Owning the Boston Red Sox

Imagine buying a business with a client base that has been dissatisfied for 86 years. How do you turn things around? For the ownership of the Boston Red Sox, they only had one option- winning the World Series. So after taking over the franchise in 2002 they did just that...twice in four years. 2004 meant good-bye "wait til' next year," no more "whose your daddy?" chants in the Bronx, and so-long Curse. Boston was the winning city again. John Henry, Larry Lucchino, and Tom Warner had created a baseball team to consistently compete at a high level.

Year in and year out, Sox fans have expected a team that has the talent to make it to October. We want to make the playoffs and compete for another title. Because of this, fans are expecting much more out of the 2013 Sox than we got from rosters of the past. And we have good reason to expect nothing short of the best.

That's generally a good thing, until that teams starts to slip. The last two years have been utter disappointments for Red Sox fans. After the September collapse that Yankee fans just love to remind us about in 2011, the Fenway Faithful didn't see much of an improvement throughout 2012. As a result, many fans now question the intent of the Sox' ownership. Do they really care about winning anymore? Who's more important to John Henry, Boston or Liverpool?

Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, wrote an Op-Ed featured on LinkedIn named "The Mavs are a Business Unlike Any Other." He explained the challenges and joys of owning a major sports franchise. What is evident about Cuban is he is his team's biggest fan. He wants to win just as much as his players because after all he was a fan a long time before he ever bought the team. Much like Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots, Cuban was a long time season ticket holder so he still has the fire in his belly to want to see the Mavs compete for a title.

The owners of the Red Sox have a different tale. The majority owners (Henry, Lucchino, and Warner) all have executive experience at baseball teams other than the Sox. They did not grow up in Boston so they didn't experience the 86 year drought like most fans did. They don't have members of their family who never got their dying wish- to see the Red Sox win a World Series. All other things equal, the current Sox ownership were never die-hard fans, rather they remain businessmen. But that doesn't ipso-facto make them less of an owner than Kraft or Cuban.

The longest tenured owner of the Red Sox was the Yawkey family. Coveted by Boston so much that we named a street after Tom Yawkey, but many forget or are ignorant to the fact that in the midst of our 86 year drought, Yawkey traded Willie Mays out of our farm system because he didn't want a black player on his major league roster. For those of you who didn't know that, let that settle in for a second. Yes, the Red Sox once had of the most prolific players of all time sitting in their farm system, waiting for the boss to give him a chance, but we traded him away based on the color of his skin.

So before we consider the ability of the current ownership to build competitive baseball teams and their desire to do just that, we should take these matters into perspective. It is very apparent that when current management took over, they wanted to win. They had desire that matches the Cubans and Krafts of the billionaire sports fans' club. You don't win two World Series by mistake. The existential question Sox fans address now is: do they have that same desire, and are the Sox their number one priority?

It is very easy for fans to answer that question by simply saying 'no,' when you look for all the warning signs. Fenway Sports Management has branched out in recent years purchasing the soccer franchise Liverpool while also buying half of the NASCAR team known today as Rousch Fenway Racing. It is not uncommon for owners to have teams from different sports, Kraft owns the New England Revolution in addition to the Patriots for example. But Henry and company made an unprecedented move with the blockbuster purchase of a historic soccer franchise and a NASCAR team.

What concerns many Boston fans is that these new teams take away the focus from the Red Sox. It doesn't help that former Manager Terry Francona's new book eviscerates the ownership as a group who cared more about the ratings on NESN than the team's win-loss column. Maybe Francona is just disgruntled that he was given the boot after having arguably the best tenure as manager in team history. Or, maybe this was his Canseco moment where years later we find out he was right all along. And what about rumors of Henry looking to sell? He answered these claims that they simply were looking for more investors, and that's commonplace in business.

So what is to be said about the state of the Red Sox and the team's ownership? I'm not sure. It's easy to speculate what their true intentions are and many fans love to play Monday morning quarterback after October. But any serious fan can't look at the acquisitions the last few years and think they're not trying to win. Sure, getting Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford never brought another ring, but is that management's fault? I argue no, it's not.

I'm not saying that Sox ownership should be more like Cuban, everyone has their own style. Not winning a World Serious in 5 years is not good, but it's also not proof that Sox brass has given up on the team. Nick laid out his thoughts on the 2013 team. Let's hope we get back to the days of the Idiots and Cowboy Up rather than beer and chicken wings in the clubhouse and a disabled listed with a bigger salary than the starting roster. In order to get there, the goal of winning has to come from the top.