Red Sox Betraying Bobby V More About Immaturity, Cowardice Than His Own Issues

A great clubhouse is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Ariel Durant said that. Or something like that, anyway. 

Regardless, it's a sentiment that is very much relevant to what is going on with the Boston Red Sox these days. There have been reports of disharmony between the club's players and manager Bobby Valentine all season, and thanks to Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, we now know that a mutiny attempt took place in July.

According to Passan, several Red Sox players, including star first baseman Adrian Gonzalez and star second baseman Dustin Pedroia, openly ripped Bobby V to team owner John Henry and President/CEO Larry Lucchino at a meeting in New York on July 26. The story goes that some players flat-out said that they no longer wanted to play for Valentine anymore.

And it all started, apparently, with a text message from Gonzalez. He informed the club's bosses of his own dissatisfaction and that of his fellow teammates much like a 12-year-old would complain to his big brother about a schoolyard bully.

As far as what went on in the actual meeting, all we really know is that the players complained specifically about how unfair it was for Valentine to leave Jon Lester in to get rocked for 11 earned runs and four homers in a recent start, and that the "tenor" of the meeting "turned ugly almost immediately."

Translation: "Rabble! Rabble! Rabble!"

A couple weeks later, what we know is this: Bobby V is still around, and the Red Sox didn't immediately clean house after the meeting took place. The team's roster has gone largely unchanged, meaning whoever participated in the Bobby V mutiny is stuck with him at least for the rest of this season, and pPossibly for the rest of next season as well if the Red Sox decide to let him serve out the remainder of his contract.

The club's players are just going to have to get used to him. 

Which, come to think of it, is something that we were all saying mere minutes after Valentine was hired to succeed Terry Francona last December. The fact that we still have to say it after all this time reflects just as poorly on Boston's players as it does on Valentine himself.

Valentine has not done a bang-up job in his first season as Boston's manager. His in-game managing skills are just fine for the most part, but he's bungled the human element of the job about as badly as he possibly could have.

Throwing Kevin Youkilis under the bus at the start of the season was a bad move, and Valentine hasn't helped himself by going public with things that should have remained private and generally failing to endear himself to a clubhouse of players who spent 2011 and the years prior playing under a classic players' manager in Francona.

Bobby V has shaken things up. No doubt about that. 

But remember, that was kinda the whole point of bringing him aboard in the first place. In hiring Valentine, the team's ownership effectively hired the anti-Francona. Contrary to Francona, Valentine is not and has never been Mr. Nice Guy. Even before he came to Boston, he had a track record of being a hard-nosed manager with no qualms whatsoever over telling it like it is.

Boston's players should have known what they were in for the moment Valentine was hired, and what they apparently haven't yet realized is that they asked for a manager like Valentine. He is the team's comeuppance for what happened in 2011.

The 2011 Red Sox were 32 games over .500 and on their way to a 100-win season when last September began. One of the worst Septembers in baseball history followed, and it was eventually revealed that the problems that killed the Red Sox in September were rooted in the club's dilapidated clubhouse atmosphere.

Red Sox fans probably know the report from Bob Hohler of The Boston Globe by heart by now. The specifics of the report came under siege roughly five minutes after it came out, but the general message of the report still rings true to this day. The Red Sox lost control of their ship in 2011 because they were out of control below deck.

Francona is partially to blame, as years of taking it easy on the club's veterans finally came back to bite him. Whatever authority he had was dried up. The players were running the show, not him. They decided to take September off, and Francona could do nothing to stop them.

This led to an ugly ending between Francona and the Red Sox, and Theo Epstein soon followed him out the door. While all of that was going on, nothing was done to punish the players for losing focus to such a baffling degree. No heads rolled.

Their punishment would come much later, in the form of the club's new manager.

Some players have responded well to Valentine's leadership. The fact that Passan's report says not all of the team's players attended the Valentine mutiny makes that clear enough. It's just as clear, however, that a sizable chunk of the roster wants nothing to do with him. It's not hard to imagine that they wanted nothing to do with him all along.

The writing is on the wall that the anti-Valentine players are against him exactly because he's the anti-Francona. Valentine does things that Francona would never do, and the players wouldn't mind it if things went back to the way they were. Rest assured, Francona is missed in some circles.

It's certainly worth noting that a contingent of Red Sox players were laughing it up with Francona, now an ESPN color analyst, in Boston's clubhouse just a couple days after the meeting with the club's ownership had taken place. 

Francona's appearance must have been a taste of the good old days when things were free and easy in Boston's clubhouse. After all, the players could basically do whatever they wanted in those days without having to worry about snide remarks from the boss or having their reputations hand-fed to the ravenous Boston media.

Crossing Valentine has consequences, whereas it was seemingly exactly the opposite in 2011, when Francona crossing the players may have had consequences.

Essentially, what the anti-Valentine contingent has refused to accept is that Valentine is in charge. His methods are unorthodox to the point of being unacceptable, but it's his team and he's going to run it however the hell he sees fit. 

Under a guy like that, the best thing to do is to just shut up and play baseball. The Valentine bashers refused to do that when they decided they'd had just about enough and started whining to the big bosses. They wanted ownership to believe that Valentine was the problem, not the players.

The dilemma is that it's debatable whether the Red Sox would be a winning team even if Valentine had been given the boot somewhere along the line. Removing him from the equation wouldn't make the Red Sox's awful pitching any better, and it certainly wouldn't erase all of the team's injuries.

To that end, it's just as debatable that the Red Sox would be a winning team even if everyone was on board with Valentine's leadership. One thing we know for sure, however, is that at least they'd be losing with dignity if everyone was on board with Valentine.

The Red Sox have none of that left. Absolutely none.

That's not all Bobby V's fault. The Red Sox's dignity started unraveling in September of 2011, well before he was hired. He hasn't helped plug up the leaks through which the club's dignity is oozing out, but he never was going to be able to do that all by himself anyway. The bulk of the repair job was going to have to be carried out by his players.

Boston's players sank the ship last season. Raising it from the depths was going to be their job. Blaming Valentine for the fact that the ship is still sunk is taking the easy way out.

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