Mike Celizic

When a man walks out on the job he dreamed of having all his life, a job for which he’s just been offered triple his previous pay, there’s something seriously wrong either with the man or with the job.

With most people, I’d pick the man as the one who’s stripped the threads on a couple of mental screws. But not with Theo Epstein, the man who authored the Miracle of Fenway. If Epstein, who took over as the general manager of the Red Sox at 28 and won the World Series at 30, is willing to turn his back on the team he grew up cheering for, a job he was offered $1.5 million a year to perform, there’s something terminally wrong with it.

Red Sox fans had better get used to that realization, and they had better hearken back to what life was like before 2004, when they entered the spring of every season knowing that waiting for them in the fall was only heartbreak. The Red Sox will get another general manager, but the job he faces is daunting.

The left fielder wants out. The center fielder is a free agent who can’t play center field any more. There’s no closer in the bullpen and no middle relief. The starting pitching is a mess. The newspapers, even more smothering in their coverage of the Sox than the New York papers are in their coverage of the Yankees, are starting to nip at the team’s heels. In the clubhouse, which not long ago was happier than a squirrel in a birdfeeder, there are stories of dissension.

In other words, the Red Sox are turning back into what they always have been — a team playing a game, as Bart Giamatti once wrote, that’s meant to break your heart.

Epstein may be young, but he didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. He became general manager of one of the most visible teams in American sports first because someone else — Billy Beane — turned it down but second, and more important, because Red Sox president Larry Lucchino thought he had the brains to do it.

The kid proved Lucchino right, getting to within a pitch of the World Series in 2003, his first year on the job, and into Boston’s first championship rings since 1918 in 2004. This year, his team limped into the playoffs for the third straight year.

But a man who is smart enough to do what no other general manager had been able to do for 87 years is also smart enough to see what’s over the horizon. And if Epstein saw reason to bail out, it can’t be good.

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After all, Brian Cashman, another relatively young G.M. who also worked his way up the corporate ladder, re-signed with the Yankees despite the certain knowledge that he would be browbeaten daily by the owner and stabbed in the back at least bi-weekly by George Steinbrenner’s Tampa cabal. Like Epstein, Cashman loves the team he helps run. Unlike Epstein, Cashman didn’t think things were bad enough to leave.

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