Francona: The Red Sox Years Read online

  While the Sox were unraveling like a ball of yarn bouncing down stairs, Francona was dealing with difficult personal issues. He was living in a hotel, separated from his wife of almost 30 years. His body was ravaged by more than 30 surgeries from his playing days, and he relied on pain medication to keep himself game-ready. He was worried about his son, Nick, who was commanding a sniper platoon in Afghanistan, and his son-in-law, who was dismantling homemade bombs in Afghanistan. He kept his cell phone handy in the dugout, in case there was news from Nick or one of his daughters.

  But he was the same manager he’d been the whole time in Boston. He knew it would be phony to suddenly change his ways. He knew that it would send a message of panic if he started playing drill sergeant. After seven years and five months of steady success, he wasn’t going to change his style. But he knew he no longer had the backing of ownership. The vaunted trio of John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino hadn’t triggered his contract option and seemed more concerned about selling the Red Sox brand and making money than about winning championships.

  Nothing could stop the September slide of 2011. The Sox, plagued by horrendous starting pitching, lost 20 of their final 27 games, blowing the biggest September lead in major league history. When they were eliminated by a wacky series of events in the midnight hour of the final night of the regular season, Francona knew it was time to go. He had little choice in the matter. Ownership was going in a new direction. It was all coming apart. Brilliant GM Theo Epstein was seduced by the Chicago Cubs, and some of Francona’s trusted ballplayers didn’t seem to have their heads in the right place anymore.

  “There’s one thing I’m going to be proud of after I’m gone,” Francona said in the days after it ended. “I think they’re going to find there’s more shit that goes on than they realize.”

  A lot went on in eight years at Fenway. The sellouts, pink hats, parades, and renditions of “Sweet Caroline” were fun. Putting out fires and dealing with a complex and needy cast of characters was a daily challenge. But none of it could take anything away from what happened on the field. The baseball was always the best part.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I’m Mr. Francona’s son and he wanted me to come over and say hello”

  A BASEBALL LIFE is a life of interminable bus trips, tobacco spit, sunflower seeds, rain delays, day-night doubleheaders, and storytelling. There’s a lot of standing in the outfield, shagging fly balls, and swapping lies. No life in sports has more downtime, more loitering, more waiting. The old salts tell the hungry young bucks not to get too high or too low. And always stay within yourself . . . whatever that means. The season is simply too long for daily reaction and analysis. It’s not like football, a violent, self-important game that demands that you hit yourself over the head with a mallet for six days if you should happen to lose on any given Sunday. Baseball doesn’t attach too much importance to any single game. If you lose today, you go back out there and get ’em tomorrow. There’s always a chance for instant redemption. Hall of Fame skipper Earl Weaver knew what he was talking about when he said that the best part about baseball was that “we do this every day.”

  When you grow up the son of a major league ballplayer and dedicate your life to playing, then coaching and managing baseball teams, you appreciate the slow, steady pace of the game. You also create a worldwide network of teammates, coaches, and associates who keep finding you, sometimes years after you think you’re done with them. This is how it’s always been for Terry Francona.

  When he was eight years old, Francona met Joe Torre, who was then a star catcher with the Atlanta Braves and a teammate of outfielder Tito Francona. Thirty-seven years after their initial meeting, Torre would come back into Francona’s life as a worthy adversary in the Red Sox–Yankee rivalry of the 21st century.

  When he was 11 years old, Francona met Ted Williams, the best player in the history of the Boston Red Sox, perhaps the greatest hitter who ever lived. Decades later, Francona would drive past a statue of Williams on his way to work every day at Fenway Park.

  When he fulfilled a lifelong dream and played in the big leagues, Terry Francona’s first manager was Dick Williams—the man who skippered the most important Red Sox team of the 20th century, the 1967 “Cardiac Kids.” In the 21st century, Francona would become the greatest Red Sox manager since Dick Williams.

  When his playing days were over and he became a coach and manager, Francona roomed and carpooled with a minor league lifer and cotton farmer named Grady Little. Eleven years after they were roommates, Little made a decision that altered the lives of millions of Red Sox fans and paved Francona’s path to Boston.

