The brutal events of this past weekend crystallized why there’s so much animosity directed towards the Red Sox. On the morning of Opening Day, The Athletic published an interview with Tom Werner, in which the team’s chairman boasted about his longstanding friendships with LeBron James and Maverick Carter, and their new small ownership stakes in the organization.
“I will be surprised actually if they don’t weigh in,” Werner said. “I would welcome their thoughts.”
Later, Werner clarified his comments on WEEI, saying James won’t be “making lineup decisions.” Instead, he’s going to be a “resource for conversations about player psychology.”
OK. Do you think he can figure out why Garrett Richards can’t get anybody out?
Or why nobody is hitting?
John Henry and Werner are more than happy to bask in the glory of James and Carter owning shares of the Red Sox, becoming the first Black partners in franchise history. It’s a truly transcendent moment, but also an opportunity for them to score some good PR — while ignoring the fact that James is a bona fide Boston sports villain. He’s played the Celtics seven times in the playoffs, eliminating them from three conference finals.
Small instances of tone-deafness add up over a 20-year period. There have also been bad decisions and unforgivable brutality, such as seemingly leaking incendiary information about Terry Francona to the Globe in the aftermath of his dismissal. The end result is an ownership group with four World Series titles and no goodwill. Fans are just waiting to blow up at the team, especially after the last two brutal summers.
The Orioles sweeping the Red Sox at Fenway to open up the season is downright embarrassing. As our Rob Bradford notes, Baltimore’s over-under win total for the season is 64. They’re already 5 percent there!
But let’s be honest: a lot of the outrage being displayed against the Red Sox right now is phony. Or at least, not really about the baseball. If the Red Sox swept Baltimore last weekend, would fans be buying up “Sneaky Good” apparel? Or dismissing them for sweeping the lowly Orioles?
I’m going with the latter.
It’s easy to understand what the Red Sox are doing as a baseball team right now. Since Chaim Bloom was hired in October 2019, they’ve added 23 new players to the 40-man roster. Dave Dombrowski stripped the organization of its depth, and now, they’re trying to rebuild. This is one of those bridge years. Expectations were never that high.
Luckily, armed with a $207 million payroll, the Red Sox still possess the resources to compete. And they can. We know that a lineup featuring Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers and J.D. Martinez is going to post a collective OPS higher than .448. Meaningful September baseball remains within reach. Any reasonable person knows that.
But the reactions to the Red Sox aren’t reasonable. They’re the end result of a rollercoaster decade, beginning with Chicken and Beer, and ending with David Price verbally accosting Dennis Eckersley. In between, there was Bobby Valentine, Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, lowballing Jon Lester, cheating scandals, trading Mookie Betts, and oh yeah, two World Series titles. It’s been an exhausting ride full of inconsistencies. One moment, they’re hiring Dave Dombrowski to build an immediate juggernaut and napalm the farm system. The next moment, they’re blaming him for going too far.
“In 2018 when we won, at that point it was clear to some of us in the organization that if we didn’t pay more attention to the future, we were going to be in trouble,” Henry said Friday on WEEI, in his first public comments in 386 days. “By the middle of 2019, it was clear that we had overplayed our hand, so to speak, in going for it.”
Ripping the Red Sox is a tradition around these parts. There’s no defending the wall or Green Team-colored glasses. That’s how we were brought up, and many times, this ownership group makes it too easy.
The danger is, the Red Sox just aren’t as popular as they used to be. For losing teams, irrelevancy now comes quickly. NESN ratings fell by more than 50 percent last year. With fans barred from Fenway, it was like the season never happened.
With Fenway reopening to fans, there will be more buzz around the Red Sox this summer — even if it’s just audible. But there will be no mercy.
After one weekend, we’ve already learned that.
