In the after glow of the Red Sox third championship in 10 years, there are some pundits in Chicago who pose the question of how much of the current success can still be traced to Cub President Theo Epstein. For the Theo-heads, he is the mythical savior who is going to turn the Cubs around just as he did for the Red Sox.
But the problem with that thinking is that is it based on myth and spin.
The architect who lifted the Curse was Epstein's former boss, Dan Duquette.
Duquette became the GM of his hometown Red Sox in 1998. Duquette, not Epstein, built a baseball
operations department which has allowed the Red Sox to be the only team
in MLB to set attendance and revenue records every year since 1998.
The Red Sox went 656-574 in the eight seasons under Duquette, winning
the AL East once and finishing 2nd behind the Yankees five other
seasons. The Red Sox won the AL East pennant in 1995 before bowing to
the Indians in the ALDS. The Red Sox were wild-cards in 1998 and 1999, only to lose to the Indians in the ALDS and the Yankees in the ALCS.
Under Duquette, the Red Sox made exceptional strides in improving
their dismal history of poor race relations as an organization in the
hiring of both coaching and administrative personnel with minority
candidates. The minor league facilities and coaching availability were
upgraded at every level during his tenure. This sounds like the plan the Cubs for their Arizona facilities.
But Duquette had a good eye for talent. Under this tenure, he drafted Nomar Garciaparra, David Eckstein, Adam Everett, Hanley Ramirez and Freddy Sanchez. He also made several major acquisitions that would
ultimately play a part in the Red Sox 2004 World Championship, including
acquiring knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, Pedro Martinez, Derek Lowe, Jason Varitek, Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon. Duquette built up his minor league system with talent that he traded over 35 players from the farm system to acquire major league talent and to put a competitive team on the field.
Duquette was let go by the Red Sox in 2002 when the team was sold to new ownership.
The current Red Sox championship team has little connection to Epstein. New GM Ben Cherington inherited a lot of big money, bad contracts from Epstein's management era. The Red Sox imploded in 2012. ESPN.com stated that Cherington deserves
to be in the conversation for a series of transactions that helped
propel the Red Sox from a 69-93 civic disaster to a team that got to the World Series.
Cherington revamped the team by several bold moves. He traded for manager John Farrell to replace
Bobby Valentine. He then sent an All-Star roster of Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett to the Dodgers to get rid of a massive amount of payroll. The new payroll flexibility that allowed Cherington to acquire Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, Koji Uehara, Jonny Gomes, Ryan Dempster, Stephen Drew, Mike Carp, Jake Peavy and David Ross.
A more realistic view of Epstein's Boston tenure is like the thin filling between two layers of cake. He is not the perfect wunderkind that the media parroted from the PR releases. One of the keys that pundits still point to with affection is that they like that Epstein is always trying to find a loophole in the rules, an edge, "game the system," to get talent. Except the glaring problem with that notion is that why would a competent front office need to "game" the system if they knew how to acquire talent by traditional means in the first place? It seems to be an attempt to cover up weaknesses by telling the world that the front office is smarter than the rest of baseball (a familiar quote from owner Tom Ricketts).
