Don’t pass on players
Guys on field deserve their share of blame
So when do we get around to the players?
For the past 48 hours I’ve heard and read much about the real and imagined failings of Red Sox manager John Farrell and club president and personnel guru Dave Dombrowski. According to their legion of critics they didn’t do this and they didn’t do that and if they had the Sox would be heading into the ALCS with bells on. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I would never have thought they built and managed a team that won 93 games and the AL East title this year.
Dombrowski, it has been said, didn’t adequately replace valuable missing parts like David Ortiz (good luck with that) or get Farrell enough new ammunition in August when other teams like the Houston Astros were reloading by acquiring the likes of lightsout starter Justin Verlander. All true, but when do we get around to the players?
Farrell in particular has been a public piñata for several years in this town, his managerial skills mocked and ridiculed and his clubhouse command compared not with General Patton but rather with Sgt. Schultz (“I know nothing!”). People insist he’s blown more games than Esteban Yan.
Certainly Farrell’s apparent willingness to let
David Price off the hook after acting like an immature imbecile during his outrageous public and profane dressing down of Hall of Fame pitcher and NESN broadcaster Dennis Eckersley on a team flight didn’t speak very well of him. And Price’s earlier whining about how the media didn’t put enough effort into getting to know him as a person are the kind of musings that do not go over well in Boston. Many observers of the club will tell you the atmosphere was poisonous in a clubhouse now led by the toxic Price and often grousing and grumbling Dustin Pedroia rather than the affable and emotional Ortiz.
Perhaps so. Certainly, at least, some of the blame for that follows on management. But, again, when do we get around to the players who created it? Why do they get a pass?
Even with those issues, Farrell maneuvered a flawed Red Sox team to the AL East title and 93 wins for the second straight season after losing by far his most potent bat with Ortiz’ retirement and his alleged ace in the long months in which the well-paid Price was out with a sore elbow. If most managers held things together well enough to make the playoffs without his best bat from the previous season and without the guy who was supposed to be his No. 1 starter, he wouldn’t be facing a firing squad. He’d probably get an extension.
Before you lose your minds over this, this is not someone making a case that Dombrowski and Farrell are blameless in the Sox second straight quick hook from the postseason. It’s just to raise this point — when do we get around to the people who actually decided wins and losses? When do we get around to the players?
In the end, you can manage your butt off and baseball ops can make one move after another but if you bring in arguably your two best pitchers — starter Chris Sale and closer Craig Kimbrel — and they can’t hold a lead in a do-or-die playoff game, don’t blame the manager.
If your lineup of young talent that few of the public critics were willing to trade during the offseason because of their “upside” and “contract flexibility” — like Andrew Benintendi, Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers or in some cases even Jackie Bradley Jr. — then isn’t it about time to ask those players why they were outscored 24-18, out-hit 4939, out-walked 14-1, out-doubled 9-7, out-homered 8-5 and outslugged .571-.445 by the Astros, as my colleague Michael Silverman pointed out in Tuesday’s Herald? Was that the manager’s fault? Was it Dombrowski’s fault? Were they swinging the bats or were their players?
When the season began many of the same people now criticizing the manager and the president of baseball operations for the team they built were arguing that their pitching and defense would be so improved it would negate the obvious lack of run production likely to follow the retirement of Ortiz. I didn’t buy into it then and still don’t. I’m not a believer in run prevention. I’m a believer in run production.
In a year when leaguewide home runs were booming, the sickly Sox were last with 168 and next to last in slugging percentage. Who had the most to do with that? A manager sitting on his duff in the dugout or players flailing away with their bats at home plate?
Whether John Farrell stays or goes, no manager can hit for his players. None can pitch for them either. When they get into the postseason the players decide who wins and who loses. Even the devotees of Moneyball admit that.
Is John Farrell the reincarnation of Earl Weaver? Not hardly. But if in five years you win a World Series, two division titles and reach the playoffs three times it shouldn’t produce your dismissal or Dombrowski’s, for that matter. What it should produce is a re-evaluation of your talent because, in the end, managers and coaches don’t win games and neither do heads of baseball ops. Players do.
So when do we get around to them?