Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  During the season—and against the backdrop of Larry Lucchino’s “Evil Empire” quip—this ragtag group of ballplayers was transformed by the national press into a group of rebels trying to topple the imperious, arrogant, overbearing Yankees dynasty. The contrast could not have been starker. The Yankees had won four World Series between 1996 and 2000 and had taken the Diamondbacks to seven games in 2001; the Red Sox hadn’t won a title in 85 years and hadn’t played in the World Series since 1986. The loud-mouthed George Steinbrenner treated every baseball game as a win-at-all-costs contest and threw money at superstars past their prime; the soft-spoken, gentle-seeming John Henry believed in the cool, rational analysis of players. The Yankees, with their prep-school regulations about hair length and facial grooming, seemed like a bunch of corporate stiffs; the Red Sox, with their cornrows, muttonchops, and motley beards and goatees, looked like frat-house refugees.

  With that rambunctiousness came a fair amount of turmoil, to be sure. Ramirez, in particular, seemed to be doing his all to alienate himself from his teammates and his fans. On Friday, August 29, while saying he was too sick to play, Ramirez told ESPN he’d like to play one day for the Yankees. The next day, he said once again he was too ill to take the field—he was, he explained, suffering from a throat inflammation, although that night he was seen socializing with New York’s Enrique Wilson in the lobby of Boston’s Ritz-Carlton. On Sunday, he didn’t show up for a Fenway Park doctor’s appointment.

  And on Monday, September 1, Ramirez capped what might have been the sorriest four-day stretch of his Red Sox career when he refused to pinch-hit in a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Heading into the ninth inning, Boston was down, 9–7. Boston mounted a comeback, with little-used role players like Damian Jackson and Lou Merloni delivering crucial hits while Ramirez stayed on the bench. The Sox clawed back that day, and Trot Nixon won the game with a grand slam. Afterward, Nixon said, “I’m sure a lot of guys would like to have seen Manny up there. Well, I’m just as confident with the people who went to the plate.”

  Ramirez’s insubordination posed perhaps the starkest challenge of Grady Little’s managerial career. In 2002, Little had made no secret about the fact that he felt players such as Ramirez and Pedro Martinez were essentially uncontrollable. At one point, he explained his attitude about the team’s spoiled superstars to the Herald’s Tony Massarotti. “Let me ask you something,” Little said. “If someone gives you a dog and that dog has a habit of peeing on the floor, can you change them?” Now, Little apparently felt it was time for Ramirez to be house trained, and the next day he refused to put him in the lineup.* After the season ended, Tim Wakefield pointed to the day Little had benched Ramirez as the turning point in the Red Sox’s season. “I think that brought us even closer together and then [Ramirez] realized, I think, that he wants to be part of this team. If you noticed, his numbers got a little better,” Wakefield said. “He started playing harder.”

  Ramirez’s meltdown was, people assumed, just another case of “Manny being Manny.” Everyone, from his manager to his teammates to the reporters covering the team, thought that was the end of it. But, in fact, Ramirez had gone to John Henry in August and asked, for the second time in two years, to be traded.

  “I thought he was happy,” Henry says. “We all thought he was happy. And since that first day [when Ramirez had asked at spring training in 2002 to be traded], we’d had a great relationship. But he said, ‘I can’t do this for five more years.’ And I said, ‘I give you my word: I’ll do everything I can to get you out of here. But it’s obviously not going to happen until the end of the season.’ ”

  A couple of weeks later, Ramirez passed Larry Lucchino on the field before a game. “We’ve got a deal, right? We’ve got a deal?” Ramirez asked. “Not until the end of the season, Manny,” Lucchino answered. “Let’s wait until the end of the season.”

  Even with Ramirez taking himself out of the lineup for days at a time, the Red Sox kept hitting, and the team kept winning. By the end of the year, the scope of the team’s offensive accomplishments was astounding. The team had set a major league record for most extra-base hits in a season, 649, and one for the most total bases in a season, 2,832. They’d broken the 1927 Yankees record for the highest slugging percentage in a season, at .491. They had eight players on their roster with 30 or more doubles, another record. The Sox’s eight players with 80 or more runs batted in and nine players with more than 100 hits both tied previous baseball records. Instead of collapsing under the weight of a fractious clubhouse, the 2003 Red Sox succeeded despite some of their superstars’ petulance. “Theo deserves a lot of credit,” says Kevin Millar. “He brought baseball players [to Boston]. Myself and David Ortiz and Billy Mueller—these guys no one wanted. David Ortiz was nontendered by the Minnesota Twins. I mean, I was going to Japan. Billy Mueller, coming off knee surgery with the Chicago Cubs, no one wanted. This guy wins [the American League] batting title [in 2003].”

