Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  When the Red Sox won baseball’s ultimate prize that chilly night in St. Louis, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino embraced in the stands. They could not have helped being optimistic about the future of the organization. During the offseason, they planned to refurbish the team’s clubhouse, adding a new upper level that would be off-limits to the prying eyes of the press; that way, they hoped, they could continue the Red Sox’s transformation into the type of organization that would attract the game’s biggest—and pickiest—stars. Epstein and his baseball operations crew, it seemed, would only grow stronger. Within days, the team embarked on a World Series trophy tour that eventually reached every single city in the state of Massachusetts, creating good will while simultaneously helping to attract new fans. The Red Sox’s victory even quieted talk of the supposed Selig-orchestrated bag job. For a few months, it seemed as if all their dreams were coming true.

  Five days after the end of the Red Sox’s 2005 season, on the morning of Wednesday, October 12, the team’s senior staff gathered for one of its regular strategy sessions. One of the quirks of Fenway is its lack of readily available conference spaces. Often, these management meetings were held in one of the luxury suites that ring the upper level of the stands. On this day, it was held in Fenway’s Crown Royal Club, a street-level room decorated with wall-mounted flat-screen televisions and framed black-and-white photographs of Red Sox heroes from years past. The club, directly accessible from Brookline Avenue and available for rental for private functions and parties, is just one of the many money-raising additions the new owners had made to Fenway since they had bought the team four seasons earlier.

  Larry Lucchino was the first to speak. Although Werner first pursued the Red Sox and Henry actually put up most of the money to buy the team, the 60-year-old Lucchino was usually the public voice of the organization, as well as the man responsible for day-to-day operations. Lucchino had been a standout high-school athlete—he was an all-city basketball player in Pittsburgh as well as a varsity second baseman. He went to Princeton, then Yale Law School, and in the early 1970s, found a mentor in Edward Bennett Williams, who had started the Washington, D.C.–based law firm Williams & Connolly. Williams steered Lucchino toward the sports world, and Lucchino served as general counsel of the Washington Redskins in the late 1970s before becoming general counsel of the Baltimore Orioles when Williams purchased the team in 1979. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lucchino gained a reputation as a swaggering, fierce competitor and a brilliant executive: As the CEO of the Orioles and the San Diego Padres, he oversaw vast improvements in each team’s record (the Padres even went to the World Series in 1998), and was often credited as the driving force behind the successful new stadiums that were built in both cities.

  Lucchino, who sat at the head of the rectangular table, is not a fan of small talk or fussing around. As soon as everyone was seated, he quieted the banter and asked people to identify the pros and cons of the previous season. “The fact that we won 95 games obviously goes on the positive side of the ledger,” Lucchino said, starting things off. Indeed, the 2003, 2004, and 2005 seasons marked the first time in the team’s history that the Red Sox had made the playoffs three years in a row; since 2002, only the Yankees had won more games in the American League. Still, Lucchino’s opening statement seemed more like a carefully planned reminder than an acknowledgment of an actual accomplishment, for after the heady roller-coaster rides of the previous two years, many of the team’s employees—to say nothing of its fans—seemed to feel that the 2005 campaign had been, in the end, a disappointment. Just a week earlier, the entire organization had been preparing for what it expected would be another long postseason run.

  Mike Dee, a Lucchino disciple and, as the team’s chief operating officer, the man in charge of wringing every last dollar of revenue out of the Red Sox experience, nodded to the improved atmosphere at the ballpark. Dee, who looks a little bit like Mr. Clean—tall and bald with a round face—noted that an increased security presence and stricter rules governing in-stand behavior meant many fewer drunken, cursing fans. Fenway, Dee said, was more hospitable to children and families than ever before, and this was accomplished during a season in which the team was publicly criticized for the addition of new beer stands and a huge increase in the amount of alcohol sold at the park. Meg Vaillancourt, the eccentric former Boston Globe reporter now in charge of the team’s charitable operations, talked about how successful the paid tours of Fenway Park had become. They were, Vaillancourt said, a way to keep fans emotionally connected to the team even if they couldn’t always afford to come to actual games. (At $44.56, the Red Sox, for the eighth straight season, had baseball’s highest average ticket price; the Chicago Cubs, at $32, were second. At $12 a pop, these hour-long tours of Fenway cost as much as bleacher seats in many of the country’s other ballparks.)

