The post-season is here, but the man who built the winner of last year’s post-season isn’t. The Boston Red Sox fired Dave Dombrowski as president of baseball operations September 9.

The decision by owners John Henry and Tom Werner was the latest in a series of questionable moves they have made with high-ranking personnel.

They fired manager Terry Francona in 2011 despite his pair of World Series championships in 2004 and 2007 after the Red Sox had not won a World Series in 86 years, and they pushed out Larry Lucchino as chief executive officer in 2015. Lucchino had joined Henry and Werner in their 2002 acquisition of the team.

My opinion doesn’t mean anything where the Red Sox are concerned, but in my opinion I don’t think Francona and Dombrowski deserved dismissal. And while we’re at it, I saw no reason for them to have pushed Lucchino to an emeritus status.

Lucchino, after all, coined one of baseball’s great saying of recent decades, calling the Yankees the Evil Empire. OK, you don’t have to think an executive is worth his title just for the turn of a clever phrase, but I’ve seen baseball executives who hold their jobs for more insignificant reasons.

As had been their practice, Henry and Werner did not hold a news conference to announce and explain their Dombrowski decision. But even worse than their failure to appear, Henry and Werner told the Red Sox manager, Alex Cora, to hold a news conference to answer reporters’ questions about Dombrowski’s dismissal.

That might have been a first – a manager explaining the dismissal of a general manager, his boss. Maybe now that the season is over, the Red Sox could fire Cora – someone has to pay for the team’s disappointing season, no? – and Henry and Werner could have Cora explain his dismissal.

Although no news conference accompanied Dombrowski’s dismissal, the team hierarchy was not silent on the subject.

Speaking on NESN, the Red Sox-owned television network, Henry said:

“It was painful to make a change for me personally, it was painful. But we felt it was the right thing to do. And from my own standpoint, if we were going to have a press conference, I would love to have talked to you about the things he brought, what he accomplished for us. You guys all would’ve asked what went wrong, which is your job to do, I understand that. It wasn’t so much a case of, I think, as it was portrayed that we were hiding from you. It’s just that I didn’t see a utility of going through what the differences were. It was more of a personal thing.”

According to NESN, Chairman Werner also noted many of the positive things Dombrowski did in his four-year tenure in Boston, including three division titles and a World Series championship.

I love it when a team fires a general manager or a manager and extols all the positive things the departed person achieved. My reaction usually is if he did so many good things, why did you fire him?

In Dombrowski’s case, he did all of the good things Henry and Werner wanted him to do so they could win the World Series, but apparently those same things cost him his job. I refer to the players Dombrowski signed whose contracts gave the Red Sox the largest payroll in the majors:

• David Price         7 years           $217 million
• Chris Sale           5 years           $145 million
• J.D. Martinez      5 years           $110 million
• Nathan Eovaldi   4 years           $68 million

Job well done, Dave, now make those contracts disappear so we can stay under the luxury tax threshold next year and avoid paying the tax while having the tax rate reverts to the lowest rate.

That was the Yankees’ strategy for this year, and what is good for the Yankees is good for the Red Sox. The Yankees, though, haven’t won anything yet. Sure, they have won a division title, but in Yankees world division titles are an expectation.

Last week, according to the Boston Globe, Red Sox owners “finally” fielded questions but spared the clear answers about Dombrowski’s dismissal. Written by Dan Shaughnessy, the country’s best baseball columnist, it began:

Almost three weeks after firing World Series winning GM Dave Dombrowski, Red Sox (and Globe) owner John Henry finally had a press conference at Fenway late Friday afternoon, before the start of the season-ending series against the moribund Baltimore Orioles.

I’d like to tell you that this session answered all of our questions about the firing of Dombrowski and the future of the team, but that would be an alternate reality. Accompanied by ubiquitous wingman Tom Werner and CEO Sam Kennedy, Henry (and Werner) responded to 26 minutes of inquiries, but it was a tad confusing and intentionally ambiguous. These guys rarely talk to us and, when they do, sometimes it feels like they are speaking a foreign language. It was an awkward, sometimes bizarre press conference.

The Red Sox have yet to name a replacement for Dombrowski, who at 63 years of age has most likely had his last general manager’s job no matter how well he has done his previous jobs. Club owners focus on youth these days.

There is plenty of irony in Dombrowski’s status. Compare it to the status of Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager of 22 years. Dombrowski won a World Series in his fourth season in Boston. The Yankees won the World Series in Cashman’s first three seasons as their general manager, but he inherited that team. He didn’t build it. The only team he “built” that won the World Series was the 2009 Yankees.

In his 22 years as general manager, the Yankees have spent approximately $4 billion on player payrolls. Had George Steinbrenner been alive all these years Cashman would have been long gone. Hal Steinbrenner, though, is the opposite of his father. He obviously doesn’t believe in firing people.

So while Dombrowski is gone from the Red Sox, his 2018 World Series ring proudly adorning the ring finger of his left hand, Cashman is stuck with an aging 2009 model.