MUTINY ON THE BOBBY

Red Sox’s Bobby V experiment was doomed from the start

For what it’s worth to embattled Bobby Valentine, he will not be the first manager — or even the most renowned — to be brought down by a player revolt. Nevertheless, the Red Sox rebellion against Bobby V has served to magnify just what a colossal mess owner John Henry and CEO Larry Lucchino have on their hands with the Olde Towne Team.

Even though Valentine got more votes of confidence than he could ever have asked for in the aftermath of that Adrian Gonzalez/Dustin

Pedroia- led players meeting with ownership a couple of weeks ago, his stormy tenure in Boston figures to end as soon as the season does. All the injuries aside, Valentine turned out to be more than Lucchino and Henry bargained for when they sought to bring in an experienced manager to change the culture in the “anything goes”

Terry Francona clubhouse. It was, however, a hire that had all the earmarks of front-office dysfunction since the Sox’s rookie general manager, Ben Cherington, who had just replaced Theo Epstein, wanted to hire a rookie manager, Dale Sve

um, and was very publicly overruled by Henry and Lucchino. (Perhaps what Lucchino should have done was to hire an experienced GM like Doug Melvin, whom he groomed years ago in Baltimore.) The Red Sox hierarchy was right in determining an experienced manager was necessary to handle the veteran Red Sox clubhouse, grown accustomed to Francona’s laissez faire, enabling style. Unfortunately, Bobby V, and his blunt, often abrasive, manner proved too extreme a change. It didn’t help either that, from the get-go, he had a frosty relationship with three of his coaches,

Gary Tuck and Tim Bogar, holdovers from Francona, and late-hire pitching coach Bob McClure.

Valentine’s reputation as a potstirrer preceded him with the Red Sox players and, as a stranger in town, he didn’t have the cache with the fans in Boston that he had in New York. And so, after the Kev

in Youkilis flap in spring training — which immediately put him on the wrong side with Pedroia, the Red Sox’s titular clubhouse leader — every critical comment by Valentine or confrontation with a player mushroomed to the point where he had a full-fledged mutiny on his hands and not a whole lot of allies. It supposedly all culminated when he curiously allowed

Jon Lester, his slump-ridden staff ace, to absorb an 11-run beating on July 22, prompting Gonzalez and Pedroia to ask ownership for the meeting. As history has a way of repeating itself in baseball, Hallof-Famer Rogers Hornsby, managing the Cincinnati Reds in 1953, was extremely unpopular with his players because of a similarly abrasive manner and triggered a revolt when he left a starting pitcher, Bud

Podbielan, in to take a six-run beating in the eighth inning of a 9-6 loss to the Dodgers. Shortly thereafter, the Reds fired him.

Once the meeting with Red Sox ownership was made public by Yahoo! Sports, all the principals — Gonzalez, Pedroia, Henry and Lucchino — sought to downplay its significance regarding the players’ reported detest of Valentine. “I’ve said this to John Henry, to Ben Cherington and I’ve said this to Bobby. I think he’s a good manager,” Gonzalez said. Added Pedroia: “I have had one problem with Bobby earlier in the year and I went into the office and talked to him like a man and he talked to me like a man. And we’ve been great. We’ve had a great relationship. I don’t think Bobby should be fired.”

Both of them were completely disingenuous. If Gonzalez thinks Valentine is such a good manager and Pedroia insists he and Bobby V have such a great relationship, then why did they feel compelled to go behind his back and ask for a meeting with ownership to air their feelings about all that’s going wrong with the Red Sox? And even though Henry took pains to say “no one at that meeting at any time took the position that Bobby should be fired,” the very fact ownership took the meeting — behind the manager’s back — was hardly a vote of confidence for Valentine.

WESTWARD WOES

So much for the American League West arms buildup at the trading deadline. When the Angels acquired Zack Greinke, the prize pitching chattel on the trade market, from the Milwaukee Brewers, they were suddenly the favorites to win the division in the eyes of many pundits — so much so that the front-running Texas Rangers felt compelled to make a deadline countermove for Ryan Dempster, the National League ERA leader at the time, from the Cubs. Welcome to the AL fellas. Both Greinke and Dempster have found it tough going in the DH circuit and have had almost no impact for their new teams. Greinke had a 5.34 ERA in his first four starts for the Angels, yielding 31 hits and four homers in 26 innings. Hardly ace-like. Dempster, who was placed on the restricted list for personal reasons Friday by the Rangers, has had an even rougher go with an 8.31 ERA in his first three starts for Texas. After allowing just nine homers in 16 starts for the Cubs, Dempster yielded five among 24 hits in 171⁄

3 innings.