In the rather insular world of top baseball executives, it’s hard to imagine more of a contrast that the one between Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro and Dave Dombrowski, who was fired this week by the Boston Red Sox.



According to the Athletic’s Evan Drelich, Dombrowski upset ownership and eventually lost his job “because he spent a huge amount of money and was no longer delivering results.” But also because the ever more interconnected baseball operations processes that fell under his purview were “sometimes chaotic,” and because “he did not take full advantage of the available information and resources.” Less than a year removed from a World Series championship, he finds himself without a job.



On Twitter, after news of the firing broke, I joked that Dombrowski had made the crucial mistake of believing that there’s no salary cap in baseball. Owners throughout the game continue to show that the luxury tax threshold...