As the foundering Boston Red Sox attempt to collapse across the finish line and win the American League Wild Card, Steve Wulf of ESPN profiles their genius owner, John Henry, who applied objective analysis in business before bringing it to big-market baseball. An excerpt:

“Henry loves facts — ‘I don’t read fiction’ — so here are some. He was an asthmatic farm boy who grew up worshipping a miner’s son named Stan Musial; a philosophy major who fell under the thrall of Indian individualist Jiddu Krishnamurti; a rock musician who shaved his eyebrows to play a space alien in a rock opera; a mathematical whiz who was banned from Las Vegas blackjack tables; a commodities trader who watched soybeans grow into a beanstalk that eventually yielded ownership of some of the most storied franchises in Major League Baseball, NASCAR (Roush Fenway Racing) and the Premier League (Liverpool FC). You have to make this stuff up.

But it’s not just Henry’s bio that makes him interesting. He’s a whole host of contradictions. He uses dispassionate analysis in pursuit of his own passions. He’s a serious thinker given to practical jokes, a shy fellow who counts Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas and Steven Tyler among his friends, an owner of a 164-foot yacht who will dash from the owner’s box above home plate at Fenway to the first-aid room to check on a fan who’s been hit by a foul ball. He may be a 62-year-old father of two girls (a 14-year-old and a 1-year-old), but he has never lost his own childlike sense of wonder.

He’s also the kind of person who politely declines personal interview requests, then spends hours thoughtfully responding to e-mail questions — at 12:32 a.m. To a query about the major influences in his life, he writes, quoting mythologist Joseph Campbell, ‘If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you …’ That’s what led me into the financial world. I started John W. Henry & Company because I enjoyed applying mathematics to markets, and it was a profound challenge that resonated within me.”

••••••••••

John Henry enters the womb-like studio of wealthy workaholic, Charlie Rose: