Baseball history will not treat Tom Hicks kindly. There’s no reason it should. Hicks, who owned the Texas Rangers for a dozen years, was one of the most ineffective owners in recent decades, perhaps second only to Vince Naimoli, the founding owner of the Tampa Bay Rays.

One major move separates Naimoli’s ownership from Hicks’ in Texas. The best move Naimoli made in Florida was selling the Rays to Stuart Sternberg, who has rescued the franchise from oblivion and turned it into an on-field, if not box office, success.

In Hicks’ tenure, he gets credit for lots of bad moves and one outstanding move.

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John Henry, the Red Sox principal owner, says that neither he nor Tom Werner, the club chairman, or Larry Lucchino, the president, was the source of comments last week that disparaged the team’s recently departed manager, Terry Francona, who left with two World Series championships.

Though short of lie detector tests, there’s no way of knowing if Henry’s claim is correct, I would like to think it is.

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The Yankees and the Phillies received invitations but didn’t stay at the party long. The Red Sox weren’t invited, snubbed for the second successive season. Invitations were not extended either to the Angels, Mets, Cubs, White Sox, Giants or Twins.

Those nine teams spent the most money this year preparing for the big party, and their fancy duds hang in the closet, for the most part unworn. Their problem is they can’t return them. The stores where they bought them have a strict no-return policy.

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