Dan Duquette Was Right!
Think back. Try to think, all the way back to before the Red Sox were the best franchise in major league baseball. Think back to when Dan Shaughnessy was actually a popular figure because of his theory of the Curse of the Bambino, rather than being viewed as the sensationalist wanna-be that Curt Schilling wants us to think he is now. Back then, nothing could ever go right for the Red Sox. After all, the curse wasn’t just about not winning the World Series. It was about the mistakes management made, the players we lost and the championships that we never won. After all, the Curse started our greatest pitcher leaving - not the idea of flukishly losing the World Series every time we were close. This is an attitude that is tough to come by today, especially when half the fans at Fenway can’t remember the old days when hats weren’t pink and $20 could actually get you 4 beers. But if you recall, one of the greatest anti-heroes in the “Cursed” Red Sox history was Dan Duquette himself. He was demonized, scapegoated and blamed for all sorts of bad luck and poor decisions, but none resonated in our minds and stuck with us as much as remembering that he was the one who was wrong about Roger Clemens. Everyone remembers when that “moron” told reporters that Roger Clemens wasn’t quite the player he used to be. We were told by the GM that the single game strikeout record holder and fan favorite, Roger the Rocket, was in the twilight of his career. And for this, Dan paid dearly. After all, numbers don’t lie and 10 years later, Clemens was once again the highest paid player in baseball making all of us Sox fans wish he was still here. It has been very clear ever since that day in 1996 that Dan Duquette was wrong about him.
Except that he wasn’t!
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock in Indonesia for the past week, you know that George Mitchell released his report on steroids. You also know that Roger Clemens was named in it, and that there is a very specific account of what he did, when he did it, and where he did it. You can read the Clemens section of the report in the last article on the blog here, or just check out the Full Mitchell Report.
I think the one guy who is probably most relieved in light of Clemens now being labeled as a cheater has to be Dan himself. After all, he was right! Clemens wasn’t the same player anymore. He played one more clean year in 1997, we think, and won the Cy Young. OK, fine. We’ll even give him that one on his own. But he was not the unanimous choice. Not until the next year, when he was juiced up on Deca-Durabolin and Winstrol that Jose Canseco had hooked him up with. (Note that these are both anabolic steroids and this is not like Andy Pettite or other players admitting to the use of HGH to enhance recovery. Injecting with anabolics is about as far as you can go with roid use. It is straight up cheating with no gray area for discussion) Once he was juiced up in 1998, he had just as good of a season, and took home the second Cy Young in as many years as he had spent away from the Sox. Toronto sold high on him and sent him to the Yankees, and if you read the report, you will see that he took his steroid provider/trainer with him, even insisting that the Yankees hire him as a clubhouse employee to keep them close.
This is when Dan Duquette was probably the most pissed off. He was becoming famous for letting Roger Clemens go, and to a lesser extent, trading Jamie Moyer for Darren Bragg. The Sox were cursed, and he couldn’t win. Clemens won the World Series in his first year with the Yankees, rolling through the Red Sox on the way, and Duquette was just another crappy GM who couldn’t win. He was eventually fired in 2002 and basically left the Sox with his tail between his legs, being remembered as the only guy in the world who didn’t believe in Roger Clemens. After all, he didn’t win a World Series, so he was pretty much a failure, right?
Well now we know, in retrospect, that Dan wasn’t a failure
Clemens needed steroids to win. Plain and simple. So Dan was right! Clemens was in the twilight of his career. He wasn’t a monster of a pitcher. He wasn’t the most durable pitcher we’ve ever seen in his 20+ years in the pros. He was a drug user, and Duquette saw that he was a guy who wasn’t going to be worth the money they would have had to give him to retain him.
In fact, I will even go so far as to say that Duquette was actually a pretty good GM. OK, so Jamie Moyer would have been a great guy to have around for all those years. Better than Darren Bragg at least! But he never won a World Series and never made any great moves, right?
WRONG! Lets start remember Duquette for all he did. He may not have been the GM in 04 when the Sox won, but he only:
- Signed the World Series MVP (Manny Ramirez)
- Acquired a guy who won 16 games in 04 and started Opening Day (Pedro Martinez)
- Got the team captain as a minor leaguer (Jason Varitek)
- And brought in the guy who won the final game in every round of the playoffs (Derek Lowe)
And remember, he got 3 of those 4 guys in trades for the following players: Heathcliff Slocumb, Carl Pavano, and Tony Armas, Jr. (who was a player to be named later). What did Theo Epstein do that can hold up to that? We all talk about the Nomar trade as being the key to 2004, but really, it was everything that had been coming together in the years before. Theo saw that there was almost a World Series Winner on the field in Fenway, and he just filled in a couple pieces. The puzzle is a lot easier when it’s almost done, and we often forget that Duquette was the guy who started it.
So in the end, Dan Duquette turned out to be OK. He established the framework of the 2004 team that broke the curse. The same curse that was blamed for Clemens beating the Sox in a Yankee uniform year after year. But now, with our 20/20 hindsight, as we look back, we can safely say that he did OK.
Until recently, there were a lot of people who thought that Duquette had to be on drugs to let Clemens go. But really, it was Clemens who had to be on drugs in order to get back. Feel better today Dan, becuase after all, you were right.
Stumble it!