Happy Halloween - and bye Theo

Well it is clear which of the Neil's has the power on this blog - Neil M says Joe Torre must stay, Steinbrenner gets it done... Neil H says Theo Epstein must stay and... blerg!

I am just reading through the THEO IS GONE thread on SOSH and the tone is split pretty much 97:3 in favor of the woe is me, the world has ended crowd - sadly in this situation I am with the 3. Some of the comments so far (and I am generally "paraphrasing", no one has given me permission to quote, and we all know how that can end up with SOSH!)

• "Absolutely brutal move by the Sox...they look PATHETIC right now!!!!! Frickin idiots."
• "The winter of discontent is upon us"
• "If Theo is really gone, you look no better then the last Red Sox owner who won a World Series with the team."
• "Every fan should boycott buying tickets until LL is removed from the organization. He is a cancer. Always has been, always will be. This team will sink with him leading things"
• "I bet Theo was told he was gonna have to take the team in a more youthfull direction. They did it to the Marlins and they did it to the Padres."
• "Welcome to the slow, steady collapse of the 2004 World Champions!"

Would I rather Theo was our GM for the next three years - clearly, yes. Is he irreplaceable - c'mon - not even close.

There is most definitely a large part of the fanatical Red Sox fan base that wallows in the potential for failure - while the 2004 season has erased part of the angst (are there now fathers that regretted not waking up small children to watch the Sox Series win just in case that was a once in a lifetime?) there remains a large reservoir of doubt about the Henry / Werner / Lucchino group, that believes the purchase was purely a financial transaction and that any signal (from a raising in the price of a Fenway Frank, to say, losing your GM) is all the confirmation that is required that they are right - it just gets wearing on this Sox fan.

Everything that happens doesn't have to be part of a bigger conspiracy, sometimes sh!t just happens.