no real radio personalities from anywhere appear on NESN except Bob Neumeier, who is no longer employed by WEEI). So two factions have sprung up. The Globe and NESN versus the Herald, FSN and WEEI. Shots are fired from each side frequently.
Where does this relate to Theo? As I said, the Red Sox can use the Globe to spin things their way, as seen with the Nomar trade fallout, Manny’s repeated trade requests, and the Pedro-bashing that ensued when he took the money and years from the Mets. The final straw with Theo came just yesterday, when Dan Shaughnessy’s column seemed to hit a little close to home. Most people were aware of a trade for Larry Bigbie at the deadline that was squashed by Lucchino, causing a reaction by the Rockies similar to that of an eBay seller when you don’t pay $200 for an air conditioner for your Brooklyn basement apartment because you found a large fan on the street that did an adequate job for significantly cheaper (and go on to name this fan after something tightasses will find offensive). ANYWAY… what we didn’t know was who proposed the deal, who really squashed it, and who took the fall, which is exactly what Shanks proceeded to let us know (assistant GM Josh Byrnes made the deal, Theo killed it because he thought he found a better offer, Lucchino “fell on his sword” and took the blame) among other things. Overall, it was an incredibly Larry-slanted article, one that was about two days too early, since Theo hadn’t actually signed yet; it was only in principle. So (and this is all according to Michael Silverman of the Herald) Theo realized he can’t really trust Lucchino, so the end result is where we are tonight. Without a general manager, two weeks before the General Managers meetings.
So how fucked are the Sox? It depends. People forget, the Sox were extremely lucky to have everything go their way. One might even say dumb luck. They signed David Ortiz to be an extra bat off the bench, a Dante Bichette type, and he only went on to become the greatest clutch hitter in the history of the Red Sox and arguably all of baseball, not to mention arguably the most popular Sox player of all time. They traded Shea Hillenbrand for Byung-Hyun Kim, who provided partial bullpen relief but overall helped the Sox indirectly in two ways; getting rid of Hillenbrand opened up playing time for Ortiz and eventual batting champion Bill Mueller, and his big contract extension (while overall foolish, since the Sox are still on the hook for it) made up the money difference between taking A-Rod’s contract and trying to finagle a contract renegotiation that ended first in tears and later a World Series win. Some of the guys they went after, like Adrian Beltre and A-Rod, have been either big-money dissapointments or girly-men who hit 50 homers in a season, 48 of which when his team has a 6-2 lead.
I’m not diminishing Theo’s impact. It took balls to hang on to some of our prospects at the trading deadline when the team had such desperate needs. It’s very hard to build a team for the future while keeping the fans who want to win it now happy. What will happen in this offseason? I have a feeling whether Manny gets traded will be the call of John Henry, not whoever the GM is, since he’s still producing. Unfortunately, we only saw Theo for three years, so we have no idea truly how he negotiates his free agent contracts and judges talent and durability (although you can argue that they could’ve given Pedro his extension prior to the 2004 season), so we thus have no idea if the new guy is gonna give too many years to a Johnny Damon who broke down physically at the end of the season.
I’m not worried, yet. As long as we hang on to the big 5 (Hanley, Papelbon, Lester, Pedroia, and Hansen), or get equal value for them by way of other top prospects (instead of a salary dump where we get Jim Thome), I can handle a year of incompotence. Hell, I’ll give ‘em two. If they’re not contending by 2008, then they’re in trouble. If there was an offseason for us to enter without a GM, we picked the right one. This free agent class is putrid.
