Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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VIEW FROM THE TOP Cherington high-fives Katie Gould during a visit to Special Equestrians, a therapeutic program for people with disabilities. 50 Cherington (CENTER) visits with Red Sox players (LEFT TO RIGHT) Ryan Kalish, David Ross, Jonny Gomes, and Daniel Nava at Fenway Park. "I take it personally when the team doesn't do well. There were some long nights last summer." —BEN CHERINGTON Cherington says he knew he wanted to be the GM of a major league club when he was in college, and that was where he began preparing for the job. Like former Sox GM Dan Duquette, one of his mentors (the others are Epstein and Red Sox President and CEO Larry Lucchino), Cherington went to Amherst College. Then he earned a master's in sports management at UMass Amherst, which should have aimed him directly at Yawkey Way. He took a brief detour to Cleveland, where he was an advance scout, then joined Duquette in Boston in 1999. Duquette now runs the Baltimore Orioles (93-69 in the AL East last season). Cherington says that as a scout, he learned that even the wiliest evaluators of talent sometimes goof, though he avoids mentioning specific miscalculations. "In Latin America and elsewhere," he says, "we've given bonuses to players who never made it. But you constantly try to get it right more often than you get it wrong. The best GMs get it right a lot more often than they get it wrong." Cherington served as assistant director, and then director, of player development, became vice president of player personnel, then co-general manager (with Jed Hoyer) after Epstein went AWOL—and then AWL—and took over the GM position in 2011, just in time for the Sox to begin skidding toward the drain from which he is currently trying to extract them by pulling on their ankles. Cherington says that's a task that matters a great deal to him. "I take it personally when the team doesn't do well," he told me. "There were some long days and nights last summer." Yes, there were. And because the Red Sox were hard to watch, a lot of people in this town spent those long days and nights occupied by something other than baseball. Cherington understands that to alter that circumstance, he'll have to keep trying to build a team that wins more games than the Orioles, the Blue Jays, the Rays, and the Yankees—as well as the Cubs. Otherwise, the team over which Cherington presides may find itself failing once again to live up to what he reluctantly acknowledges might be the closest thing he has to a motto or shorthand philosophy: "Baseball in October." BC PHOTOGRAPHY BY JJ MILLER (CHERINGTON, LOCKER ROOM), MICHAEL IVINS/BOSTON RED SOX (EQUESTRIANS) continued from page 49 except for the ones in the American League East." It's been a challenging winter for the 38-year-old Red Sox general manager (who admits that "challenging" is an apt way to describe his job all year). Winter is the time for encouraging those other teams in the AL East to fear what you're building. But Cherington actually started that process last August, when Boston sent Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez, and Nick Punto to the Dodgers, a move The New York Times characterized as "removing a little of the stench." The reset has continued during the off-season with the acquisition of various veterans said to be good guys to have in the clubhouse. Presumably this is not because when they're in the clubhouse, they're not on the field. Regarding the rehabilitation of the team that finished last in the AL East in 2012, Cherington is a realist. "When you lose 93 games, one guy isn't going to turn it around," he says. He speaks of "a three-to-five-year window" during which he and his associates will try to balance veteran talent with youthful promise and the team's budget. He acknowledges that a good GM has to be a clever accountant. Accordingly, Cherington reports that he tries to apply Moneyball-like principles to the search for undervalued talent, despite the fact that in 2012, only the New York Yankees ($197,962,289) and the Philadelphia Phillies ($174,538,938) had higher payrolls than the Sox ($173,186,617). Addition by subtraction of the previously mentioned lugs and malcontents will alter those numbers, but the Red Sox are not likely to be confused with impoverished clubs like the Oakland A's, about which Moneyball was written. One spring day during the '80s, I was sitting beside Wade Boggs in the dugout at Fenway Park. I asked him how old he was when he knew for sure that he'd make The Show. "Ten," said Boggs. BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 049-050_BC_SP_ViewFromTheTop_Spring13.indd 50 2/11/13 3:32 PM