Better times. | Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports

How low can they go? Stay tuned.

When I think of private equity, I think, for better or worse, of Mitt Romney. The former governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate is one of the pioneers of the hollowing out of corporate America that’s destroying our country, its airlines, our sport, its uniforms and even its radio feeds... well, Mittens nonetheless is, without a question, a family man with a bedrock moral code. I can’t even begin to square this moral code with his life’s work — save his groundbreaking work on health care in the state — but he can, and I get it: We have different values, for the large part, with those values only rarely meeting at the intersection of shared humanity.

That said, it does happen, and did in a perverse way around this time 12 years ago when, by way of trying to explain that wasn’t entirely a soulless cost-cutting automaton, he effectively noted that Bain Capital wasn’t just a murderous spreadsheet by way of saying “corporations are people, my friends” — the implication being that they, and he, had thoughts and feelings like everyone else. The ludicrously sounding statement threw his delicate moral balancing act into sharp relief despite being largely true, and more people focused on the fact it sounded like what we’d now call an AI answer than on the fact he was using his power, at Bain, to destroy other corporations, and other people. It wasn’t that he was wrong. It was that inside the boardroom, he was an asshole.

Outside of it? I don’t know the man, but it sure seems like a different story. I only know what I read, the same way I only know what I read about John Henry, given that he hasn’t spoken to the media in years, and Tom Werner, given that I don’t believe a word he says. Despite everything negative I’ve said and written about the Mookie Betts trade, I’ve understood it as a transparent private equity-inspired move from the get-go. It wasn’t that “Mookie was going to leave anyway,” as its defenders crowed, it’s that the owners wanted him gone, the same way MLB wants its logo prominently displayed on the back of uniforms nowadays, leading to baby-name font that drives home a single point: It’s the name on the front of the jerseys that matter, not the back.

All of this is sad, but it’s indicative of a corporate rot that, if one has their bearings, does not have to bleed over into the real world. Shitty business practices are shitty business practices, but, in a real sense, corporations are, in fact people. In the case of the modern Red Sox, these three people were Henry, Tom Werner and the recently passed Larry Lucchino. Last Tuesday, the Henry and Werner were in attendance at Fenway Park as the Red Sox celebrated the 20-year anniversary of the historic 2004 team. By that Thursday, the day of Lucchino’s funeral, they were nowhere to be found among the dozens of statespeople and dignitaries paying respects among hundreds of others to the irascible, pugnacious onetime part-owner of the team — the one they thought got too much credit for their shared success. It’s one thing to sell your team’s soul for pennies on the dollar, but it’s another to proudly and publicly lose your humanity in the face of such petty grievances.

Since the Mookie trade, Sam Kennedy has been the team’s mouthpiece, lecturing skeptical fans at every opportunity of this ownership group’s track record of success over two decades. It was a transparent bait and switch — our problem was that the team stopped doing the smart things — but it wasn’t wrong. This ownership group has been successful, thanks in no small part to Lucchino, who, if he is remembered for anything, will be remembered as the guy who saved Fenway Park by reimagining it into what it is today.

It’s not a secret that Lucchino fell out with the other owners, nor was it a surprise that the loudest guy in the room got the boot when he wasn’t the majority partner. Them’s the breaks. None of that undoes all of the good Kennedy likes to bray about with his quisling back against the wall, because all of those good things happened, and Lucchino was inseparable from all of it, for better or worse. He wasn’t perfect or even good, at times, but the did the damn thing and his reward, at his death, was to be ignored, with his former business partners almost certainly assuming that their video tribute on Tuesday sufficiently paid their respects to the man with whom they were plainly no longer speaking before his passing.

And here is where they fail the Romney test for me. Romney, or my idea of Romney, would have understood that this was the people part of “corporations are people,” and not the corporations part. If Henry and Werner were truly as proud of the work they did with Lucchino as Kennedy made it sound, they would have attended the funeral. They might have even spoken at it, and of their shared moonshot vision for a cursed Red Sox team that somehow became a reality. They would have put aside their differences to celebrate their shared life’s work, like virtually anyone else, regardless of wealth or status, would have done in that situation. Instead, they hid behind white lies like the shameless cowards they have become, or were the whole time. In the absence of words, we can only judge them on their actions. The good thing about the team bottoming out, at least, is that it’s bound to get better. Their humanity? That’s another story.