By Flint Wheeler
You just can’t turn a franchise around overnight. Unless you’re the Red Sox, that is. After scraping their behinds along the lowest pits of the deepest, darkest valley beginning with that September 2011 plummet and lasting through the bitter end of last season, the Red Sox have made a dizzying, breathless ascent. Now they’ve reached the highest mountaintop, the World Series.
The casualty rate was high — two managers, Terry Francona and Bobby Valentine; one general manager, Theo Epstein; and a loss of trust and respect from a usually adoring fan base — yet what stands out about where they are is the speed it took them to reverse course 180 degrees. It was extreme, really, and as principal owner John Henry noted Saturday night, “We had to take extreme measures.”
Those measures worked, so as the players splashed around on the beer-soaked sod of the Fenway Park infield Saturday night, Henry and team president and CEO Larry Lucchino had good reason to marvel at the best kind of whiplash an ownership group can go through.“We felt going into the season it was going to be a five-team race and we thought we would be in it, but you just have to be extremely gratified how these guys play the game,” Henry said. “In the middle of August and September, when teams are getting tired, these guys just seemed to kick it up a notch, as if through force of will.”
Changing the clubhouse culture by cloning the grit and drive of Dustin Pedroia was indeed part of the reasoning behind the chemistry-heavy signings of Jonny Gomes, Shane Victorino, David Ross and Ryan Dempster.“It’s a cliche to talk about character, but sometimes it’s just true — these guys cared,” Lucchino said. “They played for each other. They played for a city and region they cared about. They deserve an enormous amount of credit for the chemistry they created and for the performances they brought out in each other.”
Lucchino cited August 2012’s blockbuster trade with the Dodgers as the pivot point for when the club’s momentum began to shift. “But it still required us to find the right players, and deploy the money successfully,” Lucchino said. “General Manager Ben Cherington did a fantastic job with that, in the seven major acquisitions we made this offseason. We found a manager who was just perfect for this team and this time in John Farrell, and this time we were able to get him loose from our friends in Toronto. We thought it would be a good step in the right direction.”
But to think that the steps would gather momentum so swiftly, and with an unerring instinct for success, was way beyond Lucchino’s predictive powers. “I certainly hoped for it and prayed for it, but I never planned specifically for it,” Lucchino said. “We just wanted to take a big step in the right direction. We didn’t think we could step this far, this fast.”
Even after an 18-8 April, Lucchino could not have come close to thinking he would be headed to the Fall Classic. “By the end of April, we had a pretty good feeling this was going to be a good team, but I don’t know that anybody, none of us were smart enough to say we were going to win 97 games and the American League pennant,” Lucchino said. “I wish I could say that our business plan called for it.”The Red Sox are back in business, but it took one big deal, followed by several smart ones and then a season’s worth of well-coached and well-executed victories for them to reach this point. That they got here does not surprise them. That they got here so fast does.