  Finally, it was Theo Epstein’s turn. Epstein looked much older than he had on the day in 2002 when he had become, at 28, the youngest general manager in baseball history. His hair had begun to thin, and his face had been shorn of its soft edges. Epstein is a workaholic—he had been in his basement office working early on Saturday, about fifteen hours after the Red Sox had been eliminated—and John Henry, worried about Epstein’s stress level and his workload, had recently begun urging him to take some time off.

  Two-thousand five had been an arduous and trying year for Epstein. After the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, he’d become a local celebrity on par with, and perhaps even above, the team’s players. He’d stopped watching games from his seat about a dozen rows behind home plate because he found it impossible to walk through the stands without being poked at and mobbed. He’d started having his hair cut in the basement of Fenway; not only would he save time but he could also avoid the endless gawking he endured whenever he was spotted on the street. Eating out had become a chore, as had running errands or trying to catch a movie with his girlfriend. While many thirtysomethings would have enjoyed the endless adulation and attention—the gifts of women’s underwear, the marriage proposals—Epstein found it stifling. Over the course of the year, several of his closest colleagues said that he’d seemed sluggish or hesitant for the first time since he began working for the Red Sox. His interactions with the media, once friendly and frequent, became rare and combative. He seemed increasingly affected by fans’ expectations for the team and the harsh glare of the Boston media.

  There was also the fact that, although he’d been the architect of the team that had won Boston its first World Series in 86 years, Epstein still had to contend with grumbling from both inside and outside the organization that he had made a series of missteps in the past year. Several of the team’s 15 minority partners had complained about everything from Epstein’s signing of Renteria to a four-year, $40 million contract to the precipitous decline of left-handed reliever Alan Embree, who, after an ineffective half-season, was cut by the Red Sox only to sign with the Yankees. (At one point, one of the team’s partners mistakenly hit “reply all” to send an email in which he groused about Epstein’s personnel decisions and said he didn’t think the Red Sox deserved even to make the playoffs.) Toward the end of the year, as the Sox’s thin pitching staff struggled to stay afloat, even Lucchino had taken to humming Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” in Fenway’s corridors, replacing the song’s famous refrain with the words, “Where have you gone, Pedro Martinez? / A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” Everyone from the team’s executives to its most casual fans now seemed to expect the Sox to win 100 games and play deep into the playoffs every year.

  That, Epstein knew, was not going to be possible. And he was dismayed—offended, even—by the fact that the organization, instead of tempering the unrealistic expectations for the team, had been adding more fuel to the fire, always agitating for more coverage in the local media, always promising that the team could and would get bigger, better, stronger. His pride in his accomplishments was being overwhelmed by the resentment he felt at the direction of the club. Part of the
perfectionism that led him to study obsessively anything that could affect the team’s on-field performance had also caused him to grow frustrated when other parts of the organization were not functioning in a way that he thought was most effective. His agitation had only increased as the season progressed. Finally, at the October 12 meeting, he spoke up.

  “In general, we’ve had a lot of success in player development,” Epstein said, starting off with an unqualified positive. After years of being known as an organization that traded away its best up-and-coming players in dubious—or just plain stupid—deals,* the Red Sox, under Epstein’s leadership, had hoarded draft picks and jealously guarded the team’s minor league prospects. One of the brightest spots of the second half of the 2005 season was the emergence of Jonathan Papelbon, a flame-throwing right-hander whom Epstein envisioned as the type of hard-working, no-nonsense player the Red Sox would be defined by in the years to come. In 2005, Epstein told everyone at the table, the Red Sox had been able to integrate some of the team’s most promising young pitchers into the bullpen. Still, he felt compelled to warn his colleagues of what the future would likely bring: “We’re going to need a lot of patience, because there’s going to be a lot of failure.” He reminded the group that most young hitters will look lost at the plate for their first half-season or so, and most young pitchers will struggle with their confidence and command before settling into a groove.

