(Photo courtesy of FanRag Sports)
"It's not one leader," Pedroia said. "And everybody always says that. It's not one guy in baseball. It's me, it's Mookie, it's Bogey, it's Jackie, it's Benny. It's our team. So, we have to be together and know that."
I can’t be the only one who read this quote from a Dustin Pedroia press conference early Friday and shook my head, right?
After the end of the 2016 season, every Red Sox fan, writer, and player probably looked at Pedroia and felt that he would step up and be the leader they needed. It felt like the natural next step; he had been through the most with the team was the longest tenured player. He was (and still is) a talented, passionate ball player. We know that he isn’t afraid of getting in the face of players who he feels aren’t conducting business the right way, so why wouldn’t he be able to fill the leadership void that Big Papi left?
I don’t have an answer to the question; all I know is that he hasn’t become the leader we all envisioned. This was apparent throughout the entirety of last lesson when the Sox failed to have any spark and never bonded together when they needed each other most. They had plenty of opportunities; the one that comes to all of our minds was the Manny Machado incident. Stuff like that brings teams together... or at least it's supposed to. When the supposed leader of your team is spiked by a bonafide superstar, you respond by throwing at that player. That’s exactly what the Red Sox did, and it should have brought the team together, but Pedroia instead threw his teammates under the bus, claiming that he wasn’t involved in the decision to throw chin music at Machado. In this circumstance, Pedroia didn’t even have to be a leader. All he had to do was keep quiet and the guys would have rallied around him. As much as we here at Third and Long hate Tucker Boynton (~TB), we are a team, and if someone took a shot at him we would all be there to back him up. We would also all be closer for it, because that’s just how being on a team works. Now, if we backed Tucker up and he threw us under the bus for how we did so, that would probably create an irreparable rift and distrust between us. So when Pedroia didn’t back up Barnes and the rest of his teammates for targeting Machado, the other guys in that clubhouse justifiably lost respect for him. Pedroia took an opportunity to bring the team together and turned into a situation where they were untrusting and disappointed in each other--awful leadership from a player who is supposed to be the de facto captain of the clubhouse.
I also have a massive issue with the language that Pedroia uses in the aforementioned quote. In my opinion, he is really passing off the blame for the lack of leadership last season and the inevitable repetition of that same issue this year. He alludes to the existence of other players on the team that could have been leaders too, but that’s really not their role, and he should know that. When Dustin Pedroia was 23 years old, as Benintendi was last season, he wasn’t asked to command the clubhouse like he is asking Benny “with the good hair” to do. Pedroia had competent and committed leaders like the previously mentioned David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek. Those guys didn’t look at Pedroia and say, “you shoulder the load, kid,” as he is seemingly doing to the young talent on this team. It’s not their role; it shouldn’t be their responsibility. All they should be focused on is going out and playing ball, while the senior members of the clubhouse worry about baseball politics and bringing the team together.
Pedroia’s unfortunate shortcomings have left us to wonder who will be there to pick up the pieces when the going gets tough. The obvious answer is Chris Sale, but the devastatingly correct answer is David Price. Sale has many of the same qualities that led Red Sox Nation to put its faith in Pedroia: he’s fiery, he plays with a lot of emotion, he’s a competitor, and most of all he’s extremely talented. He seemed to even want the role as he, time and time again, was willing to back up teammates when they were wronged. Even as we may long for a leader like Sale, it just doesn’t seem to be the in the cards for the Red Sox. During the 2017 campaign, the Red Sox players undeniably gravitated towards the overpaid and underperforming diva that is David Price. This was such a shame; Price is a great leader but a terrible person to follow, if that makes any sense. Instead of inspiring his teammates to go out and win baseball games, he routinely motivated his teammates to attack the manager and the Boston media. In one such instance, Price bombarded former Hall of Fame pitcher and current color commentator Dennis Eckersley as he boarded the team plane, sarcastically calling him the greatest pitcher of all time before telling him to “get the f--- out of here!” This was followed up by a round of applause from Red Sox players including Dustin Pedroia, the man who we all believed would lead the Sox. This is exactly the kind of leadership the Red Sox don’t need leading into the 2018 season. A team with talented players who are easily distracted (see Hanley Ramirez and Xander Bogaerts) does not need any more diversions than already come along with a 162 game schedule.
David Price being the leader of this team is bad news for the Red Sox. Hopefully, somebody else will step up or the talent of this group may not be enough to make up for the deficiency in intangibles.
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