Terry Francona fired

Terry Francona fired, Terry Francona didn't warn that he'd come back as a ghost to haunt the Red Sox if they fired him. But it was hard not to conclude, after Thursday's post-mortem in which a drained Francona was seated alongside general manager Theo Epstein, the man who sacked Little eight years ago, that Francona is tempting the same fate. It's a tried-and-true John W. Henry course of action in the face of mind-numbing debacles that make all his spreadsheets as useful as paper airplanes. 

Listening to both Epstein and Francona, while CEO Larry Lucchino watched from the side of the room, here were the most logical conclusions to be drawn:

(A) Francona will not be back.

(B) Francona does not want to be back.

(C) Francona will not be back, but it will be made to look like he didn't want to be back.


"I know we don't believe in scapegoats; in particular nobody blames Tito for what happened in September," Epstein said Thursday afternoon on Yawkey Way, which is the last place the Red Sox expected to be on the eve of a postseason that begins Friday in Texas and New York. Terry Francona fired,

You could hear the guffaws all the way from Hickory, N.C., where Little is Grandpa Grady, living in comfortable retirement.

The manager was the one who reinforced the idea that after eight seasons, he might have reached his limit. "It's a fair question," Francona said when asked whether he wanted to be back.

To a follow-up inquiry about whether this had been his most trying season, he said:

"Only because it's now," he said. "There's not a whole lot here that isn't trying even in the best of, you know, because everything is so important to people here, and that's good. But because it's fresh and raw, it seems that way, but there have been a lot of trying moments here. We just fought through them, I think, a little bit better."

If Francona, who can make a strong case for being the best manager this team has ever had, isn't going to take the fall for the worst collapse in baseball history -- at least as measured by the biggest lead lost in September -- the Red Sox would have announced they were exercising his option for the 2012 season. The same way the Cleveland Indians did Thursday with Manny Acta, who has two fewer World Series titles on his résumé.

The Red Sox did no such thing, which will only inflame the legions of Francona bashers who lit up the talk-show phone lines Thursday with their calls for his head.

Instead, Epstein announced a group huddle -- which might come as soon as Friday -- to determine Francona's future, a discussion that will include chairman Tom Werner, Lucchino and Henry, who joked in 2003 that rather than uttering the usual celebratory tagline, "I'm going to Disney World," he was substituting, "I'm firing Grady Little."

In the course of those discussions, the group is likely to discuss a perception held by some within the organization that this team -- despite four wildly successful months -- operated in a vacuum of clubhouse leadership. That in turn cultivated a climate lacking accountability, over which the manager presided with a curious sense of detachment, a marked departure from his previous approach, when he was fully engaged with his entire roster. Terry Francona fired,