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.

Satire. This post is AI-generated for fun and does not reflect my actual views.

11 Comments

12,847 readers are commenting

Brad WhitcombVerified📌 Editor's Pick22 hours ago

Read this twice on the Acela down to a Greenwich LP meeting and I'm telling you — this is the sharpest holdco breakdown I've seen in a sports wrapper since the Glazer-United decks leaked. This isn't a baseball post. This is a family-office case study with a Fenway Frank on top. 5 things the operators in my feed need to internalize before Q3: 1. "Fenway Sports Group is a portfolio. Liverpool is the growth stock. The Red Sox are the dividend." Stop. That is the entire thesis. I'm lifting that one verbatim for the Operators Anonymous post I've owed subscribers since February. 2. "The team is the permit. Everything around the team is the asset." This is the same insight Henry was running at JWM and before that in the pits — the visible position is never where the carry lives. People forget he came up trend-following soybeans. The man does not buy ballclubs. He buys optionality on the dirt under the ballclub. 3. "The Green Monster is a load-bearing wall." Nine words. That's a Naval tweet. That's a cold open for the podcast I keep meaning to record. 4. The Mookie trade as a Klopp-era funding event is the part nobody on sports radio is high-agency enough to say out loud. Feb 2020, $27M/yr cleared, Liverpool wins the league. That's not a salary dump. That's an intra-portfolio capital call. 5. "The pain is the product." Let that sink in. The fans aren't the customer and they aren't the product — the loyalty is the product, and FSG has been compounding it since these guys were seven. Try modeling that LTV curve. I am, this week, against my own family-office structure. Bookmarking the Cora-as-grief-counselor line for the Quogue dinner Saturday. Yankees fans get rings. Operators get the cap table. Curious — who else in the comments is rebuilding their holdco deck around the dividend-vs-growth-stock framing this quarter.

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guest_44713 hours ago

brad the operators anonymous post from february is one paragraph and a stock photo

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u/WARgraphs_427 hours ago

stopped reading at "Mookie Betts, reigning MVP" lmao. mookie won MVP in 2018, trout won it in 2019, the trade was feb 2020. as someone who actually follows the sport maybe check baseball-reference for five seconds before filing 2000 words of theory

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Glenn — 86 Years Was The Quote Substack6 hours ago

What no one will say: Brian's on the right track but he stopped at the property line. The Globe sale in 2013 is the load-bearing wall of this entire piece and he walked right past it. John Henry bought The Boston Globe from the New York Times in 2013 for $70M. *Seventy million.* That's a rounding error on a Lansdowne permit. Notice how Shaughnessy's columns about FSG cost-cutting went from teeth to tongue-baths sometime around Q3 2014. Connect that. My uncle was a Globe stringer when Henry bought the paper. He told me at Easter — *2015 Easter, I remember because the Sox had just blown a series in Tampa* — that the assignment desk had a list of three names you don't put adjacent to the word "divestment." Henry. Werner. Kennedy. Oh, you didn't know? Yeah. The 2018 ring was the *cover*. They needed exactly one parade to lock in two more decades of loyalty as a balance-sheet item. The numbers work backwards from there. Pull the 2019 Forbes valuation, footnote 4 — the one they quietly revised in the second printing. Loyalty is on the books as an *asset class* now. Brian said it and moved on. He should have stopped and screamed. The Bobby Valentine year was *commissioned*. You don't hire that man by accident. You hire him to justify the tear-down. The Lansdowne zoning paperwork was filed in March 2013. The 93-loss season was filed in October 2012. *In that order.* The Krafts and Henry are not rivals. They split the market at a single dinner at the Capital Grille on Boylston in February 2002, six weeks before Henry closed on the team. Patriots take the wins. Sox take the dirt. My buddy from BC valeted that night. He remembers the table. Mookie Betts didn't ask out. Mookie was *delivered*. The Dodgers paid in a parcel two blocks off Chavez Ravine that's now sitting inside a Delaware LLC three layers down from FSG Real Estate. The dividend went west. The growth stock stayed in Anfield. The pain stayed here. Babe Ruth wasn't sold in 1918. Babe Ruth was *invested.* Eighty-six years was the quote. That was the price-discovery window. They needed to know what New England would tolerate before they redeemed. Wake up. Connect the dots.

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Linda Halloran6 hours ago

ATTENTION: Thank you to the poster for putting words to what my son in Wellesley has been telling me for two summers now. He took Tucker into FENWAY for a Sunday game in April and the beer was FIFTEEN DOLLARS and a man two rows behind them was visibly inebriated by the third inning and using language in front of a child wearing a MOOKEY Betts shirt (Tucker refuses to retire it). My son said the streets around the park don't even look like Boston anymore... it's all "small plates" and a place called Time Out where you pay before you sit down. I'm not dramatic BUT a "L-pool" themed pub has opened where the Brotherhood used to do shepherd's pie on Main Street and my granddaughter informs me Liverpool is a SOCCER team owned by the same John HENRY and I am not reassured. Selectman Bridges, are you reading this post?? EDIT: Buddy and I walked past the gray cottage on Sankaty this morning and the new family (the Connecticut ones) had a red scarf hanging in the mudroom window that says LIVERPOOL. On NANTUCKET. EDIT: I called the Better Business Bureau at 8:47 and was told they do not handle baseball. This isn't the Boston my husband used to drive Tucker into for games.

