Picked-up pieces while covering Syracuse’s dugout TVs with shatterproof glass in case things don’t go well for Chris Sale in his Sunday rehab start …
▪ Dan Duquette is one of the few folks in the world who knows exactly what it feels like to be Chaim Bloom. Like Bloom, the Duke took over as baseball boss of the Red Sox when he was 36 and incurred the wrath of Boston fans and local media when things didn’t go well.
“There was one point in time when I had to park my car in center field so that I could get safely in and out of the ballpark,” Duquette said from his new home in Wilmington, N.C. “It’s a very passionate and emotional fan base. You need to make sure you’re all-in to understand how they feel.”
Now 65, Duquette took over the Red Sox in 1994 and his first team finished fourth, 17 games out of first place.
“You can take the temperature of the fan base anytime you want in Boston,” he said. “Just take a walk around the ballpark and they’ll let you know. That’s the way it works in Boston.
“The position of the team in the standings determines how the fans in Boston feel about the chief executive. When you have a good team, everyone loves you. When you don’t have a good team, people aren’t loving you so much.”
Duquette got the Red Sox into the playoffs in 1995 and again in ‘98 and ‘99. He was cut loose when John Henry & Co. bought the team in 2002, but is remembered fondly as the man who assembled half of the 2004 world champs, including Manny Ramirez, Pedro Martinez, Johnny Damon, Tim Wakefield, Derek Lowe, and Jason Varitek.
Duquette made the greatest deadline trade in Sox history when he got Lowe and Varitek from Seattle for Heathcliff Slocumb in 1997 — a sharp contrast to Bloom not doing anything major this past week.
The Duke won’t criticize Bloom.
“I had enough trouble when I was trying to run my own ball club,” he said. “The Red Sox have a decent ball club, but right now they are not the class of the American League East. They’re not. They’re a very competitive team, but in that market and the New York market, fans expect excellence.
“There’s no time for a rebuild in Boston or New York and there’s no patience from the fan base, either. Those aren’t towns where you can throw up a shingle and say, ‘We’re rebuilding.’ That doesn’t compute in Boston. Because the value of the [ticket] prices they’re charging, the fans expect a premium product.”
It should be noted that Duquette — still active as an MLB consultant — built a major portion of the Baltimore team that currently sits atop the AL East and looks positioned to compete for many years. Duquette was boss of the Orioles from 2011-18, and his fingerprints are on Cedric Mullins, Ryan Mountcastle, Austin Hays, Anthony Santander, Grayson Rodriguez, Félix Bautista, Michael Baumann, and Dean Kremer. (Duquette also drafted Mike Yastrzemski, who has worked out great for the Giants.)
“The foundation we left the Orioles was pretty solid,” the Duke said with a chuckle. “We left some groceries in the cupboard.”
Hmmm. As Bob Lobel would say, “Why can’t we get GMs like that?”
