NESN asked Don Orsillo to lie and say he wasn't fired

There are a lot of things to love about the Red Sox, even when they aren't having a very good season. NESN's management is not and is rarely one of those things. The most recent evidence of this doesn't come from their firing of beloved and longtime play-by-play announcer, but that's only because they managed to one-up that already: according to WEEI, NESN asked Don Orsillo to tweet that their parting was mutual, a request Orsillo understandably declined.

Hey NESN, you decided to fire Don Orsillo. You knew there would be backlash. If you miscalculated how much backlash there would be, that's on you, and it's not up to Orsillo to fix your mistake. You're the ones firing him, who claim you need to "re-energize" the broadcast by replacing Orsillo. We'll leave out the whole "if the team was better the broadcast would be plenty energetic" thing, and just focus on how you made a garbage decision and then tried to force the wronged party in this to clean up the mess it caused.

What benefit does Orsillo get from this? What would he gain by playing your dumb PR game? Anyone with half a brain would know this would be utter bullshit, that you're hanging on to make it appear as if he's happily finishing out his final season despite it being obvious that this isn't the case. So either you're misguided, or you think your audience is full of dummies -- please be careful when selecting which one of those it is, as you've already made enough fans angry.

Orsillo already gets to go out like a professional by finishing up the season and walking away to another gig, presumably without doing any kind of tell-all interview discussing your direction and this firing. What more could you possibly, realistically want? Spoiler: not for Orsillo to lie to the fans who have hung on his words for 15 years.