Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  As the calendar moved toward July 31, 2004, there were plenty of rumors swirling around the Red Sox clubhouse. Despite a remarkably healthy starting rotation—the fivesome of Schilling, Martinez, Lowe, Wakefield, and Arroyo hadn’t missed a start all year—and a prolific offense, had the season ended on July 29, the Sox would have missed the playoffs, with the Yankees winning the American League East in a cakewalk and the Texas Rangers snatching the American League’s wild-card spot. Lowe was perhaps the most-discussed trade chip. The tall right-hander’s record wasn’t atrocious—he was 9-9—but he had an earned run average over 5.00 and, on many days, was the worst starting pitcher in all of baseball. One frequently discussed rumor had Lowe heading to Florida in return for Marlins pitcher Brad Penny.

  Behind the scenes, it was Nomar Garciaparra who was being discussed most intently at the Red Sox’s Fenway offices. On July 24, the same day as the Sox’s 11–10 walk-off win against the Yankees, Henry, Lucchino, and Theo Epstein met with Garciaparra and his agent, Arn Tellem. Both sides agreed the meeting would be a good way to clear the air. “The meeting was, ‘We want to know why you are unhappy,’ ” says Garciaparra. “And I go, ‘Et tu, Brute?’ Because that is all I’ve been hearing for the last couple of years: I’m unhappy, I’m unhappy. I go, ‘Where are you getting this? What am I unhappy about?’ I said, ‘Is my performance a problem?’ And they are like, ‘No.’ ”

  The meeting did not improve the relationship between Garciaparra and the Red Sox executives. “By that point, there was a high degree of alienation on Nomar’s part from the franchise and from the city,” says Lucchino. “After the meeting, there was, to me, a near certainty that he would leave at the end of the year. He didn’t say it outright, but it seemed clear.” Tellem later told the Red Sox he had to talk Garciaparra out of demanding a trade that day, although Garciaparra insists he never told Tellem he wanted out. “Wanting to be traded out of Boston has never, ever come out of my mouth, publicly or privately,” he says.

  A couple of days later, while the team was in Baltimore, Red Sox officials say Garciaparra told members of the team’s training staff and Terry Francona that he’d need to miss considerable time in August and September because he was still injured. One of the team’s trainers says Garciaparra also said his top priority was not playing, but getting healthy for November, when he’d be a free agent. Alarmed, Francona called Epstein to tell him about his conversations with Garciaparra. The Red Sox had already begun exploring potential moves, and this revelation only firmed Epstein’s resolve to deal with the situation. “After that conversation,” Henry says, “Theo, Larry, and I met, and Theo said…that we needed somebody to play shortstop.”

  On Friday, July 30, the Red Sox opened up a three-game set in Minnesota against the Twins. Garciaparra, who’d played in the previous five games, was given the night off. With Pokey Reese out with a strained rib cage, Ricky Gutierrez, already playing on his third team in 2004, got the start at shortstop. The next day, players began arriving at the clubhouse at around two thirty in the afternoon, four-and-a-half hours before game time. The trade deadline is at 4:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, or 3:00 P.M. in Minnesota. Derek Lowe, easily excitable in the best of circumstances, was particularly geeked out that day—he was scheduled to start that night’s game, but knew he could, in fact, end up on a plane headed to another team before the day was out. When 3:00 P.M. finally came, the rumors began flying. Word was the Red Sox and the Cubs had made a trade—it was Lowe, apparently, who was being sent to Chicago for pitcher Matt Clement. As Lowe waited nervously by his locker to get official word, Terry Francona called Garciaparra into the visiting manager’s office and closed the door. He handed Garciaparra the phone. Theo Epstein was on the other end, telling one of the most popular players ever to play for the Boston Red Sox that he’d just been traded to the Chicago Cubs.

  “I just felt empty,” says Garciaparra. “Just like, ‘No way.’ ” He hung up the phone and walked out of Francona’s office. “I go to my locker and I see D-Lowe there and I go, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s me. See ya, bro.’ And word starts spreading around and I’m just trying not to cry.” Garciaparra packed his stuff, left Minnesota, and got on a plane to Chicago. (The trade of Lowe for Clement had, in fact, nearly happened, but the Red Sox decided it would be too disruptive to trade Lowe and Garciaparra on the same day; better to perform a simple extraction of one veteran player.)

