Over the past 22 years, the Boston Red Sox have been one of the best MLB teams on and off the field, if not the sport’s most successful franchise.
In those two-plus decades, the Red Sox under the John Henry-led Fenway Sports Group broke the team’s famed 86-year title curse, won three more World Series championships, saved Fenway Park from demolition with a series of large-scale renovations between 2002 and 2017, sold out an MLB-record 820 straight games, have become MLB’s third-most valuable team with an estimated value of $4.5 billion, and now look to further transform the ballpark neighborhood with the $1.6 billion Fenway Corners development.
But Red Sox fans are still unhappy. Very unhappy.
Three last-place AL East finishes in the past four seasons and a projected decline in 2024 team payroll, extending what was a 5% drop in 2023 to $225 million, have darkened the mood around the Red Sox considerably. Team president and CEO Sam Kennedy and newly hired chief baseball officer Craig Breslow were loudly booed at the club’s Winter Weekend fan event, held this past Friday and Saturday.
“I want you to know the boos, the anger, the hate we see on social media, we get it,” Kennedy told the fans at the event. “It is our job to turn things around to make you proud. There’s only one way to turn the boos into applause, and that’s winning baseball games. That’s on us.”
Last week, FSG and Red Sox chair Tom Werner was forced to walk back comments from November about going “full throttle” to improve the team, as a major signing failed to materialize. At the Red Sox Winter Weekend, he denied speculation that FSG would be looking to sell the team.
“People ask that, and the cornerstone of Fenway Sports Group is the Boston Red Sox, and hopefully we’ll be stewards of this a couple more decades, at least,” Werner said.
The decline in Red Sox payroll spending, however, notably contrasts with rising activity in the soccer player transfer market by sister FSG club Liverpool FC of the Premier League.
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