McAdam: As Red Sox make yet another front office change, expect the pendulum to swing in different direction

As the 2019 Red Sox season grinds to a merciful end, change is in the air at Fenway Park.

So what else is new?

The announcement late Sunday, minutes after another one-sided loss to the New York Yankees, that Dave Dombrowski is out as president of baseball operations means that, soon, the Red Sox will employ their fourth top baseball executive this decade.

Theo Epstein, who helped end the franchise's decades-long championship drought by winning two titles, bailed after the 2011 season to go to the Chicago Cubs. His replacement, Ben Cherington, who won a World Series in his second season on the job, was nudged aside two and a half years later in favor of Dombrowski.

And now, a mere 11 months after leading the Sox to a championship and a record-setting 108-win season, Dombrowski is out, too.

That's hardly the kind of stability to which a franchise aspires. It's simply not a good look to be changing general managers -- or their titular equivalents -- every three or four seasons. It suggests chaotic leadership at the top and frequent philosophic shifts.

Yet that's where the Red Sox are.



When a Boston Globe report earlier this summer strongly suggested that Dombrowski wouldn't return next season, the story was met with silence from the upper levels of management. That was the first suggestion that the story had merit.

But while speculation intensified over Dombrowski's job security — or lack thereof -- it was widely assumed that any change in the Baseball Operations Department would come after season's end. Instead, his dismissal came on a night when the Sox were being throttled (again) by the Yankees, giving off yet another whiff of dysfunction.

Dombrowski was seen on the field, taking part in some pre-game ceremonies before the Sox and Yankees played in front of a national audience on ESPN. He was not spotted in his luxury box to the first base side of home plate during the game, lending credence to the idea that he was informed of his firing at the start of the game.

Both principal owner John Henry and team chairman Tom Werner were in attendance Sunday night, along with team president and CEO Sam Kennedy.

It's unknown why the organization didn't want until the end of the season, now exactly three weeks away, or if anything triggered the move to be made so suddenly, though the timing may give the Red Sox a bit of a head start on the search for Dombrowski's replacement.

The thinking is that Dombrowski was not fired for the job he did -- three division titles and a World Series win in three of his first four seasons at the helm -- but rather, for his unsuitability for the job ahead.

The Sox face a rash of big decisions in the next 15 months, not the least of which is the future of outfielder Mookie Betts, who is eligible for free agency after the 2020 season. Of more immediate concern is the possibility that J.D. Martinez, who has been stellar in the middle of the lineup in his first two years here, could opt-out after the current season.

Then there's the matter of the farm system, which has been depleted by a number of trades executed by Dombrowski. In obtaining the likes of Craig Kimbrel and Chris Sale, Dombrowski constructed a roster which won a record 108 games in 2018 and steamrolled past three 100-win teams in the postseason, en route to the Sox' fourth title this century.

But now the cost of those deals have come due. The team's minor league system, which ranked among the handful of best in the game when Dombrowski was hired, is now ranked in the bottom third, with Baseball America classifying it as the 30th -- and last -- in the business at the start of this season.

Another factor not to be overlooked is the price -- literally -- of the team's recent success.

More than once, Henry has noted that, by virtue of their enormous payrolls in recent seasons, the team was failing to turn a profit and failing to generate any revenues for its limited partners and minority owners.

Henry said the team was willing to make the sacrifice in 2018 for the chance to win a World Series. But when the team spent even more on this year's team -- barely staying under the third and final luxury tax threshold of $247 million -- that proved harmful to Dombrowski's job security.

Dombrowski's MO was well established in the game. He made big deals -- acquiring Miguel Cabrera and Max Scherzer in Detroit; obtaining David Price, Sale and Kimbrel in Boston -- and focused almost entirely on the major league roster, often at the expense of player development.

It's likely that, as the pendulum swings back, the Red Sox will be looking for someone who prioritizes player development, thus enabling the franchise to field a competitive team at a more modest cost. As Henry and others surely know, spending freely on free agency -- as Dombrowski did with Martinez, Price and Nathan Eovaldi -- is hardly an efficient way to conduct business.

Cherington, Dombrowski's predecessor, had a player development background and helped plant the seeds of the current team, having developed, among others, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Jackie Bradley Jr. and Betts.

Now that Dombrowski -- known for expensive star players -- is gone, look for the Red Sox to again return to someone associated with player development and takes more of a macro view of the organization.