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| Sox Are 'Scrappy Underdogs' |
Finally,
someone in the Red Sox ownership group is willing to say the Emperor has no clothes. Today in Fort Myers, team President and CEO
Larry Lucchino stated the following about the fake 793-game "sellout" streak: "It's going to rest in peace, I think, sometime in April I suspect." The dubious, oft-mocked streak has been aided by the team doling out unsold tickets to charitable organizations at the last minute. However, Lucchino had an answer for that as well:
"Our comp tickets are among the lowest in all of baseball. We talk about having more people in the ballpark than there are seats for them. That's been the operating definition." To his credit, Lucchino was candid about the abysmal play of recent Red Sox teams,
"We have fallen considerably. We used to have incentives in contracts related to on-base percentage to show you how important we thought that it was. I think there was a kind of deviation from that somewhere along the way." And, he looks forward to the role of—as he put it—'scrappy underdogs'. But, without question, the best part of his press event today was his emphatic "no comment" to two questions from
Dan Shaughnessy (author of the recent
Terry Francona book). Pointedly, he later directly answered the
identical questions from other reporters. Hey, this is the guy who invented the "Evil Empire" moniker. For all his warts, you gotta love
that part of Larry Lucchino.
