Dave Dombrowski
They aren’t exactly seismic changes, but they are changes, nonetheless.
The change in the Red Sox’ front office this offseason, started of course, with Mike Hazen heading to the Diamondbacks to become their general manager. And then, this weekend, news came down that team’s international and amateur scouting director, Amiel Sawdaye, would be following Hazen to Arizona.
That led to Dave Dombrowski having to shift things around a bit.
Tuesday, in a conference call with the media, Dombrowski explained his approach when it comes to reconfiguring the Red Sox’ front office, which included the promotion of Eddie Romero to assistant general manager while forgoing naming a replacement to Hazen in the GM position:
“When I set the departments up at this time, and I guess I should probably address as mentioned to you before, really went into this with the idea of hiring a general manager and there were two ways to go about doing it, one was internal, one was external. There were a lot of names on the list that were external that I think would have done a very good job.
“Interviewed two people here first in Eddie and Amiel. Were very impressed with both of them. However, I didn’t think from their exposure to the major leagues at this point were quite ready to be general managers. Thought it would be better for them to step into that next area in being an assistant. Amiel, Mike Hazen had asked if he could take an individual with him and we granted him permission to take Amiel to interview for. And Amiel felt it was best for his situation to go ahead and take that assistant role with the Diamondbacks. He and Mike have worked very closely together over the years and we’re very thankful for everything he did for the organization but I thought it was better to stay internal with promoting individuals of course with Eddie’s promotion some of the other things that will take place without title changes attached to them, we have now had our instability of having people move on, the compliment to Amiel is that he’s grown Eddie to be in charge of Latin America which Amiel used to be involved in but Eddie now has been running that as well as the world from an international perspective.
“[Amateur scouting director] Mike Rikard, who has been our – Amiel had trained him – has been in charge of the draft the last coulee of years. We’re in very capable hands with Mike. He will be with us for a long-term basis. We’re also in a position where we have a director of professional scouting Gus Quattlebaum who will continue to have more put on his plate as far as preparation for trades. Also, [farm director] Ben Crockett is director of player development, he will continue to be in that role. [vice president of baseball administration] Raquel [Ferreira] will continue to be our vice president of baseball administration, she does a tremendous job for us. Zack Scott, which he basically has done, will have more growth within our analytics department. He will continue to head that.
“A place that I felt I would need some assistance as far as contacting other major league clubs when it comes down to trades, we’re in a spot where we have real good evaluators within our organization, very pleased with our professional scouts. This is more when I’m working directly on special assignment scouts and major league scouts, but we’re in a position where two people who could help me a great deal on that and that’s Frank Wren and Allard Baird. So they’ll continue to live where they live. They’ll be in Boston a little bit more often, but they’ll have increased responsibilities in their roles of helping me contact other major league clubs and be involved in trade conversations in addition to their analytics, analyzing and evaluating those clubs. With Allard taking more of that approach, he will not travel to the Far East as much as he has in the past but he will continue to oversee that.
“[Director of player personnel] Jared Banner will be in a position where he’ll be promoted and assume more responsibilities and he will run that operation for us and he’ll also assume some other responsibilities when it comes to player evaluation. So that kind of sets us up going into the future. I think it’s a really good hand. I thought the promoting of these individuals and giving them more responsibilities would be beneficial rather than brining in someone from outside the organization. I think this group is more than capable of handling the responsibilities.”