  Even some of the ballparks represented a thread. Terry Francona was a seven-year-old kid in the stands when the St. Louis Cardinals dedicated their spectacular new stadium in 1966. Sixteen years later, Francona’s promising big league career was derailed when he tore up his knee chasing a fly ball on Busch Stadium’s warning track. In 2004 Francona stood on the same field as manager of the World Champion Boston Red Sox. Now the place is gone, torn down to make room for a better model.

  That’s the baseball life. You get hired or fired by guys who played with, or against, your dad. Your college teammate, Brad Mills, is back at your side in the dugouts in St. Louis and Colorado when you win World Series for the Red Sox. Buddy Bell, your roommate with the Reds, brings you back into baseball as a coach when your playing days are over. Ken Macha, a fellow western Pennsylvanian who befriends you when you are about to be released by the Montreal Expos in 1986, rescues you from the depths of depression when blood clots almost take your life in 2002. John Farrell, another big league teammate, comes back into your life as your pitching coach and eventually succeeds you as manager of the Red Sox. Billy Beane, the man drafted one spot behind you in 1980, becomes famous as the Moneyball GM, then serves as your boss when you coach under Macha. When Beane turns down an offer from the Red Sox in 2002, the Sox turn to 28-year-old Theo Epstein, who hires you as the 44th manager of the Boston Red Sox. Ellis Burks, the center fielder who caught the ball you hit in your final big league at-bat, becomes one of your trusted clubhouse guys when you win the first World Series with the Red Sox in 2004.

  They are baseball brothers, and they weave in and out of your life—on the diamond, in the dugout, and in the back rows of buses and airplanes.

  Terry Jon Francona was born on April 22, 1959, in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his dad, Tito, had met Roberta Jackson when he was a young outfielder in the Baltimore Orioles farm system in 1953. Roberta (always known as “Birdie”) wasn’t allowed to date ballplayers, but her brother-in-law, outfielder Zeke Strange, was Francona’s minor league manager, and that connection allowed an exception to the rule. Tito and Birdie married in 1956 after Tito’s rookie year with the Orioles. By the time their first child was born, Tito was emerging as a star outfielder with the Cleveland Indians. He hit .363 with 20 homers and 79 RBI for the Tribe in 1959. An armchair psychologist would submit that the birth of his only son moved Tito to have his best year in the bigs. In 14 other major league seasons, he never hit anything close to .363.

  “He used to kill a sinker,” said Tim McCarver, Tito Francona’s teammate with the Cardinals in 1965 and ’66. “He was a great low-ball hitter. Tito could hit anything down.”

  We can’t go any further in this baseball story without some explanation of the name “Tito.” Christened John Patsy Francona, “Tito” the elder got his lifelong nickname from his dad, Carmen Francona, a steelworker, piano tuner, and minister who raised his family in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, a borough of around 6,000 citizens, many of whom made their livings at local steel, lumber, and paper mills near the Ohio River. Tito is a popular nickname for small boys in Italian households. It comes from the ancient Roman name Titus. Carmen dubbed John “Tito” when the boy was four years old, and it is the name John Patsy Francona has answered to for his entire life.

  Running around big league clubhouses when he was a small boy, Terry Francona came to be
known as “Little Tito.” As a grown man, a father of four, and a two-time World Champion, Terry Francona is honored to answer to the name that his dad got from his grandfather. Strangers and professional acquaintances call him Terry. His friends, ballplayers, coaches, and clubhouse confidants go with Tito.

  Terry grew up in New Brighton and has fond, funny memories of his dad’s parents. Carmen was 100 percent Italian, known all over New Brighton, the steelworker/preacher who could fix your piano even though he could never read a note of music. Josephine Skubis, Terry’s Polish grandmother, grew up in an orphanage, met Carmen when she was only 14, and was tough enough to drive a crane during the Great Depression.

  “They were the embodiment of all the Italian-Polish jokes,” said Terry Francona. “My granddad ran the family. He was the patriarch. Everybody in the county knew him. When I was in college at Arizona, checking out at a Kmart, somebody heard my name and said, ‘Yeah, your grandpa tuned my piano.’ He was a minister for the religious services in a part of town called Hunky Alley. My mom was from South Dakota and had never seen anything like it. The family folklore is that when she came to meet my grandmother, my grandmother offered her chicken soup and set down a bowl of broth in front of her that had a whole chicken sitting in it.”

