Long-time Hub law firm goes poof | Self-censorship rampant at Harvard | Signs of life for battered development market | Red Sox owners can’t - or won’t - say where the team is headed | End times for MCAS? | Karen Cord Taylor on Boston’s much-maligned Seaport | Quick hits |
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It’s all the BS, stupid: As the Red Sox get stingy on player spending, a lack of candor from the team’s megabucks owners about their vision for the franchise’s future has left fans fuming
Just call them the duplicitous duo.
The Red Sox are mired in maddening mediocrity, having just wrapped up the latest in a series of disappointing seasons that have disillusioned fans and left them despondent about the future of the team.
However, the lead owners - cryptic, soft-spoken billionaire John Henry and his sidekick, TV mogul Tom Werner - almost certainly have a vision of where they are taking the beloved franchise.
The thing is, they aren’t sharing that vision with the rest of us, which has left everyone from fans to reporters to sports radio personalities playing a guessing game.
Still, one strong possibility: After years of breaking the bank in pursuit of World Series trophies, the owners of the Red Sox are looking to better align the franchise’s spending with its market and revenue base.
The Sox have often ranked in the top five in payroll costs, and sometimes in the second or third spot in the league, over the past two decades. That has put the team right up there with the Yankees, who play in one of the world’s largest media markets.
Yet when it comes to the size of our media market, which is based on population size and can help determine revenue potential, Greater Boston is not even in the top five nationally.
In fact, the Hub has slid from sixth place two decades ago, to number 8 or 9 over the last few years, putting us behind fast-growing Sunbelt markets like Atlanta.
The mismatch between market size and team payroll has been apparent now for decades. When the Sox were on the sales block back in 2001, one of the top bidders for the team confided plans to slash the payroll by more than half, believing the franchise was living beyond its means. (He didn’t win.)
Henry and Werner, who bought the team for a then-record $660 million, have clamped down on payroll costs over the past two years. The Sox ranked 14th in the league in payroll last year, when it had a losing record, and 11th this year, when it went 81-81.
The franchise is also placing a far greater emphasis now on developing its own home-grown talent through its minor league affiliates, a much less costly way of building a team than pursuing already proven superstars.
But whatever their strategy is, Henry and Werner are either inept at communicating it or are deliberating obfuscating when it comes to their intentions.
Werner infamously declared the Sox front office would go “full throttle” in building a contender this year - a comment that was ridiculed endlessly on sports radio when the team failed to aggressively pursue any big name players.
Henry, in an interview with the Financial Times in June, chided fans for being “unrealistic” and said they “expect championships almost annually.”
Henry, whose business empire also includes the Boston Globe, also derided the “false belief that many fans and media have that you should mortgage the future each year for the present. You have to base acquisitions and dispositions on the future, not the past. That is unpopular generally."
A spokesperson for Fenway Sports Group, Henry’s sports business empire of which the Sox are one part, told Contrarian Boston via email, that “there is no agenda or discussion by FSG ownership connecting payroll to the media market.”
Ok, so then just exactly what is Henry and Werner’s vision for the Sox?
To that, we got the old “no comment.”
Last stand for MCAS? Key members of the Bay State’s congressional delegation back campaign to end test as a graduation requirement
That would be Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.
On Tuesday, the progressive lawmakers jumped on the anti-MCAS bandwagon, throwing their weight behind the anti-MCAS state ballot question.
The endorsement comes at a critical time, with 51 percent of Massachusetts voters voicing support for repealing the MCAS graduation requirement,
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