THERE'S A SHOCK: About 18 hours after closing on their purchase of the Boston Red Sox, the new ownership group fired general manager Dan Duquette.
If Duquette had stepped down before the 2000 season, he would have been recognized as one of the best GMs in baseball. At that point, he had led the Sox to a division title in 1995 and consecutive wild-card berths in 1998 and 1999 and built the foundation for a great team with Pedro Martinez and Nomar Garciaparra. The farm system looked at least OK, and he had shown that he knew the value of the waiver wire, acquiring good complementary players like Brian Daubach, Troy O'Leary and Tim Wakefield for nothing. And he had just traded for what looked like an outstanding complementary bat in Carl Everett. People did not laugh when Sports Illustrated picked them to win the 2000 World Series.
What happened? With the Red Sox on the brink of a championship, he did what other teams have done (such as the Yankees in the 1980s): he made moves designed to put them over the top which only pushed them further away. He forgot what he had learned about the waiver wire: you can find complementary players for nothing, so it makes no sense to: a) trade good prospects for expensive veterans when you can find cheaper players who will do the same thing at little cost, and b) give long-term contracts to your waiver-wire finds, because you can find cheap replacements where the originals came from. He did both those things; trading Dennis Tankersley for Ed Sprague, Chris Retisima for Dante Bichette, giving a long-term deal to Troy O'Leary, getting suckered into taking the contract of Mike Lansing.... Trades like those depleted the farm system, which is now one of the worst in baseball.
The Boston Globe has chronicled Duquette's personality flaws at great length, and I won't reiterate them here. But if Duquette had stuck to what had worked well through 1999, those flaws would not have been enough to cause him to lose his job.