There were so many uplifting tales about the Boston Red Sox World Series championship that it’s hard to know where to begin.
On a dark weekend in America, a very diverse group of young men pulled together for the common good, all dedicated to a cause greater than individual ambition, and won’s baseball’s highest honor.
The manager, a bilingual Puerto Rican, in his first year at the helm of a major league team, steered the players from spring training to believe in each other. And the front office added crucial parts mid-season to an already powerful line up.
They played the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team in the shadow of Tinseltown. Yet it was Boston that followed the Hollywood scripts. The triumph of the zillion dollar pitcher, David Price, he of the post-season jitters and sports talk radio vitriol, the guy who couldn’t pitch when the leaves started turning in New England. The much-traveled 36-year old journeyman first baseman, Steve Pearce, acquired for a minor leaguer, capturing the hearts of Red Sox Nation and the Most Valuable Player Award, with clutch homers.
Let’s never forget the team concept forged by manager Alex Cora, a onetime Red Sox second baseman, who used his entire roster as the Boston boys marched through the playoffs and World Series. They defeated the New York Evil Empire, the defending champions from Houston and a fine Dodger squad to win it all.
Now that the duck boats are being gassed up for tomorrow’s parade through the streets of the America’s oldest major city, it’s time to give some credit to an ownership that has now won four championships since 2004. Red Sox fans of a certain age recall the Red Sox of our childhoods –loveable, often laughable, losers. “No team,” wrote sports writer Thomas Boswell, “is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.”
Four times since the end of World War II, in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986, the Red Sox went to the World Series, only to lose. The team was known for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The worst came in 1986, when Boston led the New York Mets, two games to none, but managed to lose the pivotal game when a routine grounder nicked by a player with the improbable name of Mookie Wilson dribbled through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner.
In a one game playoff against the arch rival New York Yankees in October, 1978, the Red Sox blew it when a light-hitting shortstop named Bucky Dent lifted a home run that barely cleared the left green monster wall.
The longtime owner was Tom Yawkey, a South Carolina plantation owner and timber baron whose dedication to Boston charities and his cosseted players was matched only by his racism. The Red Sox were the last team in major league baseball to integrate. Yawkey was as a fellow who liked his drink and treated players as buddies. The team’s front office was clotted with Yawkey cronies and a passel of poor managers.
The team had its stars, notably Ted Williams, arguably baseball’s greatest hitter, and other standouts. But they never won the World Series. As was the case with the fans, the owner went to his grave without ever seeing a championship banner hoisted over Boston’s Back Bay.
The Red Sox futility drew the literary crowd. John Updike, Roger Angell and Bart Giamatti all penned tributes to the historic ballpark, baseball’s oldest, and the team’s futility. Harvard literati lined up to compare the team to Greek tragedies and Eliot poems.
When Yawkey’s widow died, the team was put up for sale in 2001. The Red Sox were both baseball team and civic trust, with a passionate New England’ following. Fiddle with the radio dial, and the games spilled out as the family station wagon headed to Vermont campground or Cape Cod cabin.
The sale ignited a Red Sox Nation-wide debate as various ownership groups angled for the team. Many New England fans, forever suspicious of outsiders, were frosted when the team went to group anchored by John Henry, a hedge fund investor and owner of the Florida Marlins, and Tom Werner, a Hollywood producer who at the time was dating television news personality Katie Couric.
The Werner-Henry group beat out others with strong New England and Boston links. (The new owners did bring a lifelong Red Sox fan –former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, of the Watertown, Maine Mitchells—into the group.) The selling price was a staggering number -$700 million.
That led many New England fans to conclude that the new owners paid too much and wouldn’t have the money to sign top players and make the franchise competitive in an era of multi-million dollar ballplayers.
Shortly before Christmas, the team had a news conference at Fenway to introduce the new owners to the New England media and fans. I remember well that event. While skeptical reporters pelted questions at the new owners, longtime Red Sox reporter Peter Gammons stood at the back of the throng, watching and saying little.
I don’t know Gammons personally, but my friend Sean McAdam, then the Providence Journal’s lead Red Sox beat writer does. McAdam introduced me to Gammons. I asked what he thought of Henry, Gammons said, “he’s a great guy.”
Gammons urged New England reporters to contact those who have worked with Henry. “Talk to anyone who works with him, they think he’s great.”
The new owners set about righting the team. They pumped money into restoring historic, but faded Fenway, which helped revitalize the urban neighborhood surrounding the stadium. They became great corporate neighbors, keeping up the tradition of supporting New England good works and continuing the Yawkey’s support for the Dana-Farber Cancer hospital.
Henry set down roots in Boston, even buying the Boston Globe, investing in the newspaper and keeping it from falling into the rut of legacy print journalism across the nation. Henry’s Globe is New England’s finest news outlet and nationally-regarded newspaper with strong sports, political and investigative reporting.
As Red Sox nation celebrates the fourth World Series victory in 15 years, its’s well past time to embrace an ownership that has come to exemplify the best of New England.
