The decision by the Boston Red Sox to hire Bobby Valentine as their manager prior to 2012 has long perplexed me.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily all that odd.
I’m a perplexable guy.
But I’m also a guy who likes fairly harmless conspiracy theories.
And I haven’t seen this one around The Internet™.
Which doesn’t mean I’m the first to verbalize it, but might mean that.
So let’s do this.
Sure, the 2012 Red Sox roster was mostly unchanged from the team that heroically won 90 games while laden down with reported kilotons of fried chicken and beer, a feat that I can only assume still has dietitians hard at work in the laboratory. Yes, they lost Marco Scutaro, Josh Reddick, and Jonathan Papelbon, but that crew, while valuable in 2011, was hardly the driving force behind Boston’s success-turned-into-crumbling-failure.
And sure, the 2012 team dealt with some debilitating injuries (debilitating to the roster—the players, while inconvenienced, all ended up fine, with the exception of Jacoby Ellsbury, who wound up in one of those unfortunate cosmic loops where a person keeps getting injured as they react to previous injuries, like a cartoon in which Tom the cat gets thoroughly walloped).
But hear me out:
Do you think Bobby Valentine was put in place as the fall guy the whole time?
Did the Red Sox know they were going to be bad and throw Bobby Valentine out there to take the blame?
Did Red Sox ownership recognize—“hey, we probably aren’t going to get 114 innings of the highest quality from Alfredo Aceves two years in a row, a ton of our roster is getting dangerously older, and Dustin Pedroia can only defy God’s limits on what scrappiness can accomplish for so long”—and decide they needed a year to figure out how the hell to fix things, especially with Theo Epstein gone?
If so, there was no better choice to distract the world than Bobby Valentine, who over the past couple years had remade himself from fun-manager-who-liked-to-get-ejected-and-managed-Mike-Piazza-and-wait-a-second-how-did-we-never-see-them-fight-WWE-style-in-the-dugout into the paragon of baseball hard-assery through his carefully careless criticisms on ESPN broadcasts.
I mean, the guy had to have failed virtually every test the Red Sox put in front of him during the hiring process. People who did the things Bobby Valentine did in 2012 don’t get far in hiring processes with teams that put people like Theo Epstein and Alex Cora in charge. It’s almost as if the Red Sox made Valentine manage a hypothetical game, smiling wider and wider behind the two-way mirror with every kooky decision.
Yes, we must come to grips with the fact that while in the press, things were presented as: Who better to tell Jon Lester, who hadn’t let cancer derail his ascent to dominance, that he couldn’t indulge in a rally beer now and then in support of his teammates? The real rationale was: “Hey, our division’s kind of stacked and we definitely aren’t getting better this year. Want to throw Bobby Valentine in that clubhouse so he takes up all the attention?
Don’t forget. This ownership group has led the league in World Series titles since taking over in 2002. They aren’t incompetent. They made a lot of money by being smart, and then they took that money and bought a baseball team, and then they made that baseball team make a lot of money while also winning a lot of championships by being smart. People don’t win four World Series titles doing things like hiring Bobby Valentine to win baseball games.
No, what happened was that after their tenth season at the helm, John Henry and his band of merry money looked at their hands and found those hands splattered with Terry Francona’s blood. The stains seeped deep. Too deep for mere water. They needed to be drowned in something of their own color. And nobody would make a bigger splash on the altar than the guy even the Mets knew they should fire.
It all makes too much sense.
Bobby Valentine wasn’t hired to be a manager.
He was hired to be a scapegoat.
And it’s time the world knows.
