Now Playing at Fenway

John Henry Clears the Air Red Sox Style on WEEI
'He Left for a Reason to Be Named Later'
(Or Maybe a Deep Throat to Be Named Later)

The Leak Stops Here!
(err, not exactly...)

“Unfortunately we had a lot of contention at the end (of the negotiations). Anytime you have unnamed sources driving the media and there’s a media frenzy, it’s difficult to have a negotiation in which things are leaking our accurate, things are leaking out inaccurate things are leaking out, and that does cause problems in any negotiation and has been a problem in the past in prior negotiation. And it certainly, it creates a trust issue when that’s happening. Well who’s leaking this?...

“You have to have it (unnamed sources) in a free society. I guess you have to have that, after all if you remember Watergate, the problem… that all was about trying to eradicate leaks in the White House, that’s how that all began. And if there hadn’t been an unnamed source, Nixon probably would have gotten away with some things that were going on at that point.

“When I first met Larry Lucchino, one of his aphorisms when I first met him was 'there are no secrets in baseball.' So things have a tendency to leak out… They (the leaks) have done damage, and they have done damage in the past and there’s not a law against it. The unfortunate thing is that when someone calls you for a comment they will say ‘well we won’t use your name, we’ll protect you, we won’t say, for instance, it came from the Red Sox and then the person has no risk. He can put forward his agenda with no risk and… it may not be an agenda, it may be a simple stab at the truth, but it may not always be 100 percent accurate because they may not be involved in a particular negotiation. It’s an issue and it certainly was an issue near the end because we had a number of leaks that were inaccurate, at least I felt they were inaccurate, I remember one week reading something in the paper and thinking it was highly inaccurate and finding out well maybe it wasn’t that inaccurate but generally the early leaks weren’t that accurate at least in regard to the things I was looking at… but near the end they were and that really causes people to say to each other ‘well what’s going on here?’

“I didn’t necessarily agree with everything he left over, but I think I understand…”

“I think they (leaks that caused things to unravel at the end) were significant (part of the breakdown)

“They’re still happening, there still happening. Today I read on the front page of a newspaper that I didn’t get involved in the negotiations until after Theo quit, and this was an unnamed team source it said… It’s a continuing thing, it’s not going to stop. We can all whine about it that unnamed sources suck but it’s part of baseball.

“You’re right, late in the process, there were leaks that were more accurate and unfortunate. And where did they come from? I don’t know where they came from. I actually tried to find out where they came from. Yes (they were destructive to the process). The problem is the story is being driven by leaks. It’s not being driven by Theo or Larry himself. It’s being driven by people that don’t necessarily have all the facts… but near the end there were some leaks, but only some leaks, that were accurate and those were the ones that would drive us up the wall… $1.2 million for instance. That I saw 20 minutes after the meeting. Yes (that drove Theo up a wall). It drove all of us up the wall. That was a huge irritant at the end.

“What can you do (about the leaks)? You can’t pass a law against unnamed sources. You can try to route them out and make sure that you don’t have them but you don’t really want to go on a witch hunt." -- 11.3, John Henry on WEEI