Before The Boiling Point

I didn’t get to watch a lot of Red Sox games during the summer of 2012. I gave birth to my children in early June, and from then on it was all a blur. I tried to catch a few innings here and there (particularly if they were playing on the west coast), but it was hard to focus on anything other than feeding or burping the babies, especially at midnight.

As it turned out, it was a blessing. The Sox had an abysmal season, not only finishing dead-last in the division, but making also some embarrassing headlines for infighting among players and an attempted mutiny against manager Bobby Valentine.

Yup, my babies were doing me a favor by shielding me from baseball for a few months.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t hide from all of the ugliness. In August, news surfaced of a meeting in which players aired their grievances to the team’s owners and called for Valentine’s firing. What one report referred to as “a season’s worth of bad relations” was bubbling over.

As a diehard fan, it’s not what I wanted to hear. I know that over the course of a long, exhausting season, tempers are going to flare, but for it reach the point where players — employees — are rallying against their leader just didn’t sit well. Why didn’t cooler heads prevail? Were the conditions really that bad? Why wasn’t action taken sooner? Why didn’t they hold smaller, more informal meetings before the sit-down that “turned ugly almost immediately”?

Months later, when the season mercifully ended and Valentine was handed (or thrown) his walking papers, general manager Ben Cherington finally opened up about the meeting, which he said was intended to “provide a forum for people to express whatever frustration needed to be expressed.”

Sounds to me like it was too little, too late.

What really bothers me is that we’ll never actually know what happened in the months leading up to the now-infamous meeting; that for those of us on the outside, a huge piece of the puzzle will always be missing.

I thought about the disastrous 2012 season — and the ensuing fallout — earlier this week when reports surfaced that the CEO of a health system was resigning following a “rocky EHR implementation.” As one might expect, fingers were pointed… right away. In a letter to senior leaders, a group of more than a dozen physicians raised concerns about the new system, pointing to “aggressive” timelines and a “lack of readiness” among users, according to iHealthBeat.

Just like with the Sox incident, I have a burning question: what really happened? Did leadership fail, as the physicians seem to be implying? Did they attempt to communicate their concerns, only to be ignored? Or is it not quite that simple? Did the physicians who drafted the letter really go through the proper channels to try to solve problems they were experiencing, or is there more to it?

I’m not sure we’ll ever know the whole story— at least not for quite some time. And by then, the damage could already be done.