- Home
- Terry Francona
Francona: The Red Sox Years
Francona: The Red Sox Years Read online
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Lineup Card
Copyright
Dedication
“Can’t you guys do one thing right?”
“I’m Mr. Francona’s son and he wanted me to come over and say hello”
“They’re not going to fire a guy over one mistake”
“He kind of blew us away. . . . Is the guy too nice?”
“We’d better win”
“This is not acceptable”
“Just crazy enough to think we can do this”
• 2005 • “Everywhere we went, people were bowing and shit”
• 2006 • “We will take care of your son”
• 2007 • “They were all into getting the trophy and they didn’t even know I was there”
• 2008 • “This will not help us win”
• 2009 • “This is like a reality TV show”
• 2010 • “We need to start winning in more exciting fashion”
• 2011 • “I feel like I let you down”
“Somebody went out of their way to hurt me”
• 2012 • “I guess we should have won a third World Series”
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Authors
A manager at work: Terry Francona's lineup card for a May 31, 2008, game against the Orioles. Manny Ramirez hit his five hundredth career home run in this game. At the time, the Red Sox were defending World Series champions.
National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY
Copyright © 2013 by Terry Francona and Dan Shaughnessy
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-547-92817-3
eISBN 978-0-547-92826-5
v1.0113
Terry Francona
To my dad, Tito Francona, who managed to always make me feel like he was nearby, even when he was thousands of miles away.
Dan Shaughnessy
To my dad, the late William J. Shaughnessy, who saved enough S&H Green Stamps to get me my first mitt, a Tito Francona glove, in 1962.
CHAPTER 1
“Can’t you guys do one thing right?”
THEY WERE EXHAUSTED. Empty. Six weeks of spring training had given way to six months of regular season and another three weeks of thrill-to-the-marrow playoff excitement and pressure. It was autumn 2004, and the late, late nights had blended into fuzzy mornings with folks asking, “Did that really just happen?” Those four wins against the Yankees—the comeback trick that nobody’d turned in more than a century of postseason baseball—were played on four consecutive days, an aggregate 18 hours and 12 minutes over 44 intense innings. That’s an average of more than four and a half hours per game. Games 4 and 5 at Fenway were actually won on the same calendar day (October 18) because Game 4 stretched past midnight and Game 5 started fewer than 16 hours later. It was something like a morning-night doubleheader.
The World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals was a blur. It was a little bit anticlimactic, if you can say such a thing about the first World Series title in 86 years for a city starving for a baseball championship. At the end, the Red Sox were an army of steamrollers. The World Series games were not nearly as exciting as those in the epic playoff against the Yankees.
Despite all the bad things that happened to the franchise after Babe Ruth was sold in 1920, there was a sense of inevitability about the Red Sox march to the finish line after they beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. Major League Baseball’s 100th World Series was tension-free, nothing like those Fall Classics of 1946, ’67, ’75, or ’86, all of which ended with the Sox losing a seventh game.
The carpet in the visitors’ clubhouse at Busch Stadium was still champagne-soggy when the tired, triumphant 2004 Red Sox gathered in their own ancient locker room at Fenway for the parade. The ’04 Red Sox were enjoying their first days of folk-hero status in New England. All the stuff that everyone had been saying turned out to be true. These guys would never have to buy another beer in Boston. Kevin Millar was going to be able to live off the moment for the rest of his life. Dave Roberts was going to get asked about that stolen base every day until he was 90 years old. David Ortiz was the Dominican Yaz, Manny Ramirez was World Series MVP, and free spirit Orlando Cabrera would be forever worshiped as the guy who replaced the legendary Nomar Garciaparra. Lanky goofball Derek Lowe was done pitching for the Red Sox, but he was also destined to be a trivia answer as the man who got the win in the clinching game of every round of the playoffs.
Boston mayor Tom Menino and the Red Sox brass plotted the parade meticulously, embracing the concept of a rolling rally, which would maximize fans’ exposure to the Hub’s new heroes. Red Sox players, staff, and their families would ride in “Duckboats” up Boylston Street, then double back down the Charles River. Fans were expected to line the route. Sox CEO Larry Lucchino grew impatient, wanting the day to unfold without a hitch.
But then no one could find the sweatshirts.
And that’s where our story starts.
The sweatshirts had WORLD CHAMPION RED SOX stenciled on the front. They were supposed to be worn by all the players, coaches, members of the front office, and the manager. They’d keep everybody warm and bring a measure of uniformity to this motley band of gypsy champions.
The 2004 Red Sox were not a buttoned-down bunch. They were players who passed paper cups around the clubhouse and took a nip of Jack Daniels before cold October night games in New York. Johnny Damon famously labeled his own team “Idiots,” and Sox fans embraced them for their absence of conformity. They had beards, untucked jerseys, and hair . . . down to here, down to there. Damon looked like a lead guitarist from the Woodstock festival. Bronson Arroyo brought cornrows to the mound. Pedro Martinez could barely get his cap over the crop of black roughage on top of his head. Manny Ramirez looked like he was playing baseball wearing pajamas. Theo Epstein, the general manager, was a 30-year-old rock star who wore jeans to the office most days. When the unkempt Sox fell behind the Yankees three games to zero, reporters questioned their professionalism.
