Is Patience A Virtue Or Just An Excuse?
Just minutes after the final out of the Yankees’ five game castration of the Red Sox, after I had stopped dry-heaving and deleting all the Pearl Jam songs from my IPod, I began to wonder: Can Bostonians be patient with the Red Sox? Do Red Sox fans have the temperament to sit around for the next month and watch Josh Beckett pussyfoot his way around the strike zone and Coco Crisp flail around at the plate, all the while believing that better days are truly around the corner? Can Sox fans sit back and watch the Yankees, not only run away with the 2006 AL East title, but also bolster their 2007 lineup by adding Bobby Abreu and trust that untested minor leaguers and unsteady rookies like Dustin Predroia, David Murphy, Jacoby Ellsbury, Craig Hansen and Manny Delcarmen will be able to match the firepower of next season’s Bronx Bombers? After finally experiencing a World Series title, will Red Sox fans, who pour millions upon millions of dollars into the bank accounts of John Henry, Tom Werner, Larry Lucchino, et al., be willing to sit back and watch the team rebuild with cheap young talent, possibly wasting MVP-caliber seasons from Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, while aging, though solidly reliable, veterans like Mark Loretta, Alex Gonzalez, Mike Lowell and Trot Nixon are shown the door?
In a 162-game season, a five game span in August rarely raises so many questions about the future of the franchise. But when the franchise is the Red Sox and the Yankees have just swept a five game series at Fenway Park, there is no doubt that fans are going to question whether the prevailing wisdom of the Red Sox braintrust, Henry, Lucchino and General Manager Theo Epstein, makes any sense.
Let’s make one thing clear: Theo Epstein doesn’t care what you or I think. He’s made it his mission to run the Red Sox baseball operations with his head and not his heart. It’s not that he’s unreasonably arrogant or coldly insensitive. Theo is the one with his head on the chopping block when it comes to the team’s performance. To think that he doesn’t want to win is foolish. But Theo’s idea, and by extension the Red Sox ownership, of what it means for the Red Sox to be successful is suddenly colliding with the rabid expectations of a devoted Red Sox Nation, and not just the pink-hatters.
The longtime, old school Red Sox fans are looking at their ever-escalating season ticket bills, they’re checking their bank statement after another triple digit trip to Fenway, they’re watching as the Red Sox are morphing into the East Coast A’s and they’re starting to wonder: Are Theo’s frequent exhortations about being patient just an excuse to sugarcoat poor personnel decisions, underachieving prospects and an ownership group more interested in profits than playoffs?
My answer to those old school Red Sox fans who don’t have the patience to sit back and watch the Red Sox retool- too bad. It’s going to happen. If it didn’t happen this year (the injuries and ineffective play of Jason Varitek, Keith Foulke, Matt Clement, Tim Wakefield, David Wells and Nixon certainly sped up the process), it was bound to happen next season when numerous higher-priced veterans were likely to be jettisoned for younger, cheaper prospects. Theo hasn’t been shy about his vision for the Red Sox. He wants to be in playoff contention eight out of every ten years. He believes that the best way for the Red Sox to compete with the Yankees is to develop young, economical talent, allowing Boston more payroll flexibility to pursue free agents. He expects Red Sox fans to accept a down year or two in return for the promise of a several years of playoff contention.
Because the Yankees are the only team in major league baseball that can currently guarantee postseason potential every season because of its payroll, Epstein’s plan has its merits.
But, there are just two small problems with Epstein’s plan. For starters, none of the other American League teams has agreed to tank a few seasons to ensure that the Red Sox have an easy road to the playoffs. Is there any reason to think that teams like the Blue Jays, White Sox, Twins, Tigers, Rangers, A’s and Angels won’t also be in playoff contention next season? And 2008? And 2009?
Forget for a minute that the Twins can likely count on Johan Santana, Joe Nathan, Francisco Liriano and Joe Mauer for several more seasons or that the Tigers have three stud pitchers under the age of 24- Jeremy Bonderman, Justin Verlander and Joel Zumaya. Or that it’s the Angels who seem to have figured out how to retool with youth and still compete for the postseason. Forget all that and ask yourself this question: What makes the Red Sox different from all those other teams?
Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money.
For many Red Sox fans, myself included, the real sticking point of Theo’s patience plan is the enormous wealth of the Red Sox franchise. As ESPN’s Buster Olney pointed out in a recent blog entry, the Red Sox are not hurting for revenue:
“…consider the incredible sources of income for the team -- perhaps the best local revenue streams of any club, with NESN and tremendous local radio coverage and advertising; the expansion of Fenway Park; the highest seat prices in the majors; the surprising and enormous dollars that every team is getting for the success of MLB.com; dramatically increased concessions, with dozens of additional beer taps in the park to charge big money for the brew. It is apparent that the Red Sox are grossing enormous amounts of money.”
When you consider the incredible amount of money that the Red Sox make, is it unreasonable to assume that payroll flexibility is just code for “line the owners’ pockets?” It’s not hard to see why John Henry likes Theo’s patience plan. It’s Henry who really profits when Theo saves on payroll. That’s the reason why Theo’s patience plan doesn’t hold water with many Red Sox fans, especially after watching George Steinbrenner’s Yankees. The team has the money to guarantee success year after year. They just don’t want to spend it.
The idea of players like Lester, Hansen, Delcarmen, Murphy and Ellsbury rising through the Red Sox system is appealing. I am not against the idea of promoting from within. The great Yankees’ teams of the late 90’s featured plenty of essentially homegrown talent- Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams. I’m not ready to give up on a player like Hansen just because he struggled this season. I think Lester is going to be a solid, above average major league pitcher. But do the Red Sox really need to be so dependent on cheap talent?
I don’t buy that the Red Sox are ever “financially hamstrung.” The figures will never be released but the owners of the Red Sox make a tremendous amount of money. They just do. Smart businessmen don’t throw away $700 million just so they can get good seats at Fenway. But rather than reinvest the profits into the team, the owners have decided to reinvest the profits into new profit-making schemes to make more profits for themselves. That’s why there are 8,000 new features in and around Fenway Park every season. You spend more time in line buying your Guinness or Dunkin Donuts’ iced coffee or funnel cake and don’t notice that the second most valuable franchise in baseball is paying its infield less than the Yankees are paying some middle reliever.
Maybe the question isn’t can Red Sox fans be patient but should they? Yankees’ fans know that George Steinbrenner is going to spend whatever it takes to make his team competitive. Red Sox fans are slowly learning that their team’s owners aren’t nearly so generous. Unfortunately, Theo’s patience plan, Moneyball on steroids, seems to have been invented, not because of the limitations of the Red Sox payroll, but rather as a result of the Red Sox’s owners’ unwillingness to part with their profits.