  Three and a half years after Terry was born, Tito and Roberta had a daughter, Amy, and the children were raised in a brick ranch in New Brighton while Tito was finishing his 15-year career in the majors. New Brighton is Steeler and Pirates country. It’s near the Ohio border, close to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, where Joe Willie Namath was raised. At church services in the late 1960s, retired outfielder Tito Francona would nudge his son and say, “There’s Joe Namath’s brother.” The Franconas weren’t rich, but had everything they needed, including a vast basement that Terry converted into a baseball training multiplex. Big league ballplayers didn’t have the cachet or the cash back then that they have in the 21st century. Tito Francona’s big league salary topped out at $30,500. His big endorsement deal was $600 from Rawlings—the company gave him three cents for every G-250 Tito Francona mitt sold. When he was done playing major league baseball, Tito took a job with the local park department, but everybody in New Brighton knew him as a former big leaguer. Among the mementos in the Francona family den were a couple of framed photographs of Tito with Ted Williams.

  Another reminder that the Francona household was home to a big league ballplayer: there was a spittoon in every room. Tito Francona was not one of those ballplayers who left his chewing tobacco in the dugout.

  “The inside of the driver’s side door in our car was always brown,” said Terry.

  Early in every major league season, before school let out, young Terry went long stretches without seeing his dad. He didn’t have a baseball practice partner, so Birdie assembled a contraption that would allow her son to practice throwing and catching by himself. Working out daily in his basement, Terry made himself the best nine-year-old ballplayer in New Brighton, and when Phillips 66 sponsored a regional pitching, batting, and throwing competition in nearby Beaver, Birdie drove her son to the competition.

  “The other kids had their dads there coaching them and playing catch,” remembered Terry Francona. “I hadn’t seen my dad in three months, but my mom sat next to me on the bench and bullshitted with me the whole time.”

  He won the competition easily, but he never got his trophy. Event organizers disqualified Terry Francona because his dad was a big leaguer. Birdie was livid. She gathered up her son, put him in the car, and promised to drive him for a consolation ice cream. But she couldn’t see the road through her tears and anger. She just kept driving and talking about the injustice of it all until her son noticed a sign that read: WELCOME TO OHIO.

  A ballplayer never forgets support like that.

  In the latter years of Tito’s big league career, Birdie would wait until school got out in mid-June, pack up the family, and relocate to an apartment near her husband’s workplace. The summer of 1965 was spent in St. Louis.

  “My first baseball memory is living in apartments in St. Louis,” said Francona. “I was six or seven years old and we lived in these apartments called ‘The Executive.’ It’s not like a place where players would live today. They were horrendous. A lot of the other ballplayers’ families were there—Ray Washburn, Ray Sadecki, Bob Skinner. I used to play baseball with their kids every day. It was like a thousand degrees every day. I didn’t get to the park that often, I was too young. But I was there the night they opened Busch.”

  “I remember Terry floating around those apartments,” said McCarver. “A lot of guys used that place because it was across from the airports. Let me tell you, there was nothing ‘executive’ about it. I stayed there four or five years, including 1967, when Roger Maris lived there, and we used to drive to the ballpark together. I remember little Terry very well.”

  Little Tito got into some trouble one night when he was carpooling to the park with some of the other ballplayers’ families. Birdie Francona was at the wheel, and everyone heard the bulletin over the radio that Cardinal first baseman Orlando Cepeda had been hit in the face during batting practice and would not be in the lineup. Young Terry whooped it up in the backseat because he knew that meant his dad would be starting at first base. Birdie was mortified.

  Then there was the night he showed up in the clubhouse with a fistful of dollars. Curt Simmons’s sons had convinced Little Tito that it was okay to sell players’ game bats to fans. Business was booming until Tito asked his son to explain where all the money was coming from. Fortunately, manager Red Schoendienst and Cardinal ballplayers never knew about the enterprise.

  Terry started going to the park almost every day in the summer of 1967 when his dad was playing with the Atlanta Braves. He’d hitch a ride to the park with Rita Raymond, wife of pitcher Claude Raymond, then find his dad in the clubhouse and get a dollar to spend on concession food. One dollar. Every night. It was good for a 75-cent chicken sandwich, but there was nothing he could buy with the 25 cents of change. After watching the game with Rita Raymond and the rest of the wives, he’d ride home in the backseat, listening to Tito and Claude analyze what just happened.

