As Theo Epstein eyes Chicago, all eyes locally turn to Ben Cherington, the heir apparent to the Red Sox' GM job.
"Go back to Larry Lucchino's and Tom Werner's Friday press conference about the departure of Terry Francona," said the Boston Herald's Steve Buckley. "They kept bringing up Cherington's name over, and over, and over, and over,and over. There's a reason for that. They were posturing; they weregetting his name out there. They might as well just made theannouncement last week."
Michael Felger worries that appointing Cherington, Epstein's long-time assistant, will mean more of the same.
"You'll have a different person making the same calls," Felger said on 'Mohegan Sun Sports Tonight'. "This is nothing against Ben Cherington, nothing against him personally, but if he's just going to take directives from everybody else and do what Theo was doing, then what's the diff?"
But Buckley said that would be the case with any newcomer taking the job.
"I bristle at the notion that he's going to be a puppet GM, because I don't think any first-year rookie GM is completely autonomous, any more than Theo was in 2003," he said. "You think he was just pressing buttons, willy-nilly, doing whatever he wanted, without ownership coming in and asserting their authority? Absolutely not. Any rookie first-time GM is going to be, to some degree, a puppet."