I hope Dan Duquette gets another job, because he deserves one.

Granted, Duquette's Red Sox didn't sport an impressive ratio of wins vs. payroll the last couple of years, but at least they weren't the Dodgers, right?

Anyway, if you follow the Red Sox, you know that Duquette does have his weaknesses. I spent six months following the Red Sox, and the biggest weakness I noticed is that Duquette didn't seem to have much use for other human beings, aside from perhaps his immediate family and whoever happens to be signing his paychecks. He's an insecure man who enjoyed the power that comes with running a baseball team, but not the human relationships that can greatly facilitate running a baseball team. What's more, he often came across as arrogant, as more important than virtually everybody else connected with the team.

In Boston, that's a problem because everybody -- the fans, the writers, the superstar players, the star players, the part-time players -- consider themselves more important than the general manager. There may not be an i in team, but there are thousands of bosses in Boston. And while Duquette seemed quite accomplished at taking orders from those who outrank him, he didn't deal well with orders from the rest of us. So I think he's more suited to a city with fewer fans, fewer writers, and fewer superstars. Come to think of it, while I've written some horrible things about him in other places, if Dan Duquette replaces Allard Baird tomorrow, I will immediately become his biggest fan in the world, aside from perhaps his immediate family.

That won't happen, though. Duquette's not that stupid, and Royals owner David Glass isn't that smart. So (getting back to reality) what does all this mean for the Red Sox in 2002? Barring an unlikely collapse by the Yankees, it means the Red Sox will be fighting the Mariners or Athletics for the wild card, and that's only if Pedro Martinez is healthy enough to start 30 games.

There's plenty of talent in the lineup, of course; in fact, the more I think about it, the more I have to acknowledge the distinct possibility that the Red Sox could win 100 games this season. They've essentially stockpiled talent like the Mets have, the difference being that Johnny Damon (28) and Tony Clark (30) and Manny Ramirez (29) are all significantly younger than Roberto Alomar and Mo Vaughn (both of whom are 34) and Jeromy Burnitz, who will turn 33 two weeks into the season.

No, in the end I think it's the Red Sox front office that will hamstring the club. It's not that the front office doesn't contain plenty of talent. President Larry Lucchino was successful in Baltimore and San Diego, interim general manager Mike Port was successful (to a degree) in Anaheim, and minister without portfolio Doug Melvin was successful (to a degree) in Arlington.

But sometimes you can have too much talent. When a baseball writer asked Port if too many cooks might spoil the proverbial broth, he responded, "Yes ... but it's all about knowing when to separate the wheat from the chaff."

Misplaced metaphor aside (I think we know what he meant), Port should know better. When the Angels fired Port on April 30, 1991, they replaced him with Dan O'Brien. Four months later, the Angels hired Whitey Herzog to perform roughly the same duties as O'Brien ... but they didn't fire O'Brien, leaving virtually everyone to wonder who the hell was running the team. One Angels executive later described the arrangement as "an experiment in hell ... Both on their own probably could have succeeded, but together it was one and one equaled five."

O'Brien traded for an over-the-hill Alvin Davis, to the utter surprise of Herzog. According to then-manager Buck Rodgers, at one point the Angels were hoping to acquire Bob Patterson, but someone got their signals crossed and acquired Ken Patterson instead.

After two years of this silliness, O'Brien got fired. Four months later, Herzog, finally with the complete control that he presumably craved, resigned. And the experiment in hell was officially over.

It just doesn't work without one man at the top who's able to take decisive action. It's true that Yankees GM Brian Cashman doesn't have a great deal of authority -- that job is too big for any one man -- but George Steinbrenner keeps everybody on their toes. In Boston, you've got two owners used to getting their own way, a powerful team president, an interim GM and two or three GM's-in-waiting. So what's going to happen, I think, is that if Dan O'Dowd (for example) wants to talk to the Red Sox about a trade, he 1) won't be quite sure who to call, and 2) if he does figure out who to call and is able to agree on a deal, he'll have to wait for the various layers of management to approve the deal.

Actually, even when Duquette was the GM, that's the way things have been in Boston for the last few years. And that's not a good way to run a business, whether you're trying to win baseball games or sell industrial lubricants.

By the way, one of the interesting things about Mike Port is that people used to say the same things about him that they now say about Dan Duquette (which might explain why the two of them have been able to get along in Boston). As Ross Newhan wrote in The Anaheim Angels, Port "was quickly viewed -- by players, public and press -- as cold and calculating, an executive without heart ..."

Remind you of anyone you know and despise, Red Sox fans? Port was also accused of looking at players as if they were nothing more than their statistics in the Baseball Register, which of course is something else that's been said of Duquette. I don't know if either of those criticisms of Port are particularly fair -- come to think of it, if I were a GM, people would say the same sorts of things about me -- but my point is that Port is, at least in some ways, going to come across as the second coming of the Duke.

And I suspect that Port, just like the Duke before him, will discover that he and Beantown aren't a great fit. Not to worry, though; back in Fantasyland, there's soon going to be an opening for a fully-functioning GM in Kansas City ...

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My apologies to those of you expecting a sequel to Wednesday's column about baseball ages today, as previously advertised. Sometimes current events take control of the content, but the promised column will appear in this space on Monday.

Rob can be reached at rob.neyer@dig.com, and to order his books, including the just-published Feeding the Green Monster, click here.