3Qs: Circling over the Sox epic demise

Before the season, many sports experts pegged the Boston Red Sox as the best team in base­ball. So a late-​​season epic col­lapse that kept the team out of the play­offs was all the more shocking. Fans and jour­nal­ists demanded answers, and an explo­sive Boston Globe story out­lined details of a sup­pos­edly out-​​of-​​control club­house and dis­tracted man­ager. We asked jour­nalism pro­fessor Charles Foun­tain, who has written about sports for many years, to examine the team’s Sep­tember swoon and the ensuing media cov­erage.

The Red Sox were World Series favorites leading into the season but ended the year in a tail­spin — fol­lowed by the depar­ture of the man­ager and appar­ently the gen­eral man­ager. What was your reac­tion to this col­lapse, and the ensuing media cov­erage?

There was a lack of urgency on this team all season long. The players acted like they’d read all of the pre-​​season sto­ries about them being a shoo-​​in for the World Series and behaved as though they could turn it on and off when­ever they wanted. When they started losing, and found that they couldn’t turn it on as they wished, they started pressing and get­ting in their own way, playing with the looks of a team expecting dis­aster to befall them. It was the per­fect storm of bad karma and bad base­ball. And just like the big weather storm brings out the jour­nal­ists en masse, with their rain slickers and their apoc­a­lyptic analysis, so too did the Red Sox Sep­tember make the reporters gath­ered around them look and behave like the buz­zards cir­cling the dying car­cass.  

A Boston Globe story reported that team sources indi­cated former man­ager Terry Fran­cona strug­gled with mar­ital prob­lems and the use of pain med­ica­tion during the season. How much of the players’ and team offi­cials’ per­sonal lives is fit for public con­sump­tion through the media; and has this issue changed for sports jour­nal­ists in recent years?

The Bob Hohler piece you’re ref­er­encing was a ter­rific and impor­tant piece of jour­nalism. And, like many impor­tant pieces of jour­nalism, it made a lot of people uneasy. It’s impor­tant to remember that Hohler got Fran­cona to go on record about his mar­ital dif­fi­cul­ties and use of pain med­ica­tion and be the con­firming source of this infor­ma­tion. Had Fran­cona refused to talk to him, its place in the story might be a little more prob­lem­atic. It made me uncom­fort­able having to read that, but my under­standing of why Fran­cona elected to leave the Red Sox, and why the team didn’t fight harder to keep him, is much clearer than it could ever pos­sibly be without those facts.

It is per­haps a regret­table fact that in the age of blogs and Twitter and cell phone cam­eras, there is very little about the pri­vate lives of public fig­ures that will remain pri­vate for­ever. Jour­nal­ists, and their readers/​listeners/​viewers/​followers would do well to ask them­selves, when con­fronted with this type of infor­ma­tion: Is this essen­tial to the under­standing of the larger issue here, or is it here simply because it is intriguing and sala­cious and will get the story talked about?

Over the last decade, the Sox have hit all-​​time highs (two World Series titles) and epic lows (the 2003 ALCS loss to the Yan­kees, this season’s Sep­tember col­lapse). What is so com­pelling about cov­ering sports during these periods?

First of all, let’s not equate the two lows. The 2003 season was Greek tragedy, the noble cen­tral figure — Pedro Mar­tinez — felled by the fatal flaw beyond his con­trol: weari­ness, and the ero­sion of once-​​great gifts that comes with the passing of time. We wept in 2003 because we felt empathy and sad­ness. No empathy from the bystanders this time around. This year’s col­lapse was the inevitable man­i­fes­ta­tion of a dys­func­tional com­mu­nity. So we are angry and dis­gusted.

But col­lec­tively they add to the Red Sox legend. Far from being cursed, this is a fran­chise and a fandom that’s blessed not only by its soaring highs and but also by its with­ering lows. It’s a gen­er­a­tional pas­sion play that is unlike any­thing else in all of sport. As frus­trated as we some­times grow, and as much as we love to wail and wring our hands, if we did not have it just the way it is — all of the ups and all of the downs — we would somehow feel bereft.