  As potent as the Red Sox were, they weren’t quite good enough to overcome the Yankees in the regular season, and the Sox finished Epstein’s first year as general manager with a 95-67 record, six games behind New York in the American League East. Still, it was good enough for the third best record in the league, which meant the Sox were crowned one of baseball’s wild-card teams.* For the first time since 1999, the Red Sox were headed to the playoffs.

  *Because of baseball’s unbalanced schedule, teams not only compete within their own division for playoff spots, they play their division rivals far more each year than they play other clubs in their league: Teams in the same division play each other 18 or 19 times each year while playing other league rivals not in their division as few as six times a season.

  *Little did not bench Ramirez in 2002 when he failed to leave the batter’s box after hitting a ground ball. He later said he regretted that decision. “I should have taken him out of the game right there,” Little said the day after the 2002 incident, which had occurred in Tampa Bay. “It was a mistake I won’t make again.”

  *The American and National Leagues are each divided into three divisions: East, West, and Central. The top team in each division makes the playoffs, as does the nondivision winner with the best record of the league’s remaining teams.

  Chapter 24

  Gumped:

  A Cautionary Tale

  HEADING INTO THE PLAYOFFS, life in what had increasingly come to be known as “Red Sox Nation” seemed to be going fairly smoothly. The team was gelling and the offense was ferocious. Even the bullpen had been transformed into one of the team’s strengths, with Byung-Hyun Kim serving as the team’s closer and the newly acquired Scott Williamson joining Mike Timlin and Alan Embree to create a strong staff of hard throwers.

  But this might have been the rare instance in which the team’s front office was more pessimistic than most of its fans. The team, now under Grady Little’s tutelage for a second year, had not been managed the way the Sox’s top brass had envisioned. Little’s usage of Kim was a prime example. By July, Kim was shifted to the Sox bullpen after almost half a season in which he’d worked as a starter, training his body to be prepared to pitch once every five days.* Little (who’d acquired the nickname “Gump” after the Tom Hanks character in Forrest Gump) almost immediately started using Kim for three, four, and even five games in a row. Little had been terrified by the Red Sox’s early-season bullpen collapses; the first-time manager’s contract ran out at the end of the year, and expectations for the team were high. He decided that as soon as he found a formula that worked, he was going to ride it into the ground.

  In the final half of the season, Little used Kim a total of 42 times; extrapolated out over an entire season, that would be 84 appearances. In 14 out of the last 18 years, no American League reliever has appeared in 84 or more games. Nine of Kim’s 42 appearances were for more than one inning, and five were for two or more. In 2005, when the Red Sox’s Mike Timlin led the league with 81 appearances, only 14 of his stints were for
more than an inning, and only four were for two. From July 6 through the end of the season, Kim pitched in six out of seven games three times. From August 26 to September 3, he pitched in seven out of eight games, including one appearance of two innings.

  His use of Kim was a perfect illustration of how Grady Little’s shortsightedness and lack of creativity hamstrung the Red Sox. When, in July and August, Kim seemed to be the answer to the bullpen’s problems—in 13 out of his first 15 relief appearances after joining Boston’s bullpen, Kim didn’t allow an earned run—Little decided to hold onto him for dear life. When, at the end of August, Kim gave up seven earned runs in eight games, the shortsighted Boston fans and media blamed Kim instead of Little. Still, in September, Kim came back to throw 13 innings without giving up an earned run, going 3-1 with 5 saves for the month.