  The full details of the Garciaparra trade shocked everyone. In the multi-team deal, Boston had sent Garciaparra and minor league outfielder Matt Murton to the Chicago Cubs and gotten Montreal shortstop Orlando Cabrera and Minnesota first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz in return. Cabrera and Mientkiewicz were both Gold Glove winners, and their defensive prowess would, Epstein thought, help Boston shore up its infield. But neither had ever appeared in an All-Star game, and the two players combined had hit only 109 home runs and batted over .300 twice. Garciaparra, as everyone in Boston knew, had a lifetime average over .320, and as recently as 2003 seemed like a sure Hall of Famer. Minutes after the deal had been announced, Epstein’s cell phone rang. It was his twin brother, Paul.

  “That’s all you guys got for Nomar?” Paul asked. As Epstein explained that it would end up being a good trade for the team, his brother told him about the reaction on talk radio. “You’re getting killed,” Paul said. “People are furious that Nomar was traded for a couple of .240 hitters.”

  The trade would test’s Epstein’s mettle like no other since he’d become general manager. In the post-trade press conference, Epstein, sporting several days’ worth of stubble and looking haggard, patiently explained how the move would improve the team’s defense. He went on to tell WEEI, Boston’s sports-radio station, that, “given what we know from prior negotiations that we weren’t going to sign [Garciaparra]…we were looking forward to the next two months and said, ‘Well, what do we have here?’ ” Since Reese was injured, Epstein said, the Red Sox would be faced with “a situation where we’re likely to have Nomar Garciaparra and Ricky Gutierrez playing short and we don’t think that’s going to be enough. We haven’t been playing well, and Nomar’s likely to play less over the next month than he’s played the last month.” If they wanted to make a run at the playoffs, Epstein said, Boston needed to upgrade, even if that meant trading a franchise icon.

  Privately, Epstein wasn’t nearly so self-assured. A couple of hours after the trade, he wandered back into his office in the basement of Fenway. The baseball operations offices are three floors below the team’s executive offices, and the rest of Epstein’s crew had headed home for the night, leaving Epstein secluded. As he flicked through the stations on a flat-screen television mounted to the wall across from his desk, he passed by ESPN, which had a picture of Garciaparra in a Cubs hat. “It hit me for the first time, emotionally, that there would be real consequences to the organization and to me personally if it didn’t work out [well],” Epstein said later.

  That evening, Epstein spoke to John Henry on the phone. “It was the right trade, but no one likes it,” said Epstein. “You must feel like the loneliest man in America,” Henry replied. The next morning’s papers couldn’t have consoled him any. The Globe’s Gordon Edes wrote, “What the Sox lost was a role model for an entire generation of Little Leaguers…. From Amesbury to Bangor, there were certain to be tears last night.” Later that day, the Red Sox lost to the Twins, and Cabrera, despite hitting a home run in his first game with Boston, committed an error that led to Minnesota’s winning run. That night, for the first time in his life, a restless Theo Epstein took a sleeping pill.

  The trade also introduced new tension into the already strained relationship between Epstein and Larry Lucchino. Boston fans were upset, and they reflexively looked for someone to blame. Epstein was the golden boy, the hard-working, selfless Brookline native who felt, somehow, like one of them. Lucchino, whom the Herald said “often played the role of the Sox enforcer,” already had a reputation for being an overeager tough guy. He’d be
en blamed for screwing up the A-Rod trade, for inciting George Steinbrenner with his “Evil Empire” comment, for being the adversary of agents like Scott Boras and Arn Tellem. “No matter what happens, Larry’s the one who gets blamed,” says John Henry. “A lot of the time, it’s Theo and I who are in favor of the unpopular moves, and Larry wants to be more conservative. He doesn’t like it when people get upset. But people think I’m this nice guy and he’s this thug, so he gets blamed.”

