Blame the manager.

It’s as old as baseball, and here in Boston it’s long been an art form.

For it’s always the manager’s fault, right? Jimy Williams is too concerned with a frog bumping his booty, or some such ridiculous thing. Grady left Pedro in too long, an unpardonable sin. Terry “Francoma”.

On and on it goes, a never-ending lament, as much a part of summer as traffic jams going to the beach.

Blame the manager.

Until the manager goes out and wins two World Series in four years.

Until “Francoma” becomes someone you can’t blame, and Michael Holley writes Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston’s Rise to Dominance, and the baseball world as we’ve come to know it around here turns topsy-turvy.

The book, a look inside the Fenway Park bunker, is also extremely insightful into how being a manager of a major-league team has evolved, and how Francona has become the embodiment of that evolution.

It’s changed, no question about that. Gone are the days of manager as absolute ruler, the manager of old. You know the type: my way or the highway. When I say jump, you ask how high. The kind of manager from baseball’s past, back when the uniforms were flannel, teams played doubleheaders and managers sat in dugouts and stared out at infields parched by the afternoon, managers out of some old Norman Rockwell magazine cover.

That is the kind of manager people like: put those spoiled, greedy players in their place. That’s usually the mantra. No matter that that’s as gone as record players and Dick Williams, a style that rarely works anymore.

Or what, pray tell, can be gained by fighting with Manny?

What, pray tell, can be gained by fighting with any of the players?

Nor is managing really about strategy, even though that’s the fodder of talk shows and the morning newspaper.

What it is is managing people, no easy task in this age of huge salaries and guaranteed contracts, this age of agents and entitlement, this age of people who question anything anyone says, never mind someone who controls their fate.

This is what Francona is so good at. Or do you think it’s easy being Manny’s manager? Do you think it’s easy being the manager of a veteran pitcher who has an opinion on everything and his own blog, to boot? Do you think it’s easy to be the manager of the Red Sox, period, when your every move is dissected?

What comes across in Red Sox Rule as forcefully as a double in the gap is Francona has become the prototype for the contemporary manager. Not like Grady Little, who was too wedded to baseball’s past, those halcyon days before spread sheets and sabermetrics, before on-base percentage and numbers, back when managers made evaluations on feel and instinct. Not like Grady Little, who didn’t always listen to his bosses. Not like Grady Little, who became the human face of the Sox’ loss to the Yankees in 2003.

Blame the manager.

This is the landscape Francona jumped into in 2004, right in the middle of all the “Curse of the Bambino” nonsense, the baggage that seemed to haunt this franchise like some mean, old ghost. And, yes, he was a baseball lifer, the son of a major-leaguer, someone who lived inside the game, but he wasn’t Grady Little, either.

Not that there weren’t some doubts about him.

The knock on him in Philadelphia was he’d been too nice, was reluctant to come down on his players’ heads with a hammer.

“If the choices were talking tough to impress reporters and fans or working privately to make sure players were accountable to both him and their teammates, he would always choose the latter,” Holley writes.

So Theo Epstein created a test as part of the interview process for Francona. There were 16 questions, all designed to shed some light on both how Francona arrived at decisions, and how he defended those decisions. Sixteen questions with no right answers.

Somehow, that’s only fitting.

A test with no right answers.

Isn’t that what being a manager now is all about, forever living in some gray world where there is no one way to do things, but several ways? Isn’t that what managing now is all about, not one way for everyone, but dealing with people as individuals, trying to find the right buttons to push?

This is Francona’s strength, and it transcends when he takes the pitcher out, or when he decides to hit and run, or any of the strategic things he does during a game, the things that so many fans think define a manager.

Which doesn’t mean he’s going to tell either the media or the fans a whole lot. He’s always publicly going to defend his players. He’s always going to protect them from the prying media. He’s always going to be the moat between the players and the fans. For that’s all part of it, too, like it or not.

But what comes through Red Sox Rule is that you can call him “Francoma” all you want, and you can wonder about why he lets Manny stand at home plate and stare at his home runs all you want. But Terry Francona has become the perfect manager for this baseball team, this guy who grew up in the game and now has won two World Series in four years. This man who now sits at the very top of his profession.

Blame the manager?

Not anymore.

Not here, anyway.

breynold@projo.com