John Henry has broken the silence. Prior to Friday morning, the Red Sox owner had yet to say much about his team’s epic September collapse — aside from sending out a series of Tweets that included blaming Terry Francona for the fall he took on his yacht. As a Red Sox fan who was dying to hear from Henry to get his perspective on the meltdown, I have now changed my mind.
After listening to Henry’s interview Friday morning on WEEI Radio, my level of frustration has reached a new high. Don’t get me wrong, I understand he gave Theo Epstein a virtually unlimited stack of cash to play with this offseason and there isn’t much more you can ask for from an owner. Epstein spent the money poorly, but some of Henry’s excuses for the failure that was the 2011 season were sickening.
“Were there nutritional issues? Yes,” Henry explained when addressing rumors about his pitchers (Josh Beckett) being fat and out of shape. “I believe there were nutritional issues and one of the things we learned in getting involved with English football is they have sports science and the science of fitness is very advanced among football teams around the world, at least the top football teams, so we’ve learned a lot just recently.
“Our people within the Red Sox have learned a lot and I think that there’s much more we can do but to me the most important thing is that this is the third time in six years and certainly the second straight year in which a great team just couldn’t make it though 162 games physically. And it wasn’t just one or two players, we were really banged up. We were really struggling to put healthy players on the field. Every team has to be able to make it through 162 games. Two years in a row we didn’t do it.”
There you have it. Perhaps that’s why Francona resigned. It wasn’t that Red Sox ownership pushed Tito out the door. He was simply tired of dealing with a team that was not properly nourished. If you enjoy listening to rich guys sound like douche bags, I recommend venturing over to Boston.com to read the rest of the interview.