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guest_44712 hours ago

ma'am the bbb does not handle baseball

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Linda Halloran38 minutes ago

TO MR 4471: I see you have returned. I would like the record to reflect that this is now the THIRD time you have personally addressed me in a public comment section, following the Toad the Wet Sprocket matter and the exchange involving Cornerstone Roofing and Coach CROLEY... A pattern is a PATTERN. My file with Lt. Reynolds at NBPD has been updated accordingly this afternoon and a courtesy copy has gone to Selectman Bridges. As to your assertion regarding the Better Business Bureau, I will say this once. Baseball at the level we are discussing is COMMERCE. A fifteen dollar beer is commerce. A child's jersey with the player's name spelled INCORRECTLY on the back is commerce. I have therefore escalated the matter to the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office of Consumer Protection, which I understand is the appropriate venue for individuals such as yourself who believe the elderly cannot navigate a telephone tree. EDIT: I was placed on hold with the AG's office for 47 minutes. I did not hang up. I folded a load of Tucker's whites and I waited. EDIT 2: I have now Googled the handle "guest_4471" and it appears in TWO prior comment sections in which I have personally participated... I would like to know who is paying you and I would like to know it on the RECORD. Forwarding to Lt. Reynolds this evening after Buddy's walk.

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sabr_since_086 hours ago

Wrote 1500 words about quant-driven Red Sox front offices and didn't name Bill James once is genuinely unserious — Henry hired him as Senior Advisor on Baseball Operations in November 2002, a *month* after closing on the team, and he's still on the FSG payroll 22 years later from his house in Lawrence, KS (Joe Posnanski has written about the commute-by-fax setup at length, go read it). Tell me you didn't actually research the piece without telling me. The whole "Tufts economics seminar" bit is a lazy framing of a lineage that runs James -> Voros McCracken (DIPS, 2001, the BABIP paper that broke pitching evaluation, look up the ERA+ delta on the '03 staff after they internalized it) -> the entire current org, and you have to distinguish the *1985 Abstract* James from the *Henry-era consultancy* James — different conversation, different output, the Henry-era stuff is mostly leverage-index and bullpen-usage memos nobody outside 4 Yawkey ever sees. I have a 1985 Abstract first printing (Ballantine, $7.95 cover, picked it up at the Brookline Booksmith in '97, ask me how I know) and the fact that a piece about "the spreadsheet Sox" doesn't mention the man who invented the spreadsheet is the actual story. I'll die on this hill. (And yes Bill Mueller won the '03 batting title switch-hitting on a *torn* meniscus with a 140 OPS+ and somehow got robbed of a single MVP vote — separate grievance, different thread, but no.)

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robin (they/them)@softgrudge.bsky.social6 hours ago

CW: anti-Black racism, labor exploitation, grief language used carelessly hi — i don't usually comment on sports pieces but as someone who tabled at Fenway with the Red Sox Anti-Racism Coalition the summer of 2018 (in a working capacity, not as a fan) — and as a person currently navigating chronic burnout — i need to name a few things this piece is doing. the whole essay is built around "loyalty" and "character" as the dividend Boston pays its fans, and not once does it name that the Red Sox were the LAST team in MLB to integrate. twelve years after Jackie. Pumpsie Green in 1959. Yawkey owned the franchise for forty-four years and the street outside the park was renamed in 2018 for a reason — a reason Adam Jones could speak to from personal experience in 2017. you cannot write a 2000-word meditation on what Boston fans are "owed" and leave that ledger blank. that's not satire. that's curation. the Liverpool section landed even harder for me. FSG is treated here as a clever capital allocator — "loyalty is the most valuable asset FSG owns" — and the piece never says the words Hillsborough, or Toxteth, or Justice for the 97. Liverpool 8 is a working-class, multiracial neighborhood that buried ninety-seven people because of police negligence and spent thirty-four years fighting the state to say so, and FSG's stewardship of that legacy has meant ticket-price hikes that have priced the actual scousers out of the Kop. framing that as portfolio synergy with Fenway is — i had to close the tab and text my therapist. also, briefly — the line about Cora being "a grief counselor" was rough, folks. grief work is real labor done by real practitioners and using it as a punchline for a baseball manager flattens something a lot of us are actively in. i can tell the writer has range — the prose is doing things, the rhythm is there, the Figawi-hat instinct from the Nantucket piece is clearly the same voice — which is exactly why i think there's a much stronger version of this essay, one that names Yawkey in the first three paragraphs and lets the rest of the argument earn itself from there. low on spoons today so i won't be in the replies. calling this in with care. — robin (they/them) 🌿

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Hattie M. Pemberton@HattiePembertonHome · 247k5 hours ago

Hi loves 🤍 — what a tender, layered piece. So much grief on the page. M. grew up in Hingham and has, as I like to say, a *complicated relationship with FSG* — last summer we did Fenway as part of our Americana road-trip homeschool unit and *Wells* (now 8!) and *Birdie* (5!) had Big Feelings about the Monster while baby *Bramble* slept through a full inning of suffering. Speaking as a mother of four navigating a household where Daddy still owns a Mookie Betts jersey, I just want to say: protect your peace, friends. We're stepping away from inherited fandoms this season — character before franchise loyalty, intentional rhythms over ninth-inning sorrow, family kickball on the lawn instead of a postcard from Chavez Ravine. ❤️ P.S. — my new course *Loving Beyond Loyalty: A Course for Mothers Whose Husbands Inherited Bad Brands* drops Sunday on the Substack, with a companion devotional and a printable lineup card for family liturgy night. Use code **MOOKIE** for 20% off the annual tier (link in profile 🌾). Praying for the boys in red. xo.

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guest_44711 hour ago

promo code MOOKIE for the course about leaving bad brands 💀💀💀

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