Waiting for his results to come in
Dombrowski has done all the tinkering he can with Sox
The doors are now locked to all newcomers hoping to play past Oct. 1. Once September arrives, baseball executives cannot add pieces to help in the post-season. Everyone eligible for a playoff roster must be in his organization before Sept. 1. The gang’s all there now, for some lucky franchise.
Dave Dombrowski, the president for baseball operations in Boston, has been kissed by fortune just once in his 40 seasons. That was two decades ago, with the team then known as the Florida Marlins.
All they had to do was lose their No. 2 starter, Alex Fernandez, to a torn rotator cuff in the National League Championship Series — and then watch their ace, Kevin Brown, be humbled repeatedly by an ordinary Cleveland pitcher in the World Series. Quite a formula.
“If I told you that Chad Ogea was going to beat Kevin Brown twice in the World Series and we’re still going to win, you’d say, ‘There’s no way,’ ” Dombrowski said last week. “So that’s why, when you get into short series, anything can happen. You grind it out. You just never can tell.”
Dombrowski arrived in Boston in August 2015, a few weeks after conceding that his Detroit Tigers, a team he had built into a two-time pennant winner, could no longer compete for the playoffs. He traded Yoenis Cespedes to the Mets and David Price to the Blue Jays, helping both teams make deep post-season runs.
Dombrowski, 61, does things big. He can tear down a winner, as he did — under orders from ownership — with those 1997 Marlins, a strategy that helped them win again in 2003. By then, he was running a Detroit team that staggered to 119 losses. Yet three years later, the Tigers were in the World Series, and they returned six years after that.
Both times, the Tigers played horribly. Their pitchers made errors in all five games against St. Louis in 2006. Their hitters batted .159 in a four-game sweep by San Francisco in 2012. They were also eliminated three times in the AL playoffs, and never did win it all.
The Tigers underscored that cold reality Thursday, trading long-time ace Justin Verlander to Houston and all-star outfielder Justin Upton to the Los Angeles Angels in time for both to be eligible for the post-season. Detroit had already sent outfielder J.D. Martinez to Arizona before the non-waiver trade deadline.
“It’s not like I’m sad that they’re breaking the team up now, because it’s a couple of years down the road and there’s a lot of new people,” Dombrowski said. “But I was sad- dened that we didn’t win it. I thought we had a good enough club when we were there, and we were good for an extended period, and never did.
“There’s certain clubs that never won championships, and you say, ‘Gee, I can’t believe they didn’t win a championship.’ Seattle was like that for a while. But that’s why it’s so tough to win it, and that’s why it makes it so rewarding when you do.”
Dombrowski rarely wore his Marlins ring, though, because the roster dissolved so quickly. He rarely wore his American League championship rings from Detroit, either, because he was always waiting for a better one. Now he is taking his best shot in Boston.
Since Dombrowski arrived, he has traded for Chris Sale, who was 15-6 through Saturday; Drew Pomeranz, who was 14-5; and Craig Kimbrel, who had 31 saves and had struck out half of his opposing hitters.
In July, Dombrowski added Eduardo Nunez to the infield and Addison Reed to the bullpen. Last week, he traded a prospect to Oakland for speedy outfielder Rajai Davis.
Is this Boston team better equipped for October than last year’s version, which had David Ortiz but lost a three-game division series to the Indians?
“We have a guy in Chris Sale who’s really good, and I think we’re in the top two in the league in ERA, starting and bullpen,” Dombrowski said, accurately. “We’re a really athletic club. So it’s a different type of team for me. Normally when I’ve been associated with a really good club, that 3-4-5 in the middle are guys that just crush the ball. This is not that type of team.
“This is more of a club that wins in other ways, too. We win a lot of close games, we run the bases well, we’ll steal a base, make a lot of contact. Hopefully, if we get there, we’ll be successful. But the reality is that all the clubs that end up playing are really good.”
Yet Dombrowski has never believed that the post-season is merely a coin flip. The goal is to make each roster as strong as possible in October, and then take your chances — making sure to feel exhilarated misery along the way.
Dombrowski watched anxiously from the Toronto press box last week as the Red Sox played a tight game into the late innings. He sat with an old friend, Jim Devellano, who helped build Stanley Cup winners for the Detroit Red Wings. At one point, Dombrowski turned to Devellano with an observation.
“It’s interesting,” he said. “Your stomach churns, but this is what you really want it to be all about.”