Red Sox Fire Bobby Valentine After Worst Season Since 1965
By Josh Hill
The last time the Boston Red Sox failed to win 70 games in a season was 1994 and had the season not been cancelled due to the player’s strike, Boston likely would have made it to that mark. You’d have to go all the way back over 47 years to get to the last time the Red Sox finished a full 162 game season under 70 games. Since the 1965 season when Boston finished a dismal 62-100, the Sox have managed to keep their wins north of the 70 win mark save for two seasons in 1981 and 1994 that were cut short by player strikes. This year the Sox also finished the furthest back they ever have finished since that 1965 season when they sat 40 games out of first place.
47 years and it took Bobby Valentine’s Red Sox one to give Boston it’s worst season in nearly a half decade. Needless to say this didn’t sit well with management in Boston and the club has fired Valentine after his single year of service.
It was a tumultuous year form the start, a doomed journey from the get-go. The Red Sox got off to a horrendous start and rifts were seen early between Valentine, management and players. The first major valve to burst was the trading of fan favorite Kevin Youkilis to the Chicago White Sox two months into the season. The Red Sox were a fireball of self destruction from then on, eventually trading Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett out west to Los Angeles for minor league pieces.
There had been reports as early as late May that Valentine was losing the locker room, and the trading of Youkilis didn’t go very far in squashing those rumors. For all the great years Youkilis had in Boston, he couldn’t have sounded more relieved when he arrived on the South Side of Chicago — that right there was the first nail in the coffin.
Valentine also never got control of the diva Josh Beckett, who once he arrived in Los Angeles, stopped being headline news as a drunken train wreck who golfs on his days off rather than conditioning for games. The losses and the ugly way the season ended up was just icing on Bobby V’s farewell cake. The question now for Red Sox fans is who will be Valentine’s replacement?
After nearly a decade with Terry Francona as manager, Boston will now be on their second manager in as many years and this time around management will want to find a more long term solution than Valentine. But for the time being this Red Sox team is a shell of it’s former World Series self and after over 100 years of losing, this feeling of emptiness and disappointment is still all to familiar to those who call Fenway their home.