  Behind the scenes, Charles Steinberg, the Red Sox PR chief, was quietly trying to do some quick damage control for the only man he’d ever really worked for. Steinberg stressed to reporters—on background—that Lucchino had been plenty conflicted about the deal. “Larry believes in marquee players staying with their clubs,” Steinberg says. “He believes in the old-fashioned, illustrated by [the Orioles’] Brooks Robinson being a one-franchise player, [the Red Sox’s] Carl Yastrzemski being a one-franchise player, [the Orioles’] Cal Ripken [Jr.] being a one-franchise player, [the Padres’] Tony Gwynn being a one-franchise player. Now, Brooks occurred before Larry was in the business, but [Ripken and Gwynn] he was involved in.” It is Lucchino’s preference, says Steinberg, “as a true old-fashioned baseball fan, to keep your star players,” while it’s Epstein, Steinberg says, who “is aggressive and is going to seek to make the changes he sees fit.” But, Steinberg says, at the end of the day, it’s Lucchino who feels obligated to take the heat off his bosses. “When it comes to being the ultimate tough guy on the other side of a table…he’s your man,” Steinberg says. “Maybe it’s because he wants to, maybe it’s because he’s instructed to, but either way, he’s the SOB. Now that’s a reputation that is a part of the job when you’re protecting the ownership.”

  It didn’t take long for what Steinberg was saying sotto voce to reporters to reach Theo Epstein and his colleagues in the Red Sox baseball operations department. Because this message was being conveyed second- and third-hand instead of directly by the people involved, it became amplified and distorted. Although there was no concrete evidence that Lucchino knew anything of what Steinberg was saying, it felt to Epstein as if Lucchino had hung him out to dry. It was almost an exact mirroring of the situation that had occurred in the aftermath of the failed A-Rod trade. “After the Nomar trade, we get the opposite thing going on,” says a high-ranking Red Sox executive. “Now Theo believes Larry’s throwing him under the bus.” At least, Epstein thought, he had Henry’s full support.

  Ironically, it was Henry, if anyone, who seemed to suggest he was conflicted about the Garciaparra trade. A Globe article that ran four days after the trade began, “Red Sox principal owner John W. Henry placed full responsibility for the Nomar Garciaparra trade on general manager Theo Epstein yesterday.” It then quoted Henry as saying the trade was “extremely difficult—he was the face of the franchise.” Lucchino, meanwhile, seemed to be giving Epstein credit for the move. “Congratulations to Theo for diagnosing the problem and acting boldly to correct it,” he said, putting what seemed to be a positive spin on the “bottom-up” message that had been conveyed to reporters. But no matter. Just as Lucchino had decided, seven months earlier, that Epstein had betrayed him by blaming him for the A-Rod trade, now Epstein felt that Lucchino was no longer someone he could fully trust. He began to pull away from Lucchino, and became even more isolated from the rest of the Red Sox employees, choosing to surround himself almost solely with his colleagues in baseball operations. “We’re literally in the basement, far away from everybody else,” Epstein says, speaking of his Fenway Park offices. “And figuratively we came to rely upon each other even more. It was sort of like, ‘You say it was a bottom-up trade? Well how do you like us now?’ mentality, although we probably didn’t realize it at the time.”

  *The rules and regulations governing baseball can be comically complex. July 31 is the nonwaiver trade deadline, which means that up until that date teams can freely trade any player on their rosters so long as that player doesn’t have a no-trade clause in his contract and doesn’t have what are referred to as “10-5 rights,” which means he has at least 10 years of major league service time, the last five of which have been with the same team. Players that fall into either of those categories must give their permission to be traded. From August 1 through August 31, a player can be traded so long as he’s cleared waivers, meaning his team put him on waivers and no other team claimed the player for nothing more than the remaining money due on his contract. (Players placed on waivers in August are placed on conditional waivers, which give the team the right to pull the player back if he’s claimed.) The most recent big-name waiver trade occurred in 2004, when the Colorado Rockies traded outfielder Larry Walker to the St. Louis Cardinals.

  Chapter 33

  “We’re Gonna

  Kick Fucking Ass

  Starting Today”

  IN THE TWO WEEKS AFTER THE TRADE, the Red Sox played much as they had all year—winning a couple of games, then losing a couple. After an August 15 loss to the Chicago White Sox, the team’s record on the month was 8-6, for a winning percentage just a shade better than their mark on the season. Right around this time, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino convened one of the player roundtables they held periodically throughout the season. Henry asked the players if there was anything else management could do to help them out for the remainder of the season.

  “You guys have done everything you can do,” Jason Varitek said. “It’s up to us now.” Then Kevin Millar began to speak. “We’re gonna go on a run,” he said. “We’re gonna win, and we’re gonna kick fucking ass starting today.” It was good to see the team had so much confidence, but for months, there hadn’t been much to support that notion.

