A little humility ended a five-year silence.
Red Sox owner John Henry penned a tweet for the first time in more than five years to respond to Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy admitting a mistake about NESN in an X post.
“Historic,” Henry wrote in his first non retweet since June 11, 2021 in response to one of his employees commenting on one of Henry’s many entities.
Henry has become recluse as an owner in recent years, much to the consternation of Red Sox fans angry that their team no longer spends like it could as a big-market team.
The 76-year-old certainly has his attention spread out these days, now that he also owns Liverpool FC of the Premier League, The Boston Globe and RFK Racing. In December, Fenway Sports Group announced it was selling the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins to Hoffmann Family of Companies.
That Shaughnessy’s tweet, though, would bring him out of his X hibernation — when Henry last tweeted it was still Twitter — is quite interesting since it combines so many different entities that Henry owns.
Shaughnessy, the longtime columnist for the Globe, quote tweeted in a response to a post criticizing Red Sox spring training coverage: “Greedy Cheap NESN. Red Sox fans deserve so much better.”
Henry and his Fenway Sports Group reportedly own 80 percent of NESN.
Shaugnessy then corrected himself about his tweet, with the gripe seemingly being that Red Sox fans had used a Pirates broadcast to air a spring training game.
“I am told this is industry-practice across MLB these days – allowing teams to televise more spring games. Fair’s fair,” Shaugnessy wrote Sunday.
“In this instance, NESN is being neither greedy, nor cheap. My bad.”
Henry then emerged to provide his cheeky response to his Boston Globe employee, although it’s unknown if this will be discussed in any future performance reviews.
The Red Sox owner has not tweeted since that post, so perhaps it will be another approximately 60 months before he takes to X.
His tweet made Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy laugh, although Kennedy does not believe this means Henry will be active.
“I hope not, for his sake,” Kennedy said on the “Fenway Rundown” podcast, per masslive.com. “It’s a rough and tumble, tough, toxic place to be. But, yeah, I saw that and I obviously had to smile.”
Masslive.com reported that Henry has not answered questions from the Red Sox beat in six years, although he’s done two other interviews in that time.
He’s come under heat in recent years since the Red Sox have missed the playoffs five times in seven years since winning their last World Series in 2018.
Last year’s team lost to the Yankees in three games in the wild-card round, and added Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras and Ranger Suarez this offseason while losing Alex Bregman.
Kennedy pushed back against the narrative of Henry being a distant owner.
“Look, it’s funny. We all sort of laugh internally. John is so active, so involved. We talk every day, multiple times a day. He and (chief baseball oficer Craig Breslow) talk, text WhatsApp multiple times a day,” Kennedy said. “John and (wife) Linda relatively recently did a fireside chat with all of our employees at a sort of kind of a town hall setting. And so, very accessible and very much leading our organization. The choice to not engage day to day with members of the media is a choice that has served John well because it’s just something that he leaves to others.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
