Do they really think they've solved their little internal problem here?
The Red Sox issued a press release just before 7:30 last night announcing that Theo Epstein is coming back. Happy day, happy day. The white knight is riding back to Fenway on his high horse. According to the press release, the man who resigned Oct. 31 will have another full-time job with the club's baseball operations department, ''details of which will be announced next week."
Details of which will be announced next week?
That's code for, ''We have no idea where he'll rank on our flow chart, but we wanted to make this announcement before anybody wrote that we are being held hostage by Theo and that we are weak and don't know what we are doing."
Here's an inside look at how it works over at Fenway these days. The Red Sox are afraid of what is written about them in the newspapers and what is said about them on WEEI. That's why we got this vague, preemptive strike just after the dinner hour last night. Nothing has changed since Theo left and no one knows how the new arrangement is going to work, but owner John W. Henry figured it was better to put out a press
release saying ''all is well" than to read more speculation about weakness at the top.
Embarrassing. The people in baseball operations were working hard as usual late last night, trying to plug the team's holes in center field and shortstop, when Epstein called them and told them there was going to be an announcement that he's coming back next week. No one knew quite what to say to their former boss. There's been no discussion about who will report to whom. No one knows how this is going to work, and Theo has burned some bridges with his own people. But John W. Henry loves him. So he gets to come back. The only certainty is that Theo will report to CEO Larry Lucchino, according to Henry.
Henry and Lucchino were in Phoenix yesterday at the owners' meetings. I spoke with Henry late in the afternoon before he boarded a jet to fly home to Boston. I told him the same thing I had told him in December. I thought it looked as if he could not make a decision. I thought he should either fire Lucchino or tell Epstein to get lost. Nobody was going to buy the idea of Theo walking back into the same situation he walked away from in October. Why was Theo still hanging around, talking to co-GMs Ben Cherington and Jed Hoyer? Why was the light still on if there was so much friction between Epstein and Lucchino?
