Tracing his roots as a fan

It's not about who's to blame

August 25, 2006|Bob Ryan, Globe Columnist

I appeared to strike a chord in the readership earlier this week by writing the following: ``The truth is we need to sit down and figure what sports are all about. We've lost our way."

It was in reference to the Yankees' infamous five-game sweep of the Red Sox, and the need of many, as I saw it, to find someone to blame for all this, rather than to accept it as a pure athletic situation in which one team simply performed better than another over a period, in this case four days. As always, there are plenty of people who are quite unhappy with the manager, but at present people are displeased in much greater numbers with general manager Theo Epstein, who, in their view, either allowed to get away, traded away, or traded for the wrong people in the last two offseasons and who then angered them further by not putting the Mercurochrome bunny on all this by making a cure-all trade at the July 31 deadline.

Scrutiny of a general manager is not new, but the interpretation of his action or inaction, as the case may be, is now different. Theo has brought some of the criticism on himself because -- he can't be oblivious to this -- the events of last offseason were without precedent in the history of American sport. (I'm trying with great difficulty to picture Branch Rickey, Red Auerbach, or Dick O'Connell in a gorilla suit.) But the rest of it is management's (i.e. Larry Lucchino's) fault for botching the contract negotiations, which, you can be 100 percent certain, Epstein never wanted to be even remotely public.

My God, I'm doing it, aren't I? I'm assigning ``blame." Anyway, the result of all that foolishness was that Theo emerged in the public view as an irreplaceable entity in the Red Sox scheme of things. If he's that smart, people reasoned, then surely he will do all the right things to ensure that we conquer the Evil Empire.

Obviously, he didn't. And now people are e-mailing to say that he is, among other things, cocky, arrogant, delusionary, egotistical, and overrated. And they are not merely disappointed. They are angry. How dare he spoil their summah!

In other words, it's personal. And I am here to say that it didn't used to be personal. It just was.

OK, let's talk fandom.