  “I heard everything they said,” he remembered. “I was the only eight-year-old who knew that you pitch guys high and tight, and low and away. I saw Bert Blyleven pitch when I was 11, and when I told my dad, ‘That guy has the greatest breaking ball I’ve ever seen,’ that’s when my dad figured out that I was really paying attention.”

  In Atlanta he introduced himself to Joe Torre, the hot-hitting catcher who always had a five-o’clock shadow by lunchtime. Years later, when Francona and Torre were the two managers in the greatest rivalry in the sport, Torre would break the ice at the beginning of every series by greeting Francona with a handshake and the question, “How’s your dad?”

  The final year of Tito Francona’s career was one of the best years of Terry’s life. Tito went to spring training in Mesa with the Oakland A’s, and Birdie came out with the kids for a three-week vacation. Terry was ten. It was hardball heaven in the Arizona desert. He got to be batboy every day, hanging around with Sal Bando and pitcher Al Downing. He played catch with a sculpted young outfielder named Reggie Jackson, who’d been a star at Arizona State. He took a road trip with the team on a day when his dad stayed back in Mesa. Tito had to have his knee drained and was scheduled to play in a B game. At the road game with the big leaguers, Little Tito spilled a bunch of pine tar in the middle of the game and was too embarrassed to tell anybody. He rode back home to Mesa with super-sticky fingers.

  Most of the time he was comfortable around the big league ballplayers, comfortable enough to gawk at Rick Monday’s attractive young wife and tell the outfielder, “You’re my idol.”

  To this day, when Monday sees Terry Francona, he laughs and says, “You’re my idol!”

  “Rick says he doesn’t even remember me doing that, but I told him, ‘That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,’” said Francona. />
  Little Tito got an authentic green satin Oakland A’s jacket for Christmas in 1969. He wore it to school every day.

  “It was the best present I ever got,” said Terry Francona.

  When Tito was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers early in the 1970 season, it worked out well for his only son. Milwaukee wasn’t as hot and humid as St. Louis and Atlanta, and the Brewers in those days played in the American League, which opened up a new world of teams for Terry. Plus, he was finally old enough to go to the ballpark with his dad every day. Brewers manager Dave Bristol didn’t like kids hanging around the clubhouse, but this was Tito’s last gasp in the bigs, so nobody complained about the 11-year-old boy. Downing helped Terry hide from Bristol. The kid shagged fly balls with the big leaguers while the Brewers were taking batting practice. When the visitors took their turn in the cage, Little Tito went up into the stands to snag foul balls with the fans. After batting practice, Little Tito would make one more visit to the clubhouse to line his pockets with candy bars—like a rube traveler stuffing his luggage with the contents of a big-city hotel minibar. Major league clubhouses are well stocked with all forms of sweets, snacks, and beverages. Ballplayers support this bounty in the form of tips to the clubhouse workers, but it looks like free stuff to an 11-year-old, and Tito Francona never said a word about Little Tito raiding the candy rack. He took care of the clubbies when his boy wasn’t around. Years later, Terry Francona’s generosity toward the clubbies would become well known inside big league clubhouses.

  In late July 1970, the Washington Senators, managed by Ted Williams, came to County Stadium. Two months away from retirement, Tito Francona made sure his only son didn’t miss an opportunity to meet baseball’s last .400 hitter. “Teddy Ballgame” had taken time to meet with rookie Tito Francona when Terry’s dad made his big league debut in the spring of 1956. A mutual friend asked Williams to visit with the young Orioles outfielder, and when the kid from western Pennsylvania walked into the visitors’ dugout at Fenway before his first big league game, the “Splendid Splinter” was waiting for him. If you wanted to talk hitting, Ted was your friend. The pitchers were the enemies, even the ones on Ted’s own team. Like most ballplayers of his era, Francona believed that Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived, an opinion shared by the louder-than-life Boston batting champ. In the den of his New Brighton home, Tito Francona keeps a photo of his debut day meeting with Ted Williams.