John Henry dismantled the Red Sox six years ago in an effort to save money and repeatedly lied about it before basically disappearing altogether into a Wizard of Oz ownership role. His 2020-era ploy was stupid and bad and wrong, but the good news for him is that very few people will remember or care if the Red Sox continue to improve, year by year, a result on which he counted and got, but which took longer than expected to develop. Once an upstart owner, or at least something closer to it than most,
Henry’s now firmly part of a baseball establishment that’s trying to remake the sport in the NFL’s image, i.e., use wage-repressing techniques to promote the game as a clash of cultures, the byproduct of which would keep more money in his pockets, full.
It’s not great, but compared to Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Henry looks amazing. Lost in the (unfortunately self-perpetuating) stupid Tom Brady/Bill Belichick argument is that the real beneficiary of their symbiotic greatness was Kraft, whose emboldenment has turned his self-importance meter to 11 billion, right in line with his fortune. After apparently consulting Maximizing the Streisand Effect For Dummies before deciding to kick Macklemore off Ed Sheeran’s tour, he backed Sheeran into a corner that he has neither the tact nor willingness to escape, though his opening acts and backing band do, as they subsequently quit his tour in a direct F-you to Kraft. And yes, Sheeran really wrote an Instagram post with the sentence “I am not complicit” in order to please an octogenarian self-obsessed Master of the Universe, and it’ll follow him for the rest of his life. All because of Macklemore, and the situation in Gaza, which Kraft thinks the rapper would understand better if they spoke face-to-face. Because Kraft has all the answers on a thousand-year boondoggle, see? Why wouldn’t he?
When the Red Sox faced outrage in November for allowing a Palantir banner above the Green Monster during the Armed Forces Bowl, the team took the cowardly way out, saying that the ad placement was out of their hands, which of course it was not. Their house, their rules. Kraft took that one step further, and in the opposite moral direction, by coordinating among NFL owners to force Macklemore off Sheeran’s tour, which would make you wonder about how much more they coordinated about if it wasn’t already obviously everything. These are sick, demented people who wouldn’t touch grass if they owned the world’s supply of it, which, honestly don’t tempt them. More than that, they are actively stupid. At every step possible, they’ve done everything they can to amplify Macklemore’s message, which is more or less “killing is bad.” Kraft wants you to know – needs you to know – that he believes the opposite. And now you do. We know far less about Henry. In this case, and maybe only this one, that’s a point in his favor. I guess he relearned how to count.