  If few members of the media had noticed how Little’s managerial approach was affecting the team, it certainly wasn’t lost on the Red Sox high brass. Epstein’s baseball operations crew was providing the team’s coaching staff with voluminous reports—on upcoming opponents, on how best to use the players on the team—which Little largely seemed to ignore. “Grady Little was a hunch manager,” says Tom Werner. “That’s not our style.” John Henry is even more blunt. “My feeling was that we were here to win a championship, and I thought that, sooner or later, when it came down to crunch time, he was really going to hurt us.” By the middle of the season, Henry had conversations about firing Little. “There was a total lack of preparation,” says Henry, which went all the way back to the Opening Day debacle in Tampa. By season’s end, Henry had taken to joking that if the Red Sox did win the World Series and he was tapped to star in one of the iconic “I’m going to Disney World” commercials, he would instead announce to the world, “I’m going to fire Grady Little!”

  In the 2003 American League Division Series, the Red Sox would face Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, the team assembled by the man they’d thought they’d hired not even a year earlier. Both teams were entering the postseason with something to prove. It was Epstein’s first playoff series as a general manager, Henry and Werner’s first playoff series as the team’s owners, and the Red Sox’s first playoff appearance in four years. Beane’s A’s, for their part, were trying to shake off a reputation for being postseason chokers. Two-thousand three was the fourth year in a row Oakland had made the playoffs—since 2000 Oakland had won more games than any team in baseball except Seattle—but in each of the previous three years, the A’s had lost the clinching fifth game of their first round series.* As if that weren’t enough to whet fans’ appetites, the matchup looked as if it had the makings of a classic duel, with the Red Sox’s record-setting offense squaring off against the A’s spectacular pitching.

  In Game 1, played in Oakland, Pedro Martinez pitched a workmanlike seven innings before heading to the showers with the Red Sox leading, 4–3. After Mike Timlin retired the side in the eighth inning, Grady Little summoned Byung-Hyun Kim for the game’s final three outs. With one out, Kim walked Billy McMillon and hit Chris Singleton with a pitch, putting runners on first and second. He then struck out Mark Ellis, leaving the Sox one out away from a win. The next batter was the A’s left-handed designated hitter, Erubiel Durazo.

  Before Durazo could dig in to the batter’s box, Grady Little bounded out of the Sox dugout and headed for the mound. He held out his left arm and pointed toward the bullpen: He wanted lefty Alan Embree to come face Durazo. It was, casual fans everywhere knew, a high percentage move. Left-handed batters generally have a much more difficult time facing left-handed pitchers, and Kim fared much better against right-handers.

  Except Erubiel Durazo was not your typical left-handed batter. He actually had what’s referred to as a reverse split. He hit better—much better, in fact—against lefties than he did against righties. In 2003, Durazo’s batting average was 36 points higher when facing lefties, and his slugging percentage was 39 points higher. What’s more, in 2003, Embree exhibited a reverse split, too, with lefties hitting 42 points better than righties against him. Finally, Little had just shown up his closer by telling Kim he didn’t have confidence in him to record the game’s final out. “I thought I was going to have an actual fit when I saw Grady coming out of the dugout,” says one member of the team’s baseball operations crew. “In that instant, [Little] not only lost the game, he lost his closer for the rest of the postseason.” With the Coliseum crowd going wild, Durazo slapped an Embree fastball into left field, scoring the game’s tying run.

  The inning hadn’t even ended before Kim was, once again, labeled the goat. (Since he was responsible for the runner who scored the tying run, it was Kim, not Embree, who was charged with a blown save.) It was, as no one hesitated to point out, the third time Kim had blown a postseason game in which his team had had the lead heading into the ninth inning. But it was Little’s pitching substitution that helped set up Durazo’s game-tying hit. Three innings later, with planned Game 3 starter Derek Lowe called in for an emergency relief appearance, the Sox lost on, of all things, a bases-loaded bunt single.

  The Sox lost the next day, too, as Barry Zito shut down Boston’s vaunted offense and the A’s scored five runs in the second inning off Tim Wakefield. Heading back to Fenway, the Sox found themselves facing three elimination games in a row.

  If you looked back at the box scores from those first two games in an effort to determine what had gone wrong, a few things would likely pop out. The two pillars of the Red Sox offense, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, had gone a combined 1-for-17 with no runs batted in. (Second baseman Todd Walker, meanwhile, was 4-for-9 with two home runs and three RBIs.) And, of course, there was that five-run second inning in Game 2, an inning that was prolonged by a Red Sox error.

