Ben Cherington addressed the media Wednesday and the Boston Red Sox general manager took responsibility for the two-year downward trend for a team in last place in the American League East.
“The last two years we just haven’t delivered. That’s the bottom line,” Cherington said before Wednesday’s game in Houston, according to the Providence Journal. “(There’s) no one more responsible than me for that. Because of that, there has been a lot of self-review going on and internal analysis, and so we have been trying to learn whatever we can about what’s happened, knowing that the bottom-line results haven’t been there.”
The Red Sox entered Wednesday’s matchup with the Astros with a 42-52 record – tied with the Chicago White Sox for the fewest wins in the American League – and 10 games behind the first-place New York Yankees.
“One of the things we have been faced with the last two years – and I’m taking responsibility for this – we’ve had a lot of transition,” Cherington said. “Young players to the big leagues, that’s one form of transition. Players in a new environment is another form of transition. Players in a new role or a new position is another form of transition. We’ve had a lot of that the last two years and sometimes along with transition, it can affect performance. We’ve seen that over time historically.”
Cherington helped Boston recover from a woeful 2012 to a championship season in 2013, but last season Boston finished with a 71-91 record. That was good for a 26-game decline from 2013, last place in the AL East and a first-to-worst performance.
“I didn’t say I was satisfied with the process. I said we have spent a lot of time looking at it, trying to learn from it,” Cherington said. “If I look back at four years, the reasons that something didn’t work out very early on are a little more obvious. So that just makes it challenging. You have to find ways to build advantages any way you can and obviously we haven’t done a good job of that the last two years.”
He did not provide answers.
“I don’t have any proclamation today on a new philosophy, or I’m not rebuffing what our philosophy has been either,” he said. “I know the bottom-line results haven’t been good enough. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at why that is.”
Now the Red Sox need to figure out the real problems and then find ways to get them addressed.
“We have to look at any potential reason for why the total results haven’t been there,” Cherington said. “I think if you start isolating one particular decision, that’s really difficult because we know in baseball that not every decision you make is going to work out … We have to find a way to get better. Some of that is simple and obvious, some of it may not be. It’s up to us to figure it out.
“I still believe that there are a lot of good things going on at the organization, including at the major-league level. I still believe sooner rather than later we’re going to have a really good team at the major-league level, and I think we’re going to win more games. I also understand people are tired of hearing that. They want to see results. We have to get to the better results as quickly as we can.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
