Ultimate price paid
Farrell rode the wrong horse right out of town
In the end, what got John Farrell fired wasn’t losing in the playoffs or losing David Price, if he ever had him. What hung him out to dry was losing the ability to read the tea leaves.
One of the annoying aspects of Farrell’s five-year tenure as “Manager John” was his constant political veneer. He seemed a guy who didn’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows and was always positioning himself downwind.
Publicly, Farrell seemed to be the ultimate corporate insider. He was always on message. Whatever the organization wanted was all right with him. Then, when it mattered most, he played the wrong hand.
At a time when everyone in management was apologizing to Dennis Eckersley for Price’s obscenity-laden tirade in the middle of the Red Sox’ plane last June, Farrell sided with his pitcher. In the end, more than all the rest of his sins, both mortal and venial, that’s what got him fired. In the eyes of the guys who sign his check, he was disloyal. Or at least tone deaf, which around the Red Sox’ politically correct operation might be worse.
“John saddled the wrong horse on that one,” a source familiar with the Sox’ internal machinations said yesterday. “Horse ran him over.”
That “horse” was Price, who refused to apologize to Eckersley at a meeting in Toronto with a number of Sox management in attendance, even though that was clearly what management wanted. Ownership apologized. Dombrowski apologized. CEO Sam Kennedy even apologized. But “Manager John” could not coerce Price to do so and then made a public display of announcing he hadn’t either and didn’t feel he needed to.
So ownership apologizes. His boss apologizes. The chief bean counter apologizes. But the corporate insider suddenly becomes a baseball guy rather than a politician? That is a sin not easily washed away, as Farrell learned yesterday when at the end of a 32-minute meeting with Dombrowski he was beheaded for reasons Dombrowski chose not to share publicly.
After all, who wants to say you’re firing the manager because he sided with a snarky player instead of the guy who signs his check?
“That’s really something I’m going to keep to myself,” Dombrowski said during a press conference called to sing the executioner’s song. “I’m not going to get into anything beyond that other than a lot of different factors. … I thought it was time for a change.”
Dombrowski refused to speculate on whether Farrell would have survived had the Sox gotten to the ALCS rather than being eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for the second straight season, or if he had to lead his team of malcontents, miscreants and milquetoasts into the World Series to have survived his decision to buck the tide last June.
In the end, none of that mattered, because his players did none of those things. For the second straight year they went out of the postseason with a whimper not a bang.
What is essential here, though, is to understand John Farrell didn’t lose the clubhouse as much as he lost ownership and management, which is a death sentence. He was on the wrong side of the Price-Eckersley divide. He was caught trying to steal signs with an Apple watch (really?). And he watched in silence while Dustin Pedroia threw his teammates and manager under the bus during an April dustup over the Sox’ multiple failed attempts to drill the Orioles’ Manny Machado by yelling to Machado, “It’s not me, it’s them.”
That combination shows that Manager John forgot how he got the job in the first place. The master corporate operative began to believe the players’ feelings were more important than those of his bosses.
Years ago, when Jerry Glanville was coaching the Atlanta Falcons, he once explained that he had head shots of every one of his players posted on the inside of his locker door at the stadium. His reasoning was simple.
“First thing in the morning I’m reminded of the 50 guys who are trying to screw me today,” he told an inquisitor. “Their concerns are not me.”
Glanville was laughing when he said it, but it was no joke.
When Manager John couldn’t get Pitcher David to do what Owner John wanted, he was on a slippery slope. When he doubled down by not only declining to join the corporate crowd with a public mea culpa to Eck but made clear he didn’t think one was necessary, he was moving into enemy of the state status.
What is shocking is that someone as organizationally savvy as Farrell would allow his judgment to become so clouded by the presence of a cranky left-handed pitcher. Perhaps he thought his players would save him by playing hard and winning. Truth is for the most part they did both, just not often enough to erase the memory of him publicly picking Pitcher David over ownership PR.
Making the case to fire someone who has won two division titles and 186 games the past two years as well as one World Series on the basis of his resume would have required a level of corporate speak Dave Dombrowski does not possess. Admitting Farrell got the axe because he forgot who he worked for and didn’t win enough games to erase that mistake wouldn’t have put the Red Sox or Dombrowski in the best light either.
So instead Dave Dombrowski simply said, in essence, “That horse has left the barn.”
It was the horse John Farrell saddled back in June. The wrong horse.