Dombrowski Getting Fired in the Middle of Patriots Banner Night is John Henry 101

I’m not going to argue the merits of the Red Sox firing Dave Dombrowski just 10 months after he was smoking (metaphorical) cigars with them on the deck of a (literal) Duckboat. Carrabis said it better than I ever could.  It’s seems to be if that you hire a guy to do certain job in the way that he does it, it shouldn’t be a fireable offense when he accomplishes exactly those things. It strikes me as the way you do business when you don’t have a plan for doing business and are just going by the seat of your pants. But that’s not my point.

I’m here to talk about the timing. Count me among the vast majority of Massholes who found out about Dombrowski’s firing when I woke up this morning. Because they pulled the trigger on him at 9 o’clock at night in the middle of one of the biggest events of the 2019 sports calendar around here. When everyone was riveted on Foxboro, the Banner 6 drop, Sunday Night Football, Tom Brady’s 20th season and kicking off the year against Antonio Brown’s old nemeses. That is a black hole of attention, causing a gravitational pull from which no other rooting interest can escape.

Don’t take what I’m about to say as a knock on the team. I’ll fight any man who questions my emotional attachment to the Red Sox. I was getting a ride from my sister to the South Shore Plaza to get Dennis Eckersley’s autograph before you were born, sonny. But on a night like last night –  even against the Yankees in September – the Sox couldn’t generate buzz if Rick Porcello pitched a perfect game while Mookie Betts hit five home runs and an alien mothership landed on the infield asking to make their first human contact with the Earth person we call Remdawg.

So it was in the middle of all that the club decided it was the right time to order a Code Red on their VP of Baseball Operations. And it’s sketchy as all hell. And exactly the way John Henry’s second favorite team he owns conducts businesss. Do I think Henry orchestrated it to take attention away from the Patriots? Not at all. Though there definitely is a pattern here. His businesses do like to spoil the Pats party any chance they get:

But in this case, it’s much more logical that he picked last night precisely because the attention would be minimal. Because this is a terrible look. It’s management by reaction. By emotion. By having no vision or plan. And the best way to contain the fallout is to drop the bomb in an attention vacuum. All the talk shows today will dedicate about 5% of their time to the fact Henry has no idea what he’s doing and 95% to the Patriots.

It’s what you do when you’re ashamed and embarrassed by how you’ve bungled things. This is the equivalent of a politician involved in a scandal dumping a bunch of documents on a holiday. Or a company handing out pink slips late in the day on the Friday before a long weekend.

I’m guessing the only thing that made it necessary to fire Dombrowski last night had nothing to do with what was going on at Fenway and everything to do with what was going on at Gillette. Now I guess we just wait for someone at John Henry’s Boston Globe to quote anonymous sources saying Dombrowski was a philandering, unstable pill addict who had lost the respect of everyone around him. That’s right out of the Sox playbook.