Monday, October 31, 2005

Theo Epstein Quits as Red Sox General Manager

Stunning news out of Boston: a year after winning the World Series, 31-year old Red Sox GM Theo Epstein (on left) has rejected the Red Sox's 3-year, $4.5 million contract extension offer and he will leave the organization shortly, as his existing contract expires tomorrow. Earlier today, the Boston Globe had reported that Epstein accepted the 3-year, $4.5 million extension, but tonight's news indicates that he apparently had a last second change of heart.

Rather than wanting more money, Epstein apparently wanted more control. Specifically, he wanted less interference (oversight?) from Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino (on right), who discovered Epstein about a decade ago--when Lucchino was the Baltimore Orioles' CEO and Epstein a mere intern in the Orioles' press office. There is speculation that Epstein resented Lucchino's efforts to "take credit" for the organization's recent sucess, just as there is speculation that Lucchino resented Epstein's lack of appreciation for shepherding Epstein from public relations intern to the youngest general manger in Major League Baseball. Call it a mentor/protege or father/son relationship that went rotten.

Epstein was also angered by a negative column written by Dan Shaughnessy in yesterday's Boston Globe--a publication owned by the New York Times, which is a minority owner of the Red Sox. It is clear that either Lucchino or someone else from the Red Sox fed Shaughnessy some rather choice comments about Epstein. It looks like the Red Sox spin room has already started to attack (much like it did when the team traded Nomar Garciaparra last year, only to then have Lucchino strategically leak stories about Garciapara's alleged lack of dedication).

Here are the key excerpts from Shaughnessy's column:

Let's start with Theo being a ''baseball guy" while Larry is a lawyer with a lofty title (CEO). Granted, Epstein is a student of the game, but it's a mistake to say he knows more about baseball than Lucchino or anyone else in the Red Sox baseball operation. Theo is 31 years old and did not play baseball past high school. He spent four years at Yale and three years at law school. That hardly leaves time for much more than rotisserie league scouting. He can read the data and has a horde of trusty, like-minded minions, but we're not talking about a lifetime of beating the bushes and scouting prospects. Lucchino was a good high school baseball player and made it to the NCAA Final Four with Princeton's basketball team. He came to baseball as an executive in 1979, when Theo was 5 years old. That doesn't make him George Digby or Ray Boone, but he's not [Red Sox minority owner] Les Otten, either.

Lucchino-bashers, and they are legion, maintain that he repeatedly has undermined Theo and on occasion killed deals made by Epstein and the minions. There was one, for sure. When Theo's assistant Josh Byrnes (hired by Arizona as GM Friday) made a deal with Colorado, Epstein thought he had a better deal with another club and requested that Lucchino fall on the sword and invoke the ownership approval clause to kill the Rockies deal. Accustomed to people hating him, Lucchino took the fall, killing the deal and saving Epstein.

This is truly awful news for Red Sox fans, as Epstein had masterfully rebuilt the farm system while winning 95+ games a year. And as a native of Massachusetts and a life-long Red Sox fan, I can only imagine how hard it was for Epstein--also a native of Massachusetts and a life-long Red Sox fan--to walk away from the job that every New England kid dreams of having. In short, Epstein must have been really miserable.

But maybe not. As my brother Bill just mused in a phone conversation, maybe Epstein suffered from a cognitive bias not (yet) discussed in my new law and psychology article in the Brooklyn Law Review: The Hot Head Bias. Did Epstein just over-react? Did he see the cheap shot, probably Larry Lucchino-orchestrated-leaks in Shaughnessy's column and then hastily conclude that his relationship with Lucchino had been irretrievably-severed? Was he so angry that he failed to internalize information in a rational way? We can all relate to that, but it's unfortunate that Epstein may have walked away from the best job on Earth because of it.

Update: It looks like Epstein has fired back through the media. This story is getting more acrimonious by the minute; it's amazing that this team won a World Series just a year ago with these guys running the show and seemingly detesting one another at the same time. Here are some strikingly "pro-Epstein" comments by Boston Herald (and not Globe) columnist Tony Massarotti in Tuesday's (Nov. 1) Herald:
Larry Lucchino botched this from Day One, plain and simple, no ifs, ands or buts. The Red Sox can spin, distort and disguise the reality all they want, but the departure of the talented Theo Epstein will go down as one of the great management blunders in the history of the franchise.

Epstein is walking tall today, a bright, young man with an equally bright future. He is 31. He has won a World Series.

Red Sox management, which once trumpeted Epstein as a member of their team, treated him like a wide-eyed intern who should have felt blessed to kneel in their presence. And when Epstein responded by biting the Sox in the kneecaps, they fired up the propaganda machine and leaked information, tried to make him look bad, did their darnedest to put him in his place.

The final year of Epstein's contract began one year ago today, just days after the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918. Lucchino decided to take it down to the deadline, as he often does, which makes you wonder if he learned the art of negotiating from some trendy book on the inter-office (i.e. New York Times) bestseller list.

Who runs the Red Sox from here is anybody's guess, largely because anyone who takes this job now needs both a CT scan and some serious psychiatric evaluation.
Update 2: I wonder who shared this info about Lucchino with the Globe's Gordon Edes?
Epstein had issues with was Lucchino's insistence on being involved in every decision, [including] such relatively minor moves as whether the team should keep utility players Damian Jackson or Lou Merloni -- Lucchino insisted on Jackson, according to one team source, over the objections of the baseball ops people.
Related Coverage: Relationship Between Age and Performance Among Baseball General Managers (7/1/2005)

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