BOSTON — Former Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein is not a candidate to replace fired chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom, team president and CEO Sam Kennedy said Thursday. The club will immediately begin a “thorough” search for Bloom’s replacement at the top of its baseball operations department.
Recent speculation from DraftKings’ Jared Carrabis has centered around a potential return to Boston for Epstein, who served as GM from 2003 to 2011 and brought two World Series titles to the Red Sox (2004, 2007). But Kennedy, one of Epstein’s closest friends, explicitly said a reunion won’t take place.
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“I can rule out Theo Epstein as a candidate for one of these two positions,” Kennedy said. “I know there’s speculation, there’s professional history, there’s an even longer personal history. But I can rule Theo Epstein out as a candidate for one of these positions.”
Epstein hasn’t worked for a team since leaving his role as Cubs president of baseball operations in Nov. 2020. He has worked for Major League Baseball as a consultant for “on-field matters” over the past three years and joined the private equity firm Arctos Sports Partners in Feb. 2021. It’s unclear if the 49-year-old Epstein ever wants to get back to running a team. Some speculation has centered around him potentially returning to a club in an ownership role in the future.
“My sense is that Theo has other aspirations and challenges on his list,” McAdam said. “I believe at some point he will head up an expansion team, be the president of the organization and build it in his own image and how he wants from the ground up and really cement and put his footprints on another franchise. I think that will be the last thing that he wants to conquer in the game.”
The next head of Boston’s baseball operations department will be the fourth since Epstein resigned in 2011, joining Ben Cherington, Dave Dombrowski and Bloom. Kennedy pledged to include candidates from both inside and outside the organization in the search for Bloom’s replacement.
