Terry Francona: Boston Red Sox Manager's Departure Expected but Not Deserved

To the surprise of absolutely nobody in Boston (if not the entire country), the Red Sox have parted ways with Terry Francona, thereby bringing his tenure as manager to an end after eight seasons, 734 wins, five postseason appearances, two World Series championships and, statistically speaking, the biggest September collapse in baseball history.

Did Tito deserve to go? Yes and no, but mostly no. Francona may be an easy scapegoat, since it's infinitely more agreeable to let go of one manager than fire 25 players, but he can hardly be faulted for the Red Sox's greatest shortcoming—injuries, particularly to their starting staff. Boston's rotation was absolutely ravaged by injuries over the course of the season, from Daisuke Matsuzaka going down for the year in mid-May with a busted elbow to Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz both missing significant time.

Josh Beckett did a remarkable job of carrying the staff through those struggles, but came up with leg problems of his own in September. Meanwhile, Tito too often found himself turning to the worst starting pitcher in baseball (John Lackey), a 45-year-old knuckleballer (Tim Wakefield) and two minor-league stopgaps (Andrew Miller and Kyle Weiland) to eat up innings without putting Boston in too big of a hole and wearing down what would've otherwise been a quality bullpen.

As for the offense, the Red Sox ranked at or near the top of baseball in just about every statistical category, but lacked much in the way of clutch hitting down the stretch. Tito spent the entire season trying to figure out what to do with Carl Crawford, whose seven-year, $142-million deal looks like GM Theo Epstein's worst move this side of bringing in Lackey in December of 2009. Crawford was the Sox's consummate square peg in a round hole, refusing to bat leadoff and leaving Francona little recourse but to try him all over the lineup.

You could make the case that Tito should've done a better job reshuffling the batting order, putting Crawford third and leaving Adrian Gonzalez and David Ortiz to duke it out between clean-up and the five-hole, but realistically speaking, offense was not Boston's problem this season.

Not when the Red Sox had only the ninth-best team ERA in the AL, and not when the team's starting pitching was so ravaged by injuries and atrocious among those who were healthy enough to pitch.

So, really, unless the Sox expected Tito to come through shamanic healing powers, Francona should've kept his job. Remember, this is the guy who guided the Red Sox to their first World Series championship in 86 years and then followed it up with a second pennant in 2007. He may not be solely responsible for breaking the Curse of the Bambino, but he deserves quite a bit of the credit. After all, Tito helped exorcise those demons just one year after Grady Little's much-criticized decision to leave Pedro Martinez in the game against the New York Yankees in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.

Those memories, and the ones of 2007, have seemingly fallen into the recesses of the collective conscience of Red Sox Nation. Two straight substandard seasons with one of the most talented teams (and most expensive payrolls) in all of baseball will do that to even the most venerable and well-respected of managers. This year's Sox were supposed to be the best team in baseball history, with a loaded starting staff, a bullpen with lockdown ability and a lineup loaded with big hitters and run producers like he hadn't seen in decades.

But the talent never gelled, the pitching went limp and, by all indications, the players, even those most loyal to Tito, tuned him out, preferring to rely on their overwhelming talent rather than come together as a true team and focus on the details.

Hence, like so many managers before him, Francona finds himself back on the market after wearing out his welcome with a team, or so that's what he and the organization have suggested. It's tough to imagine though, that the Red Sox would've let him go had they held on to that wild-card spot, had they won another game or two and had the pitching not gone down the tubes so early and so often.

Hypotheticals aside, the Terry Francona era in Beantown ends almost as dramatically as it first began, bookended by the ending of one curse and, perhaps, the beginning of another.

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