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The Red Sox Pitch Man

Glenn Geffner (J90), the Red Sox’s liaison to the world, has been a busy man since Boston broke one of baseball’s longest World Series title droughts.

At 7:30 a.m. the day after the Boston Red Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series, three generic coach buses rolled into rush-hour traffic at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Along the route to Fenway Park commuters pulled over and got out of their cars, people cheered from building tops and a news helicopter circled overhead.

Glenn Geffner (J90) was on one of those buses.

“You could win five World Series in any other city, and it wouldn’t be like winning one here,” says Geffner, the team’s vice president of media relations. Two days later in the World Series parade he rode a “duckboat” with David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and others past more than 3 million people.

“I get chills thinking about it right now,” Geffner said during spring training.

In March at City of Palms Park, the team’s spring training stadium in Fort Myers, Fla., things still hadn’t quieted down. Geffner rattled off a list of media requests from the Discovery Channel, Celebrity Poker Showdown, Barbara Walters and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

“I could sit here and check my e-mail and answer my phone for 16 hours a day and still not get to everything,” Geffner says.

While growing up in Miami, Geffner dreamed of becoming a sports broadcaster. When he came to Northwestern, Geffner joined WNUR-FM, the University’s student-run radio station, where he did play-by-play and color commentary for baseball, basketball and football.

After college Geffner worked with the Rochester Red Wings, a minor league baseball team in upstate New York. Charles Steinberg, then the San Diego Padres’ senior vice president of public affairs, lured Geffner to Southern California in 1997, where he directed public relations for the Padres for six years.

Geffner recalled watching Tony Gwynn collect his 3,000th hit and seeing the Padres play in the 1998 World Series. “But at the end of the day it didn’t change people’s lives,” he said of the team’s phenomenal 1998 season. “It affects people’s lives every single day whether the Red Sox win or lose.” Geffner came to Boston with Steinberg in February 2003.

For the Red Sox, Geffner preps players for the media. You have to be sensitive to the needs of both the players and the media, says Gordon Edes, senior baseball writer for the Boston Globe. “Glenn walks that line very well. He’s responsive to the concerns of the players and also knows how to intervene on our behalf.”

Geffner also walks the line of being both a baseball man and a family man. Long after a spring training game against the Orioles ended, Geffner answered e-mails in his Fort Myers office while his wife, Christine, changed 14-month-old Gregg’s diaper on the floor. He remarked that it would be the last time his 4-year-old would spend the entire six weeks of spring training in Florida — Corey starts kindergarten in the fall. Yet the boy has already taught his father a valuable lesson.

“At the end of the day, whether the Red Sox won or lost isn’t the most important thing to Corey,” Geffner says. “He loves the game in the purest, most innocent way, reminding me of how I felt when I first fell in love with baseball. The game and my job both look a lot better when he reminds me to see it through his eyes.”

— Robert Brenner (J07)