Yahoo! Sports reporter Jeff Passan, who broke the story Tuesday that some Red Sox players -- Dustin Pedroia among them -- called for a change at manager at a late-July meeting with ownership, was on Mike and Mike on ESPN Radio on Wednesday morning to defend his story.
Pedroia told reporters late Tuesday that the way the meeting was characterized was not accurate and that he had never met Passan.
"If that's the best thing that you can come up with, ‘I don't know the guy,' as opposed to 'What he's writing and saying is incorrect,' then obviously there’s some merit to the report,” Passan told Mike and Mike (listen to the podcast HERE). "Trust me, I sat on this thing for a couple of weeks when I heard it from a very good, very plugged in source the first time, because I wanted to get confirmation. Obviously their ship is not as tight as they think it is because I was able to get a couple more people on top of that to talk about this.
“It's a bad situation. Dustin Pedroia can characterize it however he wants. The fact is he was one of the ring leaders in that meeting. Adrian Gonzalez was front and center as well after sending that text message. It's obvious that the Boston Red Sox, not all of them, not all of the stars, not all of the big names, but a lot of them do not like Bobby Valentine as their manager and would prefer somebody else.
“I don’t know if that's contributing to the fact that they're 57-60 and in fourth place in the American League East or if it's something else, but this is a dysfunctional team. I feel like this is the tip of the iceberg to be honest, that there's a lot more that's going to come out about this as the team devolves toward September."
Passan said he thinks Red Sox players have come to grips with the fact that Valentine is likely going to be their skipper for at least the rest of the season.
“A lot of those guys went into the meeting figuring that they were airing their frustrations and that something was going to be done about it,” Passan said. “But when nothing was done about it, I think the Red Sox players started to understand that Bobby Valentine was going to be around for at least the remainder of the season and instead of sitting there and moaning about it they might as well just come to terms with it and deal with it because that's reality."