  “It could get rough,” he said. “Right now, there’s a lot of hope [about the team’s young talent]. But remember, the most popular player on the football team is always the backup quarterback. When [second base prospect Dustin] Pedroia gets up here and he hits a buck-fifty, discovers he can’t reach the wall and can’t find his stroke because it’s freezing out—well, that will happen. The rest of the organization really needs to realize this.”

  Epstein, who can appear reserved in public, began to speak more quickly. “We sat here in April and talked about building an über-team. That’s dangerous. That’s very dangerous. We need to be aware of the potential that the bubble could burst. Yes, it’s a pro that, on the business side, we continued to grow. But on the con side is the amount of hype as we move toward superpower status. Yes, we won 95 games this year, but this approach isn’t really sustainable over the long run. Sooner or later we might need to take half a step backward in return for a step forward…. I warned about this in April. What if we win 85 games [in 2006]? We’re bringing up some young players that are going to be better in ’07 than they will be next year. And they’ll probably be even better than that in ’08.”

  Lucchino, who’d been running the Orioles when Epstein was hired as a summer intern 13 years earlier, jumped in. Epstein and Lucchino had a complicated relationship, one that was undergoing a tense transition from mentor–protégé to peer–peer. After having broached with Lucchino the subject of his contract, which was set to expire at midnight on October 31, back before the season began, Epstein, who made around $350,000 a year—roughly what the lowest-paid players in baseball earned—still didn’t have a deal in place for next season. Unbeknownst to almost everyone in the organization, the two men had each, over the previous year, become convinced the other was trying to undermine him. “Theo is talking about a slightly different approach that would need to be reflected in the PR of the organization as a whole,” Lucchino said. “But frankly, I’m not sure how you would project that.”

  Epstein had some ideas. Though he’d never say it publicly, Epstein wished Lucchino would cool some of his public pronouncements: labeling the Yankees the Evil Empire, for instance, or, as he did two years ago, taking swipes at the players union just as the Red Sox were on the verge of completing a trade for Alex Rodriguez, who was at the time the Texas Rangers shortstop and the American League’s reigning MVP. And he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at the efforts of Charles Steinberg, the team’s executive vice president of public affairs and Lucchino’s right-hand man. (Steinberg had actually hired Epstein while with the Orioles and had followed Lucchino to San Diego and then to Boston.) Steinberg frequently bragged about the fact that the Red Sox had been prominently featured in the Boston media every single day of 2004. He was especially proud of the fact that the team had waited until Christmas Eve to announce that catcher Jason Varitek had been signed to a four-year, $40 million contract and was being named the team’s third captain since 1923, a move that guaranteed plenty of coverage on Christmas, normally a slow news day in the baseball world. That kind of continuous press was, Steinberg often said, a great accomplishment. Epstein disagreed. It was just this approach, he thought, that increased the pressure on a team already operating under intense scrutiny. After all, every seat in Fenway Park had been sold out for several years running. What was one more front-page story going to accomplish?

  “It’s a subtle thing,” Epstein said that day. “We can’t always make ourselves out to be a superpower. For our part, on the baseball operations side, we know that’s not an effective strategy in the long haul.” Epstein only had to look a couple of hundred miles to the south to realize this: The Yankees, after building a dynasty in the 1990s by developing their own stars, had spent the first years of the new millennium trading away their farm system and signing high-priced free agents whose peak performances were likely in the past. “That has to be reinforced on the public level,” he said. “We may be reaching a saturation point. We keep asking for more, more, more. But there will be a point where we don’t do more [one year] because we need to do things for the long run.”

