Red Sox Winter Weekend is meant to serve as an offseason celebration before the team heads down to Fort Myers for spring training next month. In recent years, however, it has turned into an uncomfortable event for Boston’s ownership and front office.
That was the case again Friday night. The team elected to forgo the traditional town hall after principal owner John Henry and then-chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom were loudly booed during it last year, but fans still found an opportunity to boo this year when team president Sam Kennedy and new CBO Craig Breslow took the stage.
On Saturday morning, Kennedy and chairman Tom Werner joined Ken Laird and Chris Curtis on WEEI live from Springfield and responded to questions about ownership’s level of commitment following back-to-back last-place finishes and another offseason in which the Red Sox have not yet made any big-name additions via free agency or trades.
Curtis confronted Werner and Kennedy with his own opinion – and one widely shared by Red Sox fans – that ownership doesn’t seem to care about winning as much as they did in the 2000s and 2010s when they were building four World Series winners and consistently had one of the highest payrolls in baseball.
“I think your perception is inaccurate,” Werner said. “We suffer as much at every loss as we’ve always suffered. We embrace the success. Our desire to win another championship – I’ve got five fingers on my hand, and I want one more ring. And I can’t wait as a baseball fan for the start of 2024; 2023 is the past. I can only tell you, and Sam will speak for himself, that John and I and everybody in the front office is as excited about the future of the Red Sox as we’ve always been, proud of what we’ve done, but hungry for more success.”
Kennedy pushed back even more passionately, saying that anyone who says they’re not as dedicated as they’ve always been is “a liar” and “just flat wrong.”
“I’d echo that,” Kennedy said. “Your point is that these issues come up around lack of focus or it may not be as important, in almost a zero-sum way. And what I mean by that is, when you finish last two years in a row, of course those are going to be the questions. We have to acknowledge that and own that. In October 2021, there was not one bit of discussion around lack of focus. There was no discussion of Liverpool or investment in other areas. You know why? Fenway Park was frickin’ electric. I’ve never felt Fenway Park the way it felt for that one-game playoff against the Yankees when Xander [Bogaerts] took Gerrit Cole deep. The place almost came down. I know it was 2021. It was a couple years ago. But why? We were winning baseball games. We were playing in October.
“When we have two sucky seasons like we’ve had, these are natural questions. We have to take them. But I can tell you, as a kid who grew up less than a mile from Fenway Park, if you think for one second that we aren’t passionate, committed, dedicated to the Boston Red Sox, you’re wrong, you’re a liar, and I’ll correct you on it, because it’s total BS. We are committed. We are frustrated. We take it personally. It angers us when we don’t win. And we understand that there are natural questions. But look back in history – these questions come up when we’re not performing at the Major League level. We have to perform at the Major League level, and those questions will go away. But to say that the attention or the commitment or the care isn’t there is just flat wrong.”
Kennedy insisted that the Red Sox are still a team that can and will spend big money in free agency, even though there has been little evidence to support that in recent years.
“We will be active and engaged in free agency and bringing in star players from the outside,” he said. “We didn’t match up this offseason on those two really big-ticket items [Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto], and we own that. That’s on us. It was not for a lack of trying. We did stay disciplined. We went to our threshold. We didn’t get there. But you’ve heard from Craig Breslow – he has a plan, and we’re very confident in him and excited about the 2024 club.”
“As Sam said, at the right time, we will make a commitment to a player for a long period of time at high dollars,” Werner said. “It’s just we didn’t do it yet in 2024.”
Red Sox fans will continue to wait, not so patiently, for it to be “the right time.”