Jimy Williams said he would never quit, and he was right. He got fired.

That, though, isn't the surprise. Even though the Boston Red Sox are but two games out of the American League wild card lead, even though they are only five games behind the New York Yankees for the AL East lead, even though they have played varying chunks of the season without Pedro Martinez, Nomar Garciaparra, Jason Varitek, David Cone, Rich Garces, Carl Everett, and most recently Brian Daubach ... even though all those things are true, it's still Jimy Williams' fault.

The press conference that announced the elevation of pitching coach Joe Kerrigan was a surprise, since the most mentioned names for the vacancy were former managers Felipe Alou and Gene Lamont. But the surprise faded quickly in the face of all the issues that needed to be raised, including why the Red Sox would even bother.

It can be asked, of course, why general manager Dan Duquette waited so long to gas a manager he (a) never liked and (b) undercut at every opportunity, and we are sure the question will be asked. Not answered, of course, but asked.

Here, though, is the more compelling point, one which may not be raised even in Boston, where the Red Sox matter slightly more than the Pope's case of pink-eye matters in Vatican City:

If the Red Sox can do this well with a manager half the town thinks did a lousy job, even without their best pitcher, starting catcher, above-average first baseman, All-Star shortstop, tightly-wrapped center fielder and best setup man, then why replace him? Why not leave the office vacant and let the fellas play Lord of the Flies down the stretch?

That would make everyone happy, and after all, the only thing separating the Red Sox from the Yankees is their own fragile state of mind, right?

Williams' firing was in some ways long overdue, since it was clear that he had long ago lost his clubhouse and had no backing from his bosses. How he survived this long almost cannot be explained, unless Duquette was hoping Williams would quit on his own or that Everett would drive him to irreparable madness before now.

Fact is, if you're a general manager and you really don't like the manager you've got or the results he's getting you, firing is the only thing to do. That is, unless the owner really likes the manager. Baseball's most important tool, after all, remains leverage.

But Duquette long ago gave in to the self-built mystique of the Red Sox as the bottom of God's in-box, and tried to extract himself out of an unpleasant situation by doing nothing.

Well, there's doing nothing, and then there's doing nothing. In Boston, where every manager has operated under the burden of not being someone else, the only answer left is not a new manager that the players, the front office and the boys over at "Car Talk" can complain about incessantly, but no manager at all.

And no, we're not promoting the idea of a "College of Coaches," the preposterous notion the Cubs tried 40 years ago in an attempt to make themselves look even sillier than they usually do. We're talking about No ... Manager ... At ... All.

The drawbacks of having no manager are fairly obvious. Nobody to make out the lineup card, nobody to make the pitching changes, nobody to spend time with those New England media lampreys so the players can sneak around about their business.

But the benefits far outweigh those nagging details. The players would no longer be distracted by a front office torn in half by the differences between the general manager and his prime underling. They would no longer be able to use the manager (or the general manager) as a crutch for failures, small or large. The fans would be stunned into silence, unsure who to revile -- unless it's Terry Glenn.

And the last stumbling block to decades of Red Sox greatness would be gone at last. A century of Calvinist self-loathing, generations of belief in curses from long-dead ballplayers, all would be gone, and the Sox and their fans would be free, unencumbered by their own instinct to see mold in the foundation whether it's there or not.

In other words, it could be the end of baseball in Boston as we know it. Joe Kerrigan doesn't look like the sort of guy who can create regionwide angst just by walking into a room, and if he can't do that, he's not Boston's kind of guy at all.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.