Designated winner

It's just what the New Englanders escaping to City of Palms Park in Ft. Myers, Fla., have been waiting for. Not only have they packed the park for a spring-training baseball game on an ideal March day - 74 degrees with only an occasional cloud - but broad-shouldered Ellis Burks, back on the Red Sox roster after a dozen years playing elsewhere, has just launched a rocket into the palm trees beyond left field. The crowd leaps to its feet, applauding the towering home run, and perhaps thinking giddy thoughts about what Burks's bat could add to this season's lineup.

But not quite everyone lets loose their emotions. Seated behind home plate, amid scouts bearing radar guns, sits Theo Epstein, arms crossed, wearing the inscrutable look of a poker player.

Yet Theo (Mr. Epstein seems too formal even for those who don't know him) perhaps had more reason to cheer than anyone: As general manager (GM) of the Red Sox, he had hired Burks over the winter - just one more piece to a puzzle that, when solved, would mean the first World Series championship for the Red Sox since 1918. That is a year carved into the hearts of Sox fans along with 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986 - all frustrating losses in the World Series. Together, they make for one of the most memorable records of Sisyphean futility in all of sports.

So perhaps it was the weight of Red Sox history that kept Epstein in his seat. By taking over in November 2002 as the youngest GM ever in baseball (at age 28 years, 11 months), Epstein shouldered the hopes of Boston fans, known as Red Sox Nation, as they seek to end 86 years in purgatory. Standing in the way are the New York Yankees, the mirror opposite of the long-suffering Sox, perennial world champions funded from the bottomless pockets of their owner, George Steinbrenner.

Epstein also has become the most visible specimen in a new breed of baseball executives who use statistical analysis to crunch baseball's hallowed numbers in new ways, trying to shine fresh light on a century-and-a-half-old game.

Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland Athletics, is the high priest of the movement, squeezing unexpected success (though no championships) from his low-budget, small-market team. Other acolytes include J.P. Ricciardi, GM of the Toronto Blue Jays, and 31-year-old Harvard graduate Paul DePodesta, the newly appointed GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

But those franchises are rebuilding - no one expects 2004 championships. The special torture inflicted on the Sox, who opened this season with a loss Sunday, has been to have consistently good teams that are never quite good enough. Fans care little whether Epstein peers into a computer screen or crystal ball, just as long as he wins - now.

Theo wasn't always a sober-minded executive. His relationship with the Red Sox was much different back in 1986, when the team last reached the World Series. Then he could be just a fan.

"I was 12, and my twin brother and I were watching the [final game] in our living room" in Brookline, Mass., Epstein recalls, sitting in his office at the Ft. Myers ballpark. "The Red Sox were a strike away, an out away [from winning].... So we got up on the top of our couch against the wall and decided that, as the last ball settled into the glove [and the Red Sox won], we'd jump off the couch and be in midair, not attached to the earth. We were on that couch for about 40 minutes, and then the ball rolled through [first baseman Bill] Buckner's legs, [the Sox lost], and we collapsed to the ground. It was the most pathetic sight you could imagine."

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