The sweatshirts would have helped their band-of-misfits image the day of the parade. At long last the Sox would look like a team.
But the sweatshirts were nowhere to be found as the players and their families got ready to man the Duckboats. Lucchino, the trigger-tempered smartest man in the room, was not happy.
Standing in the doorway of his office, looking out at the clubhouse filled with happy (some hungover) ballplayers, wives, and excited little kids, first-year Sox manager Terry Francona saw Lucchino engaged in an animated discussion with one of his favorite veteran clubhouse operatives. Francona went over to find out what was happening. As manager of this bombastic ball club, he was accustomed to extinguishing fires.
“What’s going on, guys?” he asked Lucchino and the clubbie.
The longtime, underpaid Sox employee explained that the sweatshirts had gone missing. It didn’t seem like a big deal to Francona or anybody else, but Lucchino was fuming. Francona overheard Lucchino muttering, “Can’t you guys do one thing right?”
Goddamn, Larry, we just won the fucking World Series, Francona thought to himself. That should be good enough. Who cares what we wear? We could go down the street naked and they’d still clap for us. It doesn’t matter. This is the greatest day of our lives.
“It was my silent protest,” said Francona.
Epstein said with a chuckle, “I think we lost those sweatshirts on purpose. They wanted these official, marketing, licensed sweatshirts to be worn. They were going to sell them. They were hideous. They looked like ’80s Zubaz-type sweatshirts. They were this awful, faded blue. No one wanted to wear them, so I think we had the clubbies lose them.”
Francona thought of Lucchino as something of a bully, but he knew the CEO was running on fumes—like everyone else—and was just blowing off steam. Still, the first-year manager wanted to make a point. Being a team wasn’t about wearing the uniform hoodies, cropping your hair in standard fashion, or tucking in your shirttails. It wasn’t about newly embossed sweatshirts that were already on sale in the team souvenir store. The ’04 Sox were a wacky rainbow of diverse personalities. But they were a team. They had their differences, but they also had each other’s backs. Francona knew he could count on guys like Kevin Millar, Gabe Kapler, Ellis Burks, Jason Varitek, and David Ortiz to keep things in line. The ragtag bunch cared about one another. It was the mark of every good team. Baseball is the most selfish of our team sports. It’s a sequence of one-on-one battles. You don’t need teammates to pass you the ball or protect you in the pocket. If you try to help yourself, you’re usually helping the team. But there’s a lot of human interaction and tolerance in a big league clubhouse, and the winners generally handle matters better than the losers. The special ball clubs are the ones that are able to get past the small stuff and push each other to succeed. The ’04 Red Sox were one of those teams. Francona’s managing style tapped into the genius of the Idiots.
He was the proverbial “players’ manager.” He didn’t bark orders, didn’t have a lot of rules, and never ever buried his players in public. He took all the bullets. He swallowed hard when he saw things that violated his sense of baseball etiquette or decorum. He always looked at the big picture. If mercurial Manny stopped running out his ground balls or took himself out of the lineup with mysterious hamstring injuries, Francona would leave it up to Manny’s teammates to decide the best course of action.
“I always had my fingers crossed with Manny,” said the manager. “Sometimes, when it really got bad, I’d meet with Damon and ’Tek and David or Doug Mirabelli. All the veterans. I’d say, ‘I see what you guys are seeing. What do you want me to do? I can bench him or suspend him, and Theo will back me up. I want to know what you guys think is the best thing for us.’ And every time they’d come to the same conclusion. I think it was hardest for ’Tek, because he was so respectful of the game. But he did it. They’d always wind up telling me, ‘No, we’ll be a team. We’ll take his numbers.’ So that’s what we wound up doing.”
And Manny wound up being Most Valuable Player of the 2004 World Series. Of course.
Francona was never a World Series MVP or American League Manager of the Year. In the autumn of 2004, he went mano a mano with Mike Scioscia, Joe Torre, then Tony La Russa, and he came out on top in each series, but he stayed in the background. There wasn’t a lot of credit for the manager of the Red Sox, nor was there much space for him on the victory platform. There were no Gatorade showers or magazine covers. The best he could do was an endorsement for Metamucil—which made him the ultimate regular guy. He was just the man who put his players in position to succeed and let their skills take over. He was the master of preparation and people management. When others told him that he probably would have made a good corporation manager, he’d deflect the praise and refer to himself as a “dumb-ass.”
But deep down, he knew he could handle all of it. He knew that he was always prepared. Nobody could take away the baseball lessons he’d learned in five decades around big league clubhouses. It was his style to present himself as less than brilliant, but that was part of the ruse. Everybody who was paying attention could see that other managers never got the better of him. The Red Sox had the right guy in the dugout.
