Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  “I don’t agree with that,” Francona said. “I don’t agree with that.” As the rest of the reporters in the room shifted uncomfortably, Heuschkel tried again. “Was he going hard?”

  “I don’t agree with that. I think when you’re trying to make a point, you’ve got to be correct,” Francona said, now staring directly at the reporter. He ended the conversation without ever answering what he knew was Heuschkel’s real question: Does it bother you that the team’s $20 million a year left fielder can’t be troubled to run out a bases-loaded grounder in the middle of a pennant race? Francona, who made about $600,000 in 2005, couldn’t answer, because if he had, the answer would have to have been yes.

  August 25’s game began well, with Schilling notching two strikeouts in the first inning. But, in the second inning, five singles led to three Kansas City runs, and the Royals weren’t just making contact, they were hitting the ball with authority. Schilling let in another run in the third and two more in the fourth, and his final line on the night was actually worse than his first start of the year: five innings pitched, nine hits, six earned runs.

  “If that start had been on March 10 [in spring training], we would have said, ‘We’re doing okay,’ ” says Josh Byrnes. “He had some nice splitters, and he reached back for a 95-mile-per-hour fastball on one of the strikeouts. But it wasn’t [spring training]. Baseball is all about repetition, doing the same thing 90 or 100 times and getting the same results every time.” That night in Kansas City, Schilling’s split-fingered fastball would sometimes dive out of the strike zone as it had done in years past, but other times it would stay over the meaty part of the plate. Schilling himself often seemed to be surprised to see where his pitches ended up.

  Still, with seven more starts before the end of the year, both Schilling and the Red Sox were hopeful the big right-hander could regain his form before the start of the playoffs. This was, after all, the pitcher who had carried the team to a world championship the year before, the pitcher who gutted his way through a pair of postseason starts on just one good ankle and his fierce pride.

  Schilling’s next start came on August 30, back at Fenway Park, when he took the mound for a game against Tampa Bay. From the second pitch of the game, it was clear that this would not be the night in which Schilling morphed back into his 2004 self. After taking stock of Schilling’s first offering, the Devil Rays’ Julio Lugo squared off on the next pitch and smacked a double into left field. Two batters later, Tampa had a 1–0 lead. Schilling escaped the first inning without incurring any more damage, but in the second he let in four more runs on a single, three doubles, and a triple. It seemed at times as if he were throwing batting practice.

  After the game, Francona met with reporters in the Fenway Park interview room, located directly above the team’s clubhouse. The manager tried to put a positive spin on his pitcher’s outing. Schilling, Francona said, “looked more confident” as the game went on. “I think his velocity is fine, [he’s just having trouble] executing it.”

  After Francona left, Schilling came in, already showered and in his street clothes. He wouldn’t turn 39 for another two-and-a-half months, but on that night he looked considerably older. Schilling is known as being a good interview, and he tries to be thoughtful and articulate when he speaks to the press. Now, speaking softly and deliberately, he sounded like a shell of the bravado-filled athlete who’d said before a Yankee Stadium start in the 2004 playoffs, “I’m not sure I can think of any scenario more enjoyable than making 55,000 people from New York shut up.”

  “I think after that second inning [I] was probably as down as I’ve been in a long, long time,” he said. “Emotionally, [I was] just frustrated. [I was] at a point where I was at a crossroads mentally and it was either continue to either, to keep beating myself down or to make some adjustments. I tried to make some adjustments.” Schilling had rarely, if ever, shown this level of self-doubt. It sounded as if he wondered if he’d ever be able to pitch effectively again.

  “I’m sitting there after the second inning and we’re down 5–0, and I’m showing no signs of being able to get them out. You know, I’ve always taken a lot of pride in being the guy that took the ball, the eight guys that go out there with me, we’re going to win,” he said. That was no longer the case. “It’s hard to be confident when you’re not successful, and it’s been going on since spring training—seven months now. It wears on you…. You start to find yourself throwing personal pity parties, and you get nothing accomplished.”

  Schilling was merely vocalizing what everyone associated with the Red Sox was already thinking. Still, it was a sobering press conference. Ten months ago, on October 19 and 24, 2004, he’d pitched a total of 13 innings against the Yankees and the Cardinals, letting in just one earned run while striking out eight. He hardly seemed like the same person. Now even Schilling, who was signed through 2007 and still owed almost $30 million, had to wonder: Would he ever be able to pitch that well again?

  In early September, Kevin Millar, the self-fashioned team mascot, handed out to his teammates T-shirts he’d had printed up. FUCK ’EM ALL, the shirts read. 2005 SOX—ALL WE HAVE IS EACH OTHER. Even some of his teammates found this new us