Since Epstein's departure, Larry Lucchino, the team's president and chief executive officer, has conducted the search for a new GM and had appeared to focus on Jim Beattie, the former Orioles executive vice president, as his leading candidate. Beattie had at least three interviews for the position, but said yesterday he had not spoken with the Sox in a week.
The impending appointment of Hoyer, 32, and Cherington, 31, who spoke at length yesterday with Henry and Werner, could indicate a split among the Sox owners, with Lucchino possibly preferring to go in another direction. In addition to Beattie, Lucchino is known to have spoken with two senior advisers, Jeremy Kapstein and Bill Lajoie, about taking the GM job on an interim basis. Kapstein said he wanted the job; Lajoie, who is 71 and in recent years has undergone treatment for leukemia, seemed less interested, though he served as de facto GM during the recently concluded baseball winter meetings in Dallas.
In response to an e-mail last night, Lucchino said, ''No comment on our consideration of internal candidates. That has been and remains our policy." Werner also said in an e-mail that he had no comment. The other principals did not respond last night to e-mails seeking comment. Henry, when reached by colleague Dan Shaughnessy yesterday via e-mail, said Epstein was ''not a candidate at this time."
Looming as the biggest question connected to Epstein's possible return is whether Lucchino and Epstein can be expected to resolve apparent differences that surfaced in Epstein's contract negotiations. Those talks fell apart in the last hours before Epstein's original contract expired, after the sides had come to an agreement, according to multiple sources, on the financial terms of Epstein's contract extension.
On Oct. 30, the day before Epstein departed, a major league executive said he spoke with Epstein. ''Theo said all that was left to do was work out some of the contract language," the source said. ''I thought the deal was done."