Francona managed the Sox for seven more seasons after 2004, never changing his style. He’d get to the ballpark absurdly early, pore over voluminous reports from Epstein’s baseball operations department, work out in the clubhouse Swim-Ex, talk strategy with his coaches, and have all of his work done by the time the ballplayers started showing up for duty. If the owners wanted to show the clubhouse off to their friends, he’d grudgingly submit to the meet-and-greet. He’d be grateful if the suits didn’t bring anyone into his office when he was half-naked. He’d patiently submit to questions from the Boston media three hours before every game, and again after every game. A lot of time was spent diffusing combustible situations. Everything the Sox did mattered. Nothing was too trivial to draw the scrutiny of talk shows and newspapers.
“I got to where I hated the traffic lights when I was driving to the ballpark,” said the Sox manager. “The guy in the car next to me always had something to say and didn’t feel like he had to hold back. When we weren’t going good, those red lights seemed to last forever.”
It isn’t like this anywhere else—not even in Philadelphia, where Francona managed for four sub-.500 seasons. Boston is a smaller town, and the Red Sox are a religious experience for local fans. Columnist Mike Barnicle summed it up when he wrote, “Baseball is not life or death, but the Red Sox are.” This is why years spent managing the Red Sox are like dog years. They age you disproportionately. Those before-and-after photos of US presidents looking young and vigorous on Inauguration Day, then tired and gray four years later? It was the same with the men who worked in the small corner office of the Red Sox clubhouse.
During his eight seasons in Boston, Francona occasionally allowed himself to wonder what it would be like elsewhere. He’d eavesdrop on one of Joe Maddon’s sessions with the South Florida media and gasp at the easy tone of the questions. He’d see Toronto Blue Jays players almost come to blows on the mound in midgame and be amazed when the incident was buried in the local papers. He knew it would have been front-page stuff in Boston.
But those moments of longing for hardball tranquillity always passed. Managing in Boston was better, even if it was an ass ache much of the time.
What he loved most was the baseball. The games. During those three-plus hours when the team was on the field and he was in the dugout, Francona could escape the madness and immerse himself in the game he loved.
His favorite time of every day was the half-hour he’d spend in the dugout before the first pitch at Fenway. That was when the media was gone and all the preparation was over. It was just the manager, his coaches, and the band of hungry players who’d come out early to banter in the quiet time before the television camera’s red light went on and quick decisions had to be made. It was a time when a manager could talk to players apart from the heat of the moment. It was a time to set up shop and get ready for the game. Francona would align three water bottles under the upper dugout bench perch—a spot where he could best watch and manage the game. He’d tape his matchup sheet to the pegboard on the dugout wall and hide his stash of Lancaster chew behind wads of bubblegum that had been unwrapped by clubhouse worker Steve Murphy. He’d sign a few autographs for folks in the rows directly behind the Sox dugout. That always ended the same way. Frenetic fans tossed baseballs toward him, and sooner or later someone would hit him in the chest while he was signing a ball. That would be the end of the signing session. The offending fan—the one who ruined it for everyone—invariably was an adult.
None of his players or coaches was required to be in the dugout in the golden half-hour before the first pitch, but Francona always knew he had a good team when there were a lot of ballplayers hanging around in those quiet minutes of pregame.
“I loved that
time,” he said. “That’s when they haven’t made an out, they haven’t made an error yet. You can get a guy in the dugout 20 minutes before the game starts, and they are pretty loose. Once the game starts, you can’t have that conversation anymore. It’s a great time to talk to people, and I loved it.”
The white noise of Boston only got louder in the years after the championships of ’04 and ’07, and ultimately the players stopped taking care of each other and abused their freedom. The 2011 season unfolded like many of the earlier Francona years as the Sox played 39 games over .500 for four months and came into September with the best record in baseball. But it was not like the other years. Veteran players David Ortiz, Tim Wakefield, and Jonathan Papelbon—warriors of championships past—worried about their next contract and got caught up in ancillary issues. An injured Kevin Youkilis had trouble dealing with his inability to contribute. Carl Crawford, an underachiever all year after signing a whopping, seven-year, $142 million contract, never performed like the player who tortured Boston when he played for Tampa Bay. Worst of all, pitchers Josh Beckett, John Lackey, and Jon Lester seemed to lose their focus, sometimes drinking beer and eating chicken in the clubhouse instead of staying in the dugout to encourage teammates. Players who at one time were mature enough to police themselves suddenly were in need of a managerial taskmaster. Francona opted not to change the style that had produced an average of 93 wins per season in his eight years in the Boston dugout.
“I think the chicken-and-beer stuff turned out to be more of a metaphor for our team,” said Francona. “I can guarantee that these guys drank less beer than a lot of other teams. I was most disturbed by the idea that stuff wasn’t staying in the clubhouse. They weren’t protecting each other. If somebody was drinking, they weren’t drinking a lot. I’m not saying it’s right, but I was more disturbed by our lack of unity. That group, they had gained my trust. Well, they probably took advantage of it in the end. They needed a new voice.”