By Soo Youn ’96
As Red Sox general manager, a former Amherst baseball player took a laughingstock and made it a winner.
[Baseball] When the Boston Red Sox won the World Series on Oct. 30, it was the team’s third championship in a decade. Sweetening the moment, it provided the first win at Fenway Park in 95 years and a sense of healing from the Boston Marathon bombings six months earlier. And with players sporting unifying beards, the victory was full of theater.
After the game, cameras eventually found the 39-year-old general manager, who took the stage in jeans, a baseball cap and a championship T-shirt (over a dress shirt). Ben Cherington ’96 remembers exactly what he was thinking at that moment: “I wanted to get off the stage as quickly as I possibly could.”
Sporting News and MLB.com named the former English major 2013’s MLB Executive of the Year.
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
So, with childhood friends, he “found an empty place, quiet and away from everyone else. Had some beer, talked about what happened. That was pretty cool, to be there with guys I had grown up with.”
He had no desire to celebrate on TV, to join in the theater. “You do those things because you have to do them and they ask you to do them,” he says.
You also do those things because you’ve accomplished something commendable, even historic, in a town with a sharp memory.
The Red Sox ended the 2012 season in last place in the American League. Cherington—who became GM after the 2011 season—responded by, among other things, replacing the dramatic Bobby Valentine with manager John Farrell and picking up seven free agents in the off-season.
In 2013 the team won 108 out of 178 games. “What Ben did in the span of one off-season might rank as the greatest rebuilding job of all time,” says The Boston Globe’s Red Sox beat writer, Peter Abraham. “After an agonizing 2012 season, the 2013 Red Sox were a team even the greatest cynic had to admire.”
While rebuilding, “we never once talked about the World Series, because we don’t want to focus on outcomes,” Cherington says. “If we prepare the right way, if we invest in scouting the right way, if we find the right players in the draft, if we sign the right players from the Dominican Republic, if we have the best medical operation in baseball—if we do all those things over time, the outcomes will be there.”
On the night of the World Series win, Cherington walked through a tunnel to the dugout and then onto the field to talk to Farrell, as he does after every home game. “Obviously I knew there would be a celebration,” Cherington says, but because it was half an hour after the last pitch, he assumed the stands would be emptying. Instead, “literally every seat was still filled. I had never seen the ballpark completely full from that vantage point, after a game.”
As Cherington surveyed the fans, reporters were surveying him.
“The field at Fenway Park was full of players, their families, team employees and media,” says The Globe’s Abraham. “Ben spoke to reporters with just a hint of a smile, pointing out that the team had weaknesses he hoped to address in the off-season. Even then, in a moment of triumph, he was on point.”
The Three GMs
Three Amherst baseball alumni are Major League GMs. In a December New York Times article, all gave credit to retired Amherst Coach Bill Thurston.
- Cherington joined the Red Sox in 1999 as a scout. He was hired by then-GM Dan Duquette ’80 on Thurston’s recommendation.
- In 2007 Neal Huntington ’91 became GM of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which in 2013 made the playoffs for the first time in 21 years. Huntington got his start from Duquette on Thurston’s recommendation.
- Since Duquette became executive vice president of the Baltimore Orioles in 2011, the longtime losers have had two consecutive winning seasons.