Red Sox’ hiring of Dave Dombrowski is worthy of optimism — but serious caution, too
COMMENTARY
So here we are, more startled and bewildered than usual, the day after a seismic shift in the Red Sox organizational structure was revealed in the middle of a ballgame … during the annual Jimmy Fund telethon … on the day manager John Farrell began chemotherapy treatment for lymphoma … and we’re supposed to be able to make sense of it all right now?
Good luck with that. I’m not playing that game today. The circuits are overloaded here. There’s too much information to process, and yet not enough information at hand yet regarded the Red Sox’ rerouted direction. Former Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski is in as the president of baseball operations, Ben Cherington is out after four years as the general manager, and the change is so drastic and complicated that anyone who tells you right now that it’s a good or bad thing is probably just shoehorning it in to a preconceived opinion.
We won’t know for sure if this was the right thing to do for a couple of seasons, though clues and harbingers will arrive much sooner, once Dombrowki starts dealing.
The best we can do right now is talk through it, and try to assemble some coherent thoughts on where the Red Sox stand and where they are headed.
First, a brief postmortem on Cherington.
It’s crazy that less than two years after winning the World Series – not to mention less than 2 1/2 months after owner John Henry said Cherington would remain with the Red Sox “for years to come’’ – that he essentially lost his job. (He was offered the opportunity to stay on under Dombrowski, but it’s hard to imagine he’d retain any authority.)
“We hoped Ben Cherington would remain as GM,’’ Henry said during Dombrowski’s introductory press conference Wednesday, adding that bringing in a new president meant was taking a “substantial risk’’ that Cherington would leave.
I’m sympathetic to his plight to a degree. He’s relatable, a New England kid who worked in the organization for 16 years, contributed to three championship seasons when it wasn’t so long ago that we were pleading to witness just one … and like that, his dream job now belongs to someone else.
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Who is Dave Dombrowski?
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Crazier still: Cherington probably deserved to be fired. The Red Sox are careening toward their third last-place finish in four seasons. That’s unacceptable given their expectations and resources, even when Cherington’s accomplishments are considered alongside, such as assembling an admirable World Series champion in 2013, or stockpiling prospects to the point that the Red Sox own the consensus best farm system in baseball at the moment.
Some of what has gone wrong here is not is doing, and it should be noted that some of his most regrettable moves were lauded when they happened. But enough of it is his fault hat he cannot be shocked at being held accountable.
He’s a gracious person and it will never happen, but I do wish Cherington would go full-candor on his way out and spill the truth on who meddled with decisions in specific situations. “Lowballing Lester? That was all Lucchino. And that was totally Tom Werner in the panda suit. Also, I never really wanted to hire Dale Sveum, honest.’’ Wouldn’t you love to read his correspondence with, say, Theo Epstein over the last 24 hours?
I hope Cherington ends up with the Cubs as a consultant and wins a ring this year. He’s a smart baseball guy, and I’m surprised his four-year reign basically boils down to one delight and three distinct disasters.
I thought he’d do better.
I just wish I were convinced that Dombrowski will do better.
There’s no doubt he’s an intriguing hire, an accomplished executive who won a World Series with the ’97 Marlins and revived the downtrodden Tigers shortly after his arrival in 2002. He has a long track-record of bold trades – acquiring the magnificent Miguel Cabrera from the Marlins in ‘97 essentially for Andrew Miller and Cameron Maybin is his coup de grace, but he also pulled off savvy swaps for then-unheralded righthanders Max Scherzer and Doug Fister during his time in Detroit. And for a general manager of particular daring, it’s impressive that his personnel blunders – beyond a hard-luck run of failing to build a competent bullpen – are relatively limited.
I’m excited to see what he does. The hot-stove season is certain to be a thrill ride. But I’m also nervous and a little bit wary. Maybe a lot wary.
You never know how an outsider joining a new organization will view or perceive the holdover talent; remember, it was revealed in Moneyball that Billy Beane’s among first acts with the Red Sox as general manager would have been to try to trade Jason Varitek and bring in a long-forgotten White Sox prospect named Mark Johnson to be the catcher. Imagine how history would be different. A-Rod never would have tasted a catcher’s mitt, at least publicly.
We need to see how Dombrowski, an accomplished wheeler-and-dealer but one who will never be accused of hoarding prospects, attempts to repair this. Who stays? Who goes? What if he decides that Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts – the two 22-year-old cornerstones, and the two best things about this drag of a season – are expendable to bring in more established superstar talent? It’s unlikely, but he has no attachment to these guys.
What if Dombrowski, who left behind arguably the worst farm system in baseball in Detroit, decides to swap the myriad of appealing prospects Cherington left behind to rapidly repair the major-league mess at the expense of the long term? As lousy as this season has been, the one redeeming satisfaction has been watching the young players develop. He will deal some of the Baseball America darlings; it’s what he does. All we can hope is that he deals the right ones.
He does have one notable thing in common with Cherington: it’s difficult to gauge which mistakes were his and which were forced upon him. I’ll never believe Pablo Sandoval was Cherington’s idea, even as he took ownership of it.
In Detroit, Dombrowski wasn’t just allowed to throw around owner Mike Ilitch’s stacks of cash — he was obligated to do so in an attempt to win a championship for the aging owner. That resulted in some dubious contracts – a seven-year, $180-million deal for Justin Verlander at age 30, a nine-year, $214-million deal for Prince Fielder, even the eight-year, $248-million extension for Cabrera that begins next season, when he’s 33.
To his credit, I suppose, the Tigers swallowed a chunk of Fielder’s salary and sent him to Texas for a decent return, second baseman Ian Kinsler. Perhaps Dombrowski – or the general manager he hires to work beneath him — can do something similar with positionless roster-clogger Hanley Ramirez.
Dombrowski is regarded as an old-school executive, one who relies on scouting more than analytics. As Ken Rosenthal noted, Dombrowski’s successor in Detroit, Al Avila, acknowledged that the Tigers need to “catch up with the industry’’ in terms of gathering and utilizing statisical data.. That would be alarming, except for this: I refuse to believe that John Henry, whose riches come from his mastery of numbers, is about to sign off on a fundamental shift in philosophy. He was an early believer in sabermetrics, and three duckboat parades since 2004 suggest that it works. Any alterations will be more nuanced than that – will he be allowed to pursue high-priced pitcher older than 30? — and I’d bet that this is more about a balance between scouting and analytics than any sea change.
If there’s an irony here, it’s that the task Dombrowski faces in replacing Cherington is far less daunting than the one Cherington faced between the colossal mess of a 2012 season into 2013 – when, you’ll recall, virtually every offseason move he made worked and the Red Sox knocked off Dombrowski’s Tigers on the way to the championship.
He has a loaded farm system, those two 22-year-old budding stars in Betts and Bogaerts, and the financial wherewithal to repair this roster as he sees fit.
The 2015 Red Sox are a lost cause. The franchise itself is not. I’m anxious about what Dombrowski might do, because given his track record, he might do just about anything, and this is not a situation that demands a full rebuild. What it demands is a couple of quality starting pitchers and a lineup where the pieces fit defensively.
So I’m reserving my judgment on this move until Dombrowski makes a couple of moves and we get a sense for whether his much-lauded major-league player evaluation skills are still intact. His hiring is intriguing at the least, and we know he’s not going to stand pat.
If he’s already looking to make a splash here like the Miguel Cabrera deal he made in Detroit, well, he could win me over by looking toward Miami again. See, there’s this guy named Giancarlo …
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