  On August 16, the Sox beat the Toronto Blue Jays, 8–4, behind a decent outing from Derek Lowe. The next night, Orlando Cabrera won the game for Boston with a one-out double in the bottom of the ninth. On the 18th, Boston completed its sweep of Toronto, before taking the next three from the Chicago White Sox. Facing Toronto for another series, the Sox took two out of three, before sweeping the Detroit Tigers in a four-game series. The Red Sox, after stumbling through so much of the season, had suddenly won 12 of their last 13 games. Still, the sternest test seemed just ahead: The next nine games were against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Texas Rangers, and the Oakland A’s, three teams all riding hot streaks—the A’s had won 12 of 13, the Angels 10 of 11, and the Rangers 12 of 16—and fighting for playoff spots.

  The Red Sox ripped through their American League West opponents like a buzzsaw, sweeping the Angels and the A’s and taking two out of three from the Rangers. All of a sudden, Boston had won 20 of its last 22 games. On August 15, the Red Sox were 10.5 games behind the Yankees. On the morning of September 9, they were just two back. “The Red Sox are now the hottest property in baseball,” Sports Illustrated proclaimed in a September 13 cover story. “With a 16-1 burst through Friday, Boston remade itself into a pitching-and-defense juggernaut…and outdid itself producing melodramatic script material.” John Henry couldn’t help but think back to Millar’s speech a few weeks earlier. “From that point on,” Henry says, “we were basically unbeatable.”

  The Yankees, meanwhile, seemed to be imploding. They were humiliated to the tune of 22–0 by the Cleveland Indians, at Yankee Stadium no less. With Schilling dominating the league, Kevin Brown and Javier Vazquez, two of New York’s offseason pickups, were pitching poorly, when they were pitching at all: In early September, Brown punched a wall in the Yankees clubhouse and broke two bones in his left hand. And, while Orlando Cabrera had energized Boston with both his defense and his playful personality, the Yankees’ trade-deadline acquisition, pitcher Esteban Loaiza, had gone 0-2 with an earned run average of more than 8.00.*

  The Red Sox and the Yankees split their remaining six games, and Boston never did overtake New York, finishing the regular season at 98-64. But their record, good only for second place in the American League East, was the third-best mark in all of baseball (only the 101-61
Yankees and the 105-57 St. Louis Cardinals were better), and for the second year in a row, the Red Sox made the playoffs as the American League wild-card team. They’d face the Anaheim Angels in the first round. The first two games, beginning October 5, would be out in California.

  Of course, the regular season didn’t end without its share of Bostonian melodrama. About a week before the playoffs were set to open, Pedro Martinez announced to reporters that Curt Schilling had been tapped to begin the postseason, meaning he was the pitcher Boston wanted to ensure got the maximum number of starts.

  “Without a doubt, he deserves to be the number-one starter,” Martinez said. “He’s been better than Pedro Martinez and better than anyone on our team.” It was true. While Martinez lost his last four starts to finish the year at 16-9 with a 3.90 earned run average, the highest of his career, Schilling went 21-6 with a 3.26 ERA. Remarkably, the Red Sox were actually worse on days in which Martinez—the active pitcher with the best winning percentage in baseball and the player with the third highest winning percentage in history—was the team’s starting pitcher than they were the rest of the year: Boston went 19-14 in Martinez’s 33 starts* for a .576 winning percentage, while putting together a 79-50 record the rest of the time, good for a .612 clip. When Schilling took the mound, the team was 25-7. In games after a Red Sox loss, when a victory would halt a potential losing streak, the team was 12-3 in Schilling’s starts, 7-7 in Martinez’s. If Martinez had been wounded by Schilling’s acquisition, even he had to admit that in 2004 the beefy, verbose right-hander had been the better performer on the mound.

  There was also the question of what to do about Derek Lowe. Lowe had finished the year with an adequate 14-12 record, but with a frightening 5.42 ERA. In his last four regular season starts, Lowe had averaged only about two-and-a-half innings per game. On several of those occasions, Red Sox officials wondered if Lowe’s penchant for late-night socializing might have contributed to his poor performances, as he looked bleary-eyed and gave up runs by the fistful. At least once, Lowe himself felt compelled to respond to the rumors that he’d been out partying. “To say…I didn’t come to play because of the night before is using an excuse that wasn’t really there,” he told reporters after one game late in September.