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"If you could pick one guy -- among anybody in baseball -- to start against a hot club like Colorado,
it would be Josh (Beckett). Easy." - October 23, 2007, Sports Illustrated
"It's an organizational triumph because everybody played a part in it. The reality is that a Red Sox Way is being cultivated." - On winning the 2007 World Series
"The free-agent market has always been an inefficient market. Now with teams locking up their better players to extensions, it's become a horribly inefficient market. That's another factor driving our player development." - October 30, 2007, Sports Illustrated
"There's going to be a lot of pressure to go for the quick fix," he said. "If that means sacrificing more of the future than we're willing to do, we have to remain disciplined and pass on a potential quick fix." - On Trades
"To do this job you have to believe in every aspect of the job. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe in the people you work with."
Well, risk is a funny thing. We talk about it a lot at the Red Sox. You could say our approach is a bit of a paradox, because at the same time we are risk takers and risk-averse. I think we're risk takers in the sense that we'll try anything within reason, within moral boundaries, to get a competitive advantage. So if someone has an idea--no matter how crazy, no matter how off-the-wall, no matter how illogical it seems--as long as we don't have to expend a tremendous amount of resources to try it, we'll try it. Even if the odds seem stacked against us, we'll still try an endeavor that in the end, if we're successful, we think will help us. So in that sense of the word, we're not afraid to take risks. We're not afraid something will make us look foolish, or create a bad public perception--that's fine. We don't place a lot of weight on that. We'll take those kind of risks, so we're risk takers.
Where we're risk-averse is in situations where there are a lot of resources involved. And when I say resources, I really mean a percentage of our payroll. By design, we're risk averse with our payroll. We feel that we have tremendous resources, and the quickest thing that we can do to sacrifice that competitive advantage is to take an ill-advised risk with our payroll and have it backfire on us, eliminating that edge. So we are risk averse, because we want to make every single unit of resource count for us; every single dollar on the payroll really counts for us and translates into wins. So I think it is accurate to say that we're risk-averse and risk takers at the same time." - On Risk, Baseball Prospectus, February 9, 2004
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