FORT MYERS, Fla. -- They had met only a few Michael Pineda Authentic Jersey months earlier, John Henry inviting Dave Dombrowski to lunch aboard his yacht in Miami. Yet there was Henry, at the press conference to announce his purchase of the Florida Marlins in 1999, telling the world what he thought of his general manager by holding a handmade sign that read, "In Dave We Trust."It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that Henry has turned to Dombrowski again, 17 years later, to restore his faith in how to build a winning baseball team.More than ever, Henry is unsure his philosophy still works. In his first eight seasons as principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, the team made the playoffs six times and won two World Series after going 86 years without a championship. But despite winning another title in 2013, over the past six seasons, the Sox have been to the playoffs only once and finished last in the American League East in three of the last four years.Once unassailable, the Red Sox Way -- Henry's way -- appears broken.And so, last summer, with another season Nolan Ryan Authentic Jersey wasted despite a franchise-record payroll nearing $200 million, Henry began "looking under the hood" for answers. At the same time, Dombrowski was let go after 14 seasons with the Detroit Tigers.It took less than three weeks for Henry to convince his partners to co-sign the hiring of his old friend as president of baseball operations. More importantly, he gave Dombrowski the autonomy to remake the roster, even approving the seven-year, $217 million signing of ace lefty David Price, precisely the sort of free-agent contract Henry has been loath to bestow."He has tremendous experience, tremendous relationships throughout the game," Henry said of Dombrowski. "He has a leadership skill that has been developed over how long he's been a general manager -- 35 years, 30 years. He's the total package from my perspective as someone to lead a baseball operation."Indeed, the Red Sox Way has become Dombrowski's Way.When Henry asked to meet Dombrowski on a Saturday afternoon late in the 1998 season, he was in negotiations to buy the Marlins from Blockbuster video mogul Wayne Huizenga.Henry, now 66, made his fortune by studying numbers, developing an algorithm that netted billions in commodities trading. Dombrowski, 59, was a baseball lifer, working his way up through the Chicago White Sox front office to become the youngest general manager in baseball history with the Montreal Expos in 1988.But Dombrowski also had a head for http://www.authenticlakersstore.com/authentic-17-roy-hibbert-jersey.html numbers, having majored in accounting at Western Michigan University. And Henry was an avid baseball fan, growing up listening to St. Louis Cardinals games on the radio and idolizing Stan Musial before becoming a limited partner in the New York Yankees in 1991."We hit it off very well," said Dombrowski, seated at a table in his office overlooking the Red Sox player-development complex. "We had lunch and visited for hours and just talked. It was a chance for him to ask me questions, me to ask him questions. I liked him. You could tell he was inquisitive yet he also understood the game of baseball. That came across well."So well, in fact, that Dombrowski turned down a chance to become the Los Angeles Dodgers general manager in favor of a five-year extension to work for Henry. After being directed by Huizenga to gut a team that won the 1997 World Series, Dombrowski oversaw a rebuilding effort in which he fleeced the Yankees for third baseman Mike Lowell, drafted Texas high school pitcher Josh Beckett and young first baseman Adrian Gonzalez and signed teenage slugger Miguel Cabrera out of Venezuela.The Marlins were using analytics http://www.authenticrangersshop.com/authentic-30-henrik-lundqvist-jersey.html even before Henry bought the team. According to Dombrowski and longtime assistant Frank Wren, Florida was among the first teams to enlist AVM Systems, a company that helped pioneer the study of sabermetrics. But while Henry espoused the use of data, baseball had not yet entered the Moneyball era in which statistical analysis became a widespread team-building tool.
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