Dave Dombrowski And The End (And The Beginning) Of The Red Sox

The Oakland A's may have popularized baseball analytics—or, anyway, a book Michael Lewis wrote about their approach did—but it has always made sense that smart numbers, used in a smart and balanced way, could have as much to say in building a championship ball club as scouting. But it took the Boston Red Sox to prove that such an approach could not just pick up wins in the margins, but help a team win championships—three of them, in fact. This resulted in arguably the most successful era in the franchise's history. But it sure appears to be over now.

Original architect Theo Epstein is gone now, club president Larry Lucchino is gone as well, and on Tuesday the team announced that GM Ben Cherington is leaving, too, having declined to stay on in a reduced role under new GM Dave Dombrowski. But if this is the end of something—and it certainly appears to be—it is also likely a beginning. That's how it works, in baseball as everywhere else. It's hard to see what that new future looks like just yet, but it's coming. The future always is.

Cherington, like Epstein, ran a front office at the forefront of analytics. As Dombrowski's successor in Detroit, Al Avila, made clear that his former boss was never beholden to analytics, and likely never would be. And so Dombrowski's hiring combined with Cherington's resignation seemingly represents a fundamental shift in the way Boston's front office will function, the first such sea change since the analytically inclined John Henry and Tom Werner bought the team back in 2002.

Back then, Henry tried to bring in Billy Beane, patron saint of baseball spreadsheets, to run the franchise. Beane initially accepted the job but then changed his mind. Henry then hired the 28-year-old Theo Epstein. Since then, under Epstein and later Cherington, the Red Sox won three World Series and routinely have been one of the best teams in one of the toughest divisions in baseball. When Epstein left (the second time) to run the Chicago Cubs, the reins were passed to Epstein's assistant Cherington.

Cherington was in the GM chair for just four years, none of them boring. His first job was overseeing the demolition of the Epstein Red Sox, which he sped up when he sent Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, and Adrian Gonzalez along with their combined $250 million in future contract obligations to the Dodgers. That offseason, Cherington brought in David Ross, Jonny Gomes, Ryan Dempster, Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, and Stephen Drew, a grab bag of role players that contributed mightily to Boston's stunning World Series win that season.

That 2013 World Series win will always be the highlight of Cherington's time in Boston — it's a dang World Series win — mostly because of the way the team helped galvanize a battered city following the marathon bombings. The 2004 team broke the organization's curse, and that was amazing, but I'm not so sure it was ever fun. The 2007 team was the pinnacle of Epstein's accomplishments, a home grown team that dominantly ran the table. But the 2013 team was just so damn fun, so gloriously unexpected and flamboyant. That team doesn't ever happen without Ben Cherington. Of course, it says something about Cherington's decisions since then—some of which are more defensible than others, and some that seem very expensive and very bad—that he's out of a job less than two years later.

It's hard to say what Dave Dombrowski will bring to the table. Dombrowski has a reputation for being an excellent player evaluator with a knack for winning trades. But like any GM he isn't perfect. He's made some bad evaluations and some worse ones, and there are a few stinker trades in there as well. When people cite the four consecutive AL Central crowns the Detroit Tigers won under his stewardship, they generally leave out the previous nine seasons where the team finished out of the playoffs. They often also ignore the fact that Dombrowksi's Tigers are a .500 team with hundreds of millions tied up in the late careers of Miguel Cabrera, Victor Martinez, and Justin Verlander.

But neither Dombrowski's or Cherington's work with their former teams are complete representations of who they are as executives. Both are competent general managers who worked within the structures of their organizations; as such, pinning down exactly who gets credit and who gets fault is both an impossible and impossibly subjective task. What is for certain, though, is that Dombrowski will sign free agents Cherington wouldn't sign, he'll draft players Cherington wouldn't draft, and trade for players Cherington wouldn't acquire. He is a different GM with different ideas about players and analytics and scouting, and he'll set up his front office to reflect that. If Cherington was hired to continue Theo Epstein's model, Dombrowski got the job to do just the opposite.

Dombrowski's hiring is a clean break with the recent past. Perhaps it was time to move on, and perhaps Dombrowski is the right person for the job. It's hard to say much more with any certainty than that. All we know is that one Red Sox era has ended, and that another one is just beginning.