Given the way their clubhouse unraveled last season, with sensitive lefty David Price running the joint from his sick bed, the Red Sox were a year too late making a managerial change.

They should have fired John Farrell after the 2016 season and everyone knows it.

Beyond that, there’s no need returning to the butchery. As long as Farrell is nowhere near a lineup card or a bullpen phone, the man deserves a role in baseball.

He’s an intelligent, well-spoken man, and let’s not ever forget he survived a bout with cancer. He knows a thing or two about getting up off the canvas and returning to the fray.

As it turns out, one of Farrell’s new roles is going to include a chair on the “Baseball Tonight” set at ESPN. The network that brought you the laugh-out-loud “Dominant 20” that planted Patriots quarterback Tom Brady at a he’s-lucky-they-even-know-his-name No. 20 is now introducing the deposed manager of the Red Sox as its newest hardball talking head.

That’s right, folks: The man who threw NESN baseball analyst Dennis Eckersley under the bus last summer is now working . . . as a baseball analyst.

Tell me you’re not dying for the first time John Farrell has to break down a rough David Price outing.

Farrell, who will also do some scouting for the Cincinnati Reds, apparently underwent some training this offseason in anticipation of a new career in the exciting world of sports broadcasting. And while his media coaches surely did a great job teaching Farrell how to sit and smile, when to look into the camera, when not to look into the camera, and how to hold his hands so as not to look like Pat Robertson at a revival meeting, it’s possible they didn’t cover everything.

Allow us, then, to offer two vitally important pieces of advice to baseball analyst John Farrell.

No. 1: Tell it like it is — This phrase, which dates back to the days when the late, great Howard Cosell was palling around with Muhammad Ali and ruling the booth on “Monday Night Football,” has become something of a cliche by now. We always hope our analysts and play-by-play barkers will “tell it like it is,” but if they even try to do so they wind up as door-to-door encyclopedia salespeople.

So let’s compromise. If Farrell can’t always tell it like it is, he’ll be disrespecting viewers if he falls into a familiar trap and starts telling it like it isn’t. Think of the too-many times over the past five seasons when this or that Red Sox pitcher — and I’m talking about you, Clay Buchholz — frustrated Red Sox fans with his latest act of lethargy. And think of the too-many times that Farrell, speaking with the media after the game, would say that his lethargic starter “settled in and pitched some of his best ball for a while.”

That’s an actual John Farrell quote, delivered on the evening of May 4, 2015, in the aftermath of Boston’s 5-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays. Buchholz gave up five runs in 6-1⁄3 innings, dropping his record to 1-4 with a 6.03 ERA in six starts.

Farrell’s hope that night may have been to avoid calling out Buchholz. Managers do that. Sometimes they should do that. But there also comes a time when you begin to disrespect your fan base, and that was part of Farrell’s undoing in Boston. He spent all last season laying verbal rose pedals at the feet of Price, particularly in the aftermath of the L’Affaire Eck, and all it ever got him was the back of Price’s head.

In an ironic twist, Farrell now needs to be more like Dennis Eckersley.

Eck is a throwback who really does tell it like it is, and he does so in an entertaining, easy-to-understand fashion. Nobody’s expecting ESPN’s new baseball analyst to come up with zany “Farrellspeak,” but he needs to be candid and avoid the empty-calorie excuses.

No. 2: Develop a sense of humor — Former Red Sox manager Terry Francona would have handled the Price/Eckersley flap by saying, “I’m just glad Eck wasn’t analyzing the games when I played. He’d have been swearing so much the FCC would have been called in.”

And then Francona would have ladled out a mishmash of quotes about how he was talking with David Ortiz, and Ortiz was talking with Price, and Price was talking with Eck, and somehow it would all go away. That’s how Francona put out many a Manny Ramirez fire during their time together in Boston.

Farrell doesn’t have to spit out one-liners. He just needs be less Harvard Business School and a little more Harvard Lampoon.

Remember, John Farrell: ESPN used to stand for Entertainment and Sports Programing Network.

It’s showtime.