Frank Wren Unlikely To Be Named Red Sox GM

While former Braves/Orioles general manager Frank Wren, currently the Red Sox’ senior vice president of baseball operations, had previously been tabbed as a leading candidate for the GM vacancy in Boston, Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports reports that Wren is now “unlikely” to become the team’s next general manager (Twitter link). Wren, as WEEI’s Rob Bradford recently pointed out, resides in Atlanta and wasn’t a guarantee to accept a greater role with the Sox even if the team wanted to promote him. Per Rosenthal, Wren is happy with his current position within Boston’s front office. The Sox, of course, are in the market for a new GM after Mike Hazen was hired as the new GM of the Diamondbacks.

President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said yesterday that the ideal scenario for the Sox would be to fill the GM void internally. That leaves a fair number of options, but MLB Network’s Peter Gammons reported earlier today (via Twitter) that the question among GM circles is whether Red Sox vice president of amateur/international scouting Amiel Sawdaye would take the “diminished” GM role in Boston. Certainly, even though Sawdaye would be second in command as opposed to the top decision-maker, it would seem logical that Sawdaye would welcome the promotion. And indeed, the Boston Herald’s Evan Drellich tweets that the likely removal of Wren’s name from the running now places Sawdaye in the spotlight.

Also of note with regard to the Boston front office is Gammons’ report that analytics director Tom Tippett has left the team. Drellich reports that Tippett, who spent the 2008-13 seasons as the team’s director of information services before rising to the role of senior baseball analyst, was offered the opportunity to return but elected to pursue other avenues. Tippett told the Herald’s Michael Silverman that he could end up working for another club or within baseball in another capacity, adding: “…but I’m also interested in other spots and opportunities outside the sports world.” Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe tweets that Dombrowski said Tippett’s role will be filled, though he declined to specify if it’d be an external or internal hire and added that the position’s title is to be determined.

Those interested in the inner-workings of the Red Sox’ front office under current and prior leadership groups will want to check out Drellich’s above-linked column, as he quotes Tippett in discussing the leadership styles and strengths of Dombrowski as well as former Boston GMs Ben Cherington and Theo Epstein. Notably, Drellich reads between the lines a bit and wonders how heavily Tippett was leaned upon by Dombrowski, as Tippett said back in August when speaking at a seminar entitled Sabermetrics, Scouting and the Science of Baseball that Dombrowki has a “smaller inner circle that he works with when he’s making decisions” than either Epstein or Cherington did.