The point is really that Bobby said this to the press? That is what Pedroia was
complaining about. Did BV talk to Youk about his impressions and work with him
to help him to figure out what he should do to be better? We have absolutely no
idea of what really happened other than BV's one sentence and Pedroia's comment
that gets quoted many times.
I used to be a manager of software engineers building and maintaining a product-
some of great talent, big egos, some with personality defects and other personal
issues that affected how they worked with other people and how they performed.
And my group was a team - they had to work together and rely on each other to do
their part. I didn't announce problems to the department or to the customers. I
worked with the individual to help him/her deal with the problem and be a more
effective worker and team member. If talking, setting goals, and reassignments
didn't work out the person would be fired or encouraged to get another job
before being fired. Of course people didn't have multi-year contracts but you
still had to follow lots of corporate guidelines to fire a person with a history
of evaluations etc. and it took time to do it.
I think the same approach applies to baseball management and how they deal with
players who aren't playing as well as they should. Talent, experience, work
habits, attitude, personality, personal issues all go together to yield results
- good or bad. Team spirit is an important factor. We really know very little
of how Bobby approached this - you can't go by sound bites. We do know that
Francona was very successful for a few years and then last year somehow
everything fell apart. Again we really know very little of what happened to
change the team's playing so rapidly last September.