Red Sox manager Terry Francona went out of his way to stress that neither hitting coach Ron Jackson nor pitching coach Dave Wallace was being made a scapegoat as the Sox announced the dismissal of both coaches on Monday, but that doesn't mean anyone has to like it.

    Jackson is the same hitting coach who helped the Sox lead the major leagues in runs scored for three straight years, remember, and the absence of Manny Ramirez had more to do with the Sox' second-half struggles than anything else.

    As for Wallace, does anybody have an even remotely plausible explanation for that one? Throughout baseball, Wallace is regarded as a highly intelligent, knowledgable and versatile baseball person, as evidenced by his range of jobs in the game. Lest anyone forget, Wallace missed much of this season to illness, which only makes the Sox' actions all the more deplorable.

    By all accounts, Francona was largely responsible for the dismissal of Jackson and general manager Theo Epstein for the ousting of Wallace, which raises the question of whether there was some petty, tit-for-tat exchange between the manager and the front office. Such jousts are not unprecedented in baseball, as Sox fans learned when then-manager Jimy Williams went to the front office and said that he preferred to remove then-coach Dave Jauss from his coaching staff after the season because of a perceived loyalty to then-GM Dan Duquette.

    So Jauss went and, in turn, Red Sox management forced out Williams' chief ally, then-bench coach Grady Little. The irony now is that Jauss has built his own reputation in the game and currently serves as Little's bench coach with the Los Angeles Dodgers, though the two were nothing more than victims in the deteriorating relationship between Williams and Duquette.

    Understand? If the dismissals of Jackson and Wallace were some type of exchange between Francona and Epstein, it is relevant only because it would suggest a crack in their relationship. The two have been together in Boston for three seasons now, of course, but this is the first time that they have had to deal with the fallout of a season that failed to end (one way or another) with a postseason appearance.