Written by Steve Buckley at Boston Herald.com
When Red Sox manager John Farrell revealed yesterday that Travis Shaw would be the team’s Opening Day third baseman over veteran Pablo Sandoval, it became the most talked-about story in baseball.
I’m not referring to fans, sportswriters and talk-show hosts, though they — that is, we — have had plenty to say. I’m referring to the board rooms of baseball, the places where owners and general managers pull the drapes, leave a message to please hold all calls and then sit down to map out their strategies.
I’m referring to the dusty, below-street-level places where well-educated, underpaid baseball ops whiz kids crunch the numbers and, some believe, produce lineup cards.
This is inside-baseball stuff. Very inside. That’s because this isn’t just about Travis Shaw and Pablo Sandoval. If it were, we could dispatch with the entire story in one sentence: Eager, young player looks good in spring training, wrests starting job from underperforming veteran.
It’s so much more than that. It’s about the meritocracy of big league sports, a meritocracy that exists mostly in theory but not always in practice. In the real world of professional sports, the veteran, big-ticket players are generally going to play, even if their performance suggests it’s time for a change. And when change does happen, it’s usually via a trade, or an outright release, and it involves “eating money” just to get the guy off the roster.
This is different. Pablo Sandoval is still with the Red Sox. And while we keep hearing variations of “the poor guy works really hard but just can’t seem to keep the weight off,” the poor guy now finds himself on the bench. For now, anyway.
Part of the reason for this dramatic announcement is that the Red Sox were not entertaining last year. They were lousy, sure, but beyond that they looked slow, lethargic, unprepared and out of shape.
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