  Epstein took pleasure in talking about, and planning for, the days when the team’s emerging talent took center stage, but he worried that the transition to the team’s up-and-coming stars would be hindered by the too-bright glare of unrealistic expectations. The previous year had been a good reminder of how an overabundance of media could become suffocating.

  “Somehow, we still get involved in these weekly soap operas,” Epstein told the table. “A lot of it’s because the veteran players who have a forum because they always have a mic in their face become blowhards. Certain people have too much influence—the older, louder veteran players. They need to get a little more professional about presenting themselves…. That’s one element of becoming an über-organization. We build the brand so big that it becomes hard to manage.” Epstein was trying to remain calm, but he was clearly distressed by much of what he was describing.

  Soon, as happens with many conversations involving the Red Sox, this one evolved into a discussion of money. The Red Sox had been very successful, but were constrained by baseball’s revenue-sharing system and had to compete in their division with the Yankees, the richest team in the sport. One of the team’s financial advisors warned that a single 85-win season could cost the organization as much as $20 to $30 million in lost ticket and advertising revenue. Lucchino raised the haunting legacies of teams like Baltimore, Colorado, Cleveland, and Toronto, all clubs that had enviable runs of high attendance followed by years of mediocre on-field performances and prolonged periods of fan apathy.

  “We have the long-term solution to that problem,” Epstein repeated. “We can be both a large revenue club [that can afford to sign high-priced free agents] and have a strong farm system. But it’s probably not going to be a seamless transition. This year we had a great year. We will probably be worse next year.”

  An old Red Sox hand who worked in Fenway Park operations spoke up. “We’ll just tell [the fans] different, we’ll just tell them we’ll be better.”

  Finally, Epstein lost his cool. “No!” he barked. “No!” Struggling to control himself, he said, “We can’t just tell them we’ll be better. That’s the whole point! That’s what I’m trying to say!” Epstein, already flustered, let the topic drop, and Lucchino steered the conversation toward other issues before breaking for lunch.

  Later that afternoon, Epstein paced among the cubicles outside of his basement office. “What a joke: ‘Just tell them we’ll be better,’ ” he said to no one in particular. “T
wo more weeks. Two more weeks and I might be a free man.”

  And so he was. Epstein’s season-long frustration, coupled with some last-minute leaks regarding his contract negotiations, resulted in the biggest bombshell to hit Red Sox Nation since Henry and Werner had bought the team four years earlier. On October 31, the same day the Globe reported Epstein would be signing a three-year deal worth $4.5 million, Epstein announced his resignation. An apparently irreparable break in his relationship with Lucchino, compounded by his frustration over what he felt was not-so-subtle backstabbing by his old boss Charles Steinberg, convinced him to walk away from one of the most lucrative general manager contracts in all of baseball.*

  Over the next several months, the Red Sox were roiled by the kind of drama and controversy fans had associated with the Yawkey era. John Henry, in an emotional press conference, said Epstein’s departure had forced him to question whether he was fit to be the principal owner of the Red Sox. Larry Lucchino was accused of being everything from an egomaniacal cowboy to an insecure bully. The normally loquacious Steinberg all but disappeared from view. Suddenly there was, Boston reporters agreed, a level of dysfunction not seen since the waning days of the Dan Duquette–John Harrington era.

  The John Henry era was supposed to be about finally realizing the squandered potential of a team that had been so miserably mismanaged for so much of its existence. Within three years, the Sox seemed to have accomplished everything they could have ever hoped to achieve. One year later, it looked like it was all falling apart.

  *Try, for instance, telling your average Red Sox fan that former owner Harry Frazee didn’t sell Babe Ruth to the Yankees to finance the Broadway production of No, No, Nanette. It’s true that Frazee sold Ruth—in 1919. It’s also true that he produced No, No, Nanette on Broadway—in 1925. By that time, Frazee was already two years removed from his ownership of the team. Still, the myth, and the attendant outrage, endures.