The Red Sox parted ways with Bobby Valentine on Thursday, but it's not necessarily a move in a vacuum, rather the latest in an attempt to overhaul the entire organization.
Sure, the club will undergo its second managerial search in as many winters, but the decision to move on from Valentine was a necessary move, considering the direction the club is heading in.
"This season was a tremendous disappointment," general manager Ben Cherington told NESN's Tom Caron at Fenway Park on Thursday afternoon. "We take collective responsibility for that."
"We look to next year, we felt that in order to [improve], there needed to be a fresh start that started a few weeks back with the trade."
That trade, of course, sent Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and Nick Punto to the Dodgers. That transaction gives the club a ton of flexibility heading into the offseason, an offseason that begin Thursday, with the decision to move on from Valentine.
"This was a disappointing year in a lot of ways," Cherington said. "For us to be good again, there needs to be a change in the culture."
Red Sox president and CEO Larry Lucchino agreed.
"This was something we all share a full measure of responsibility for," he said. "We need to realize the things that we can do better in the front office and ownership to do things better.
"The process is already under way and has been for some time. We have been moving forward already to a better, more successful future for the Red Sox."
Now, the Red Sox turn their attention toward the managerial search. Rumors have already started to fly, and both Cherington and Lucchino indicated they're hopeful things go quicker this time around.
Once that's done, it will be time to retooling a roster that was decimated by injuries — and the aforementioned trade. Cherington recognizes that the club is in a unique position with all of the cleared-up cash, but he is already preaching the importance of discipline in testing the market.
"We have to be aggressive in our pursuit and disciplined in our execution," he told Caron. "There's times to be bold and times to take a step back and most importantly, we have identify what we have here already and that's the core we want to build around. … It's going to be a lot of work, but it's exciting to get to that work."
However it gets done, the objective is clear. The Red Sox want to get back to their winning ways.
"It's an obligation to get this team back to a competitive, winning, entertaining team," Lucchino said.
