Dave Dombrowski is out of a job. The Boston Red Sox parting ways with their president of baseball operations in the wake of Sunday night's game against the New York Yankees.
This isn't the first time in Dombrowski's long history in baseball that a team has opted to go in a different direction. This time, however, it wasn't Hawk Harrelson's doing.
Dombrowski, a Chicago native, grew up a White Sox fan and got his first job in the game working for his hometown team in the late 1970s under then general manager Roland Hemond. According to an extremely detailed Boston Globe piece written by Bob Hohler and published in 2015 after Dombrowski was hired by the Red Sox, the 20-something Dombrowski spent years working in every aspect of the White Sox organization, including operating the scoreboard at Old Comiskey Park, traveling with scouts and working throughout the minor leagues.
The Globe's piece has one story that will make White Sox fans smack their foreheads. In 1983, at just 26 years old, Dombrowski was the White Sox minor league director and had the responsibility of running the draft. With the team's first-round pick, he narrowed his options down to two players: high school pitcher Joel Davis, who he selected at No. 13, and University of Texas hurler Roger Clemens, who went several picks later at No. 19, to the Red Sox, coincidentally enough.
Oops.
But Dombrowksi was doing such a job with the White Sox that he was interviewed for the Seattle Mariners' general manager job at just 28 years old. He didn't get it, and that's where the Hawkeroo comes into play.
Team chairman Jerry Reinsdorf moved Harrelson from the broadcast booth to the general manager job after the 1985 season. Harrelson infamously fired skipper Tony La Russa and pitching coach Dave Duncan, but he also axed Dombrowski, who was the assistant general manager at the time.
MLB
Dombrowski obviously landed on his feet. The Montreal Expos hired him in 1987, and a year later he became the youngest general manager in the major leagues at 32 years old. In 1991, he became the first general manager of the Florida Marlins, where he worked until 2001, winning the World Series in 1997. He spent more than a decade as the president of the Detroit Tigers, often terrorizing the White Sox while winning four American League Central crowns and a pair of AL pennants. He took the job with the Red Sox in the middle of the 2015 season and won the World Series last season before being fired Monday.
For that 2015 piece, the Boston Globe asked Reinsdorf about Dombrowski's time on the South Side.
"What stands out," Reinsdorf told the paper, "is my stupidity in letting him leave here. I've seen him grow from a kid just learning the business into one of the best executives in the game."
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