The Red Sox Are Bad On Purpose And You Should Send John Henry A Thank-You Note
Look. I know. I’m watching it too. Last place in the AL East. Again. A payroll that keeps shrinking while franchise value keeps ballooning. A rotating cast of front-office kids who all look like they were hand-picked off a Tufts economics seminar and handed a lanyard. I have heard the podcasts. I have seen the columnists begging John Henry to spend. I have watched grown men in faded Fenway hoodies get misty-eyed over a Xander Bogaerts jersey in a San Diego dugout.
And I am here, calmly, to tell you: this is all going according to plan. The Red Sox are not underperforming. The Red Sox are overperforming — on a spreadsheet you have not been permitted to see.
The Team Is Not The Business
Let’s start with a number. John Henry bought the Red Sox in 2002 for roughly $700 million. Forbes now puts franchise value north of $4.5 billion. That is a 6-to-7x return over two decades. With exactly one World Series ring since 2018. You know what else returned 7x over that period? A boring S&P 500 index fund. You know what didn’t require fielding a baseball team that your grandmother swears at through a television?
The index fund.
So why bother owning a team at all? Because the team isn’t the asset. The team is the permit. Everything around the team is the asset. And winning is expensive. Winning means arbitration raises and free-agent bidding wars and a manager who thinks the 26th man matters. Winning means a luxury-tax bill with six digits and a comma. Mediocrity, on the other hand, is free. Mediocrity is the most stable, most scalable equilibrium available in a 30-team league where revenue-sharing flows downhill and loyal fans have already pre-paid their parking.
The Red Sox are not chasing a ring. They are chasing a P/E ratio.
Fenway Is A Zoning Permit That Happens To Have A Baseball Team In It
You think Fenway Park is a ballpark. Cute. Fenway Park is a 1912 grandfathered real-estate anchor sitting on top of the most valuable square mile in New England. The MGM Music Hall. The Time Out Market. The Landmark Center. The entire Fenway neighborhood has transformed from a parking-lot wasteland into a “lifestyle district” — a phrase nobody should ever be paid to say out loud — under the careful stewardship of Fenway Sports Group .
A winning team requires bats. Bats cost money. Money is finite. Every dollar that leaves the FSG ledger as a free-agent contract is a dollar that never becomes another hotel on Boylston, another concert venue on Lansdowne, another mixed-use tower with a rooftop bar charging eighteen dollars for a cocktail nobody ordered. The team competes with the real estate for the same pot. The real estate wins. So the Red Sox are kept just barely competitive enough to keep the lights on — and just cheap enough that the quarterly cashflow keeps pouring into the portfolio. The 1912 designation is not a romance. It is a tax strategy.
The Green Monster is a load-bearing wall.
Liverpool Is The Favorite Child. You Are The Other One.
In 2010, FSG bought Liverpool FC for roughly $476 million. As of last year, Forbes valued the club above $5 billion. Liverpool won the 2019 Champions League. They won the 2020 Premier League — their first top-flight English title in thirty years. The Klopp era was, by any measure, the most successful trophy run in modern club history. And it was paid for. In part. By you.
Look at the timeline. Mookie Betts, reigning MVP, gets traded to the Dodgers in February 2020. The trade clears roughly $27 million per year off the Red Sox books. A month later, COVID hits. By July, Liverpool lifts the Premier League. The Red Sox finish the shortened season 24-36. You are supposed to see these things as unrelated. A global cost-cutting move. A coincidence of calendars.
Please.
Fenway Sports Group is a portfolio. Liverpool is the growth stock. The Red Sox are the dividend. You cut the dividend to fund the growth stock. That is not a conspiracy. That is a first-semester MBA case study. (We will not be discussing the Pittsburgh Penguins today, because no one in New England has ever willingly discussed the Pittsburgh Penguins, but please know that FSG bought them in 2021 and I see that too.) And they left Alex Cora behind as the mascot of a martyrdom. Somebody had to stay in the dugout looking soulful while the money quietly walked out the door. Cora is a wonderful manager. He is also a grief counselor. Those are compatible job descriptions.
Losing Is Cheaper Than Winning And You Will Pay For It Either Way
Here is the part you don’t want to hear. Red Sox tickets remain among the four most expensive in Major League Baseball. A beer at Fenway is nearly fifteen dollars. NESN — also owned by FSG — collects your cable carriage fee whether the team goes 90-72 or 72-90. In fact, a heartbreaking season generates more content. More hot takes. More talk-radio hours. More Dan Shaughnessy columns. More eyeballs on ads for the Fenway Group’s real-estate developments. A Red Sox fan in crisis is a Red Sox fan engaged. You think the front office doesn’t know this? Craig Breslow went to Yale. He majored in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. You think a man who can pronounce “phosphofructokinase” can’t also read a P&L statement?
The pain is the product.
You were told, from childhood, that loving the Red Sox is a character trait. That suffering through them is a Boston rite of passage. That the eighty-six years from 1918 to 2004 made you who you are. That language is not yours. That language was given to you. It was given to you so that when Mookie leaves, you grieve instead of churn. When Bogaerts leaves, you mourn instead of cancel. When Devers starts eyeing the exit, you write an open letter to the Globe. Loyalty is the most valuable asset FSG owns. They have been compounding it since you were seven.
A Humble Proposal
So the next time you’re watching a four-game September slide against the Orioles, and the camera cuts to John Henry in the owner’s box looking tired, I want you to try something new. Don’t boo. Smile. He is doing this for you. He is preserving the neighborhood. He is funding Mohamed Salah. He is protecting Fenway from the indignity of being modernized. He is giving you the one thing a Red Sox fan has always actually wanted, underneath it all, which is something to complain about on the drive home.
You wanted passion. You wanted stakes. You wanted a team that means something. Meaning is not free. Meaning costs fifteen dollars a beer, half a decade of fourth-place finishes, and a postcard from Mookie in Chavez Ravine every October. And you — bless you — will pay it forever.
Yankees fans get rings. You get character.