Report: The Red Sox Conducted 5 Rounds of Interviews With a Baseball Ops Candidate Using an AI Bot

Winslow Townson. Getty Images.

And the hits keep right on coming. 

Like I was saying yesterday, when an organization as messed up and dysfunctional as the Red Sox have been starts to really implode, it's only a matter of time before the knives come out, in the form of anonymous reports:

And so it has. People on the inside, frustrated by the lack of any sort of cohesive, organizational strategy for getting this franchise back into contention, are sooner or later going to decide they have nothing to lose, and they'll start to talk. In this case, the reports are coming sooner. And probably later as well. 

But for now, we have this little chestnut to pass the time while the Circular Firing Squad forms up. And it's a doo-oozy:

NBC Sports Boston -  Yahoo! Sports reporter Joon Lee joined NBC Sports Boston show Early Edition with Trenni on Tuesday and reported that the Red Sox used an AI bot to conduct interviews with a baseball operations job candidate.

"What's happening with the Red Sox, with Sam Kennedy, with Craig Breslow, with Alex Cora, is a state of organizational dysfunction," Lee said, as seen in the video player above. "I heard last night about an interview with -- the Red Sox were trying to recruit a new person for their baseball operations department, and during this interview process, the entire interview was conducted with an AI bot, where you would record the answers to the questions and then the Red Sox would then evaluate them.

"And this wasn't just one round. It wasn't just two rounds. It was five rounds of interviews where this person did not talk to another person in the Red Sox organization, and this source told me that he had also interviewed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, with the San Diego Padres.

"The Dodgers have kind of been the organization that the Red Sox have been trying to emulate for the last five years (in terms of) sustainability, a big market team that knows how to spend money at times, but also is able to develop young prospects, which they've done successfully over the course of the last decade.

"What he told me was that the gap between the field, the people skills of (Dodgers president of baseball ops) Andrew Friedman -- who, obviously relies a lot on numbers dating back to his time in Tampa Bay -- and what he dealt with with Craig Breslow was so far apart that it seemed like utterly delusional that the idea that this is what the Red Sox think the Dodgers are doing is just absolutely crazy. The gap between the two organizations and how they're trying to function is just miles and worlds apart."

I'm going to admit my own ignorance here. The last job interview I was involved in was with Dave Portnoy, talking about me leaving WEEI and coming back to Barstool full time. It lasted 90 seconds and a deal was struck. Technologically, it was a notch below this:

The world has changed a lot since 2016. For all I know, AI is an essential tool for finding the right candidate for certain positions. Though based on the reaction of the unnamed interviewee here it certainly doesn't sound like it. Not through five rounds of interviews where he never spoke to a living, breathing human in the organization. 

At the same time, it totally tracks. If you asked me to guess which professional sports franchise in North America conducts its business this way, without knowing any of the other details, I'd guess it was John Henry's baseball team. You just know that he's watched Moneyball a hundred times, while rubbing his nipples and moaning with delight not just at the scenes where he's portrayed, but at the ones where Jonah Hill appears to completely rethink everything the human race had learned about baseball. The fact that the 2002 Oakland A's had the AL MVP, a Gold Glove 3rd baseman with 34 HRs, the Cy Young winner, three starters with 15-plus wins and 200-plus innings and a 44-save closer, is all secondary in Henry's mind to the fantasy of the game being reinvented a data-miner proving the key to success was Scott Hatteberg getting on base. 

So it only follows that Henry would want to be on the cutting edge of letting bots make the very human decision of hiring a new baseball ops guy. In some twisted attempt to be more like the World Series champions, who presumably had some human executives sit down, pour this potential employee a cup of coffee and have conversations with him. The way it's been done since the Lincoln Administration. 

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The good news for this guy who had to be interviews by HAL from 2001, is that at least the AI bot had more warmth and charm than the owner of the team. The even better news is that presumably, he didn't get a job in this shitshow of a franchise.