So you wanna be a general manager, eh? Specifically, you wanna be the general manager of the Boston Red Sox. After all, you’re a child of New England: a New Hampshire native, a graduate of Amherst College with a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

You get a job with the Red Sox in 1999, become a temporary co-general manager in 2005 after your boss flees Fenway Park in a gorilla costume, revert to assistant general manager when he returns in more suitable clothing three months later, then get the job for real last month after he is lured to Chicago with a lot more money and a bigger title.

As you move into your new Fenway office, you think life can’t get any better than this. Weeks later, though, you discover that it can get a lot worse.

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The Boston Red Sox, trying to replace the Chicago Cubs as modern-day lovable losers, may be on the verge of extending their September swoon into a December descent. They may not realize it, but if they hire Bobby Valentine as their manager they could be adding injury to insult.

If the Red Sox brain trust thinks Valentine is the antidote to what has ailed them, they need to get a second opinion. They should at least expand their due diligence and delve into his history more thoroughly than maybe they have.

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As the baseball commissioner basks in the glow and glory of the third consecutive negotiation of a labor contract without a work stoppage, let’s remember that Bud Selig, first as a club owner, then as commissioner, played an integral role in most of the eight work stoppages that preceded this prolonged period of peace.

Before he became commissioner, Selig, as owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, was chairman of the Player Relations Committee, which set and directed the owners’ labor policy and strategy. The policy was generally misguided and the strategy almost always flawed.

But Selig’s worst mistake in judgment of labor matters came just before he became the acting commissioner and just afterward.

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