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The news on Monday afternoon that Theo Epstein, erstwhile wunderkind general manager of the Boston Red Sox, had quit the club quickly engendered a simmering stew of news, rumor, informed speculation, and ad hominem invective that baseball fans, journalists, and sports-talk radio entertainers found irresistibly palatable.
What appears to be incontrovertibly true is this: Larry Lucchino, the chief executive officer of the Red Sox, and Epstein, a protégé of Lucchino's who had worked with and learned from him on baseball clubs in Baltimore, San Diego, and Boston, had had their ups and downs for some time before the younger man abruptly took his leave of Fenway Park.
Up to that point, according to the weekend editions of Boston's two morning papers, The Globe and The Herald, it looked as if the CEO and the GM had reached a modus co-operandi and were going to announce agreement on a new contract for Epstein on Monday, one that would have the club paying him close to $1.5 million a year over three years.
To its red-faced chagrin, The Globe gave the story a done-deal stamp, running a double-bylined article across the bottom of Monday's sports section, the headline of which carried no cautionary note: "Epstein, Red Sox agree on three-year-contract." The Herald's Monday morning story left room for the possibility that something still could happen to derail the expected announcement.
So what happened? It seems that only two people - Lucchino and Epstein - can say for sure. And at a news conference yesterday, Epstein hardly cleared things up; he was questioned intensively, but he basically said that when everything was considered, he as an individual was better off leaving the club. Lucchino has been mum all week.
But the lack of specific information from the two Red Sox executives over the weekend and into mid-week didn't stop everyone else - editorial writers, sportswriters and columnists, sports-talk radio blabbermeisters, sportswriters who work part time as blabbermeisters, and Red Sox fans, most of whom seem to know intuitively that Larry Lucchino was the villain in all of this - from weighing in in lopsided fashion in favor of Prince Theo of Brookline and against his boss.
Many of these same people offered up a second villain, Dan Shaughnessy, longtime Globe sports columnist and a man whose prose usually leaves no doubt about where he stands on any given issue (he has called himself an "equal-opportunity offender").
On Sunday morning, in a column tucked at the bottom right of the front page of the sports section, Shaughnessy wrote a generally affirmative piece about the ongoing Lucchino-Epstein back-and-forth and an apparent reconciliation. He mentioned that on Friday he had taken a conference call from Lucchino and Epstein wherein, he said later, the two men didn't discuss the contract negotiations but otherwise acted like people who had a deal to announce. Shaughnessy used much of the rest of his two columns of space to go back over, in some detail, what the headline of the column called "dirty laundry" involving the two men.
When Epstein quit on Monday, his fans in the media and across Red Sox Nation charged out of the gate that night and Tuesday morning, citing Shaughnessy's Sunday column and The Globe's ill-advised Monday morning story as the things that pushed Epstein away from agreement and out of his Fenway Park digs.
Again, only Epstein knows for sure, and he said yesterday that no single columnist's words were going to influence his decision on a matter of such importance to him personally and professionally. But sportswriters and columnists who are competitors of The Globe and sports-talk radio hosts and guests, some of them full time sportswriters and columnists, could not contain their venom over what they saw as The Globe's, and especially Shaughnessy's, crucial role in the denouement of this soap opera.
One talk-show entertainer, Glenn Ordway, waxed apoplectic over the air Tuesday afternoon as he suggested several reasons for the unhappy (to him) ending of this drama. One of them was that Shaughnessy, having listened to Lucchino and Epstein josh with each other over the phone about the apparent success of their negotiations, decided on his own to dynamite any agreement by writing his Sunday column the way he did.
As we were reminded in virtually every other sentence spoken on the radio over two days and in virtually every other paragraph of Boston Herald stories, the New York Times Co., which owns The Globe, also owns 17 percent of the Red Sox.
Clearly, perception is reality for many people when they take stock of this situation, and fair enough. To my knowledge, no one at the Times Company consulted the editors and writers on the sports staff before they made the investment in the post-Yawkey-Harrington Red Sox club. And to my knowledge, no one on the sports staff of The Globe checks in with the Times Company honchos in New York before beginning to type a story about the Red Sox and Fenway Park. In fact, the owner relationship is acknowledged at an appropriate point in every Globe story dealing with executive moves by the Red Sox either at the baseball club level or in the wider world of local real estate development.
Still, this arrangement allowed conspiracy mongers this week to call Dan Shaughnessy a "flack" for Lucchino and the club's upper management, asserting that he is essentially a stenographer in thrall to the team's brass. And it allows those writers who associate at the ballparks and on the road with veteran Globe baseball writer Gordon Edes to impugn by implication his professional bonafides when it comes to covering the Red Sox.
Those of us who know both men personally and professionally know better, much better. But the institution from which they draw their salaries has put them in an awkward spot. They can never have a widely acknowledged scoop about the Red Sox because the story will be seen as something handed to them by the team. On the other hand, they will be seen as holding their fire on controversial or negative stories involving the team their company has a part ownership in.
The Times Co.-Red Sox relationship didn't help them very much last Monday morning, if Theo Epstein had signaled Red Sox ownership about what he planned to do that day. If he kept his own counsel right to the end, as seems to have been the case, then The Globe dug its own hole by not finding some place in its Monday morning headline and story to say that things could still unravel at the very last minute, given the volatility of the Lucchino-Epstein relationship.
Whatever the immediate cause of Epstein's apparently abrupt decision to decide against a renewal of that relationship no matter the financial gains he was offered, it seems obvious now that he and Lucchino never could have worked things out over the long haul to each man's satisfaction. When push came to final shove, the accomplished protégé wanted more than his graying mentor - and his boss, principal owner John Henry - was willing to give up.
That scenario works itself out every day in the business world. But this one involves the Red Sox, so all bets are off on finger-pointing, especially where the local media and the team's fans are concerned.
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