BOSTON - Red Sox principal owner John Henry said back in June that Ben Cherington was going to be his GM for a long time.
Flash forward to August 18, and Cherington had stepped down after being stripped of all his power.
With the Red Sox going into Tuesday's game with a 52-66 record and heading to their second straight last place finish, it wasn't a complete shock.
Cherington had no plans to fire John Farrell this year - and Henry put his faith in Farrell, too. But now Cherington is out of the picture, and we know that we can't exactly trust Henry's show of support.
It's Dave Dombrowski's decision to make now. But he won't get a chance to evaluate Farrell the rest of the season as he'll do for everybody else on the team. Farrell is undergoing chemotherapy treatments after a hernia surgery discovered that he has Stage 1 Lymphoma.
The two played some phone tag, but Dombrowski and Farrell connected Tuesday night, the same day he had his first round of chemotherapy treatments.
"I think first and foremost with John - and I don't know John real well, we've crossed paths, we know each other a little bit, but I wouldn't say that we know each other real well - I told him first and foremost you need to take care of your health," Dombrowski said. "And that's the most important thing. He's a very respected individual in the game, but I don't even think at this point as I told him, I said, 'You take care of yourself. When you have an opportunity to visit in person you call me and let me know and we'll work out getting together. He thought he would be able to visit by the end of this homestand, so we'll sit down and visit but just really to get to know each other even better and get his feeling on the ball club."
There was some chatter that Dombrowski would come in and clean house in the front office especially with Cherington out of the picture completely. Dombrowski obviously has a staff of people in Detroit that worked under him not even a month ago, so there's a possibility that some of those individuals join the Sox front office over the offseason. But Dombrowski isn't saying that that will be the case.
"I think it's important to know, and again talking to a couple people in the front office very quickly on the baseball end of it, I'm not here to blow up the operation," Dombrowski said. "There is a lot of good people here, good reputations. When I originally went to Detroit, we kept I think everybody there at the time and evaluated them over a time period. So it's a situation where I'd like to hopefully advance what we have, work together closely, and then we can add people to the organization from wherever it may be. We're open-minded to that, but I hope that most of the people here will be in position to stay and be able to help."