  What you wouldn’t see was any indication that, in both games, the Red Sox’s best chance at victory may have hinged on something Manny Ramirez did while not in the batter’s box. In the 12th inning of Game 1, with two outs, Ramirez on second, and Bill Mueller on first, Boston’s Gabe Kapler hit a shot down the third base line. Coming off the bat, it looked to be a sure single, and Ramirez began trotting toward third. But Oakland’s third baseman, Eric Chavez, made a terrific play to stop the ball. Seeing that Ramirez hadn’t been going all out, Chavez raced back to the bag, barely beating a sliding Ramirez for the out. Instead of loading the bases, the Red Sox’s inning was over, and the A’s won the game in their turn at bat.

  The next afternoon, a Ramirez defensive miscue led to four of the five runs the A’s scored. With one out and runners on first and second in the second inning, Oakland’s Eric Byrnes hit a high fly ball to left field. Ramirez tried to track the ball and got turned around before Byrnes’s pop-up fell behind him for a two-run double. Had Ramirez caught the ball, Wakefield would have likely escaped from the inning after allowing only one run. Ramirez seemed to be doing his best to provide the Red Sox with yet more proof of his lack of hustle and subpar defensive performances.*

  It was the A’s whose mistakes cost them Game 3, as the Red Sox took advantage of a pair of Oakland base-running blunders to win, 3–1. The next afternoon, David Ortiz won Game 4 with a two-run double off Oakland closer Keith Foulke in the eighth, tying the series at two games apiece. On Sunday night both teams flew back to California for the next evening’s deciding game, in which Martinez would face Zito, the laid-back left-hander who’d edged Martinez to win the 2002 Cy Young Award.

  Both pitchers started well, and Oakland was nursing a 1–0 lead as Boston came to bat in the top of the sixth inning. Finally, the big Boston bats woke up. Jason Varitek led off with a home run, and three batters and one out later, Ramirez hit a three-run blast to give Boston a 4–1 lead. There were only 12 outs to go, and even after the A’s got back a run in the sixth, Boston’s lead appeared safe. Martinez retired the first two batters in order in the seventh, and then Jermaine Dye lofted a pitch into the no-man’s-land between second base and center field.

  Grady Little had lifted the defensively
challenged Todd Walker when the Red Sox got the lead in the sixth inning, and the athletic Damian Jackson was sent in to replace him at second base. As soon as the ball left Dye’s bat, Jackson went into a full sprint out toward center, tracking the ball over his shoulder. Johnny Damon, meanwhile, had started dashing in at the exact same time. As they converged in shallow center field, Jackson dove and the ball landed in his outstretched glove at almost the exact moment that Jackson’s and Damon’s heads struck in a gruesome collision. As the ball trickled away and Dye tried to sprint to second, both Jackson and Damon lay prone on the field. Only a head’s-up play by Nomar Garciaparra, who ran out, plucked the ball off the ground, and fired it to second, kept Dye from reaching base safely.

  With the inning over, every Red Sox player on the field gathered around the two players as the team’s trainers and doctor sprinted from the dugout. Jackson was groggy but alert. Damon was out cold. “When I got there,” said right fielder Trot Nixon after the game, “he was breathing kind of heavy…. I said a prayer for Johnny and said the Lord was with him. In those kinds of situations, it makes this game real small.” It only took a minute for Jackson to struggle to his feet. Damon, however, remained motionless. Two minutes passed. Then three. Finally, four minutes after losing consciousness, Damon began to stir. He was lifted into a stretcher and, after raising his right arm to acknowledge the crowd, was taken off the field in an ambulance. Only ten minutes had passed, and the Red Sox had just six outs to go to win the series, but the game felt very different.

  Pedro Martinez was sent back to the mound in the eighth, and he allowed another Oakland run, bringing the game to 4–3. With that, his night was over. Alan Embree and Mike Timlin were called in to finish the inning off, leaving the Sox with just three outs to go, Grady Little had lefty Scott Sauerbeck,* who hadn’t yet pitched in the playoffs, and Scott Williamson still remaining in the bullpen. (Byung-Hyun Kim had further alienated both his teammates and Boston fans when he gave the middle finger to the Fenway crowd after being booed during the introductions to Game 3. Before that game began, Kim told Little he was unavailable because of a sore shoulder.) Thus far in the playoffs, Williamson had been stellar, striking out eight while giving up only two hits and one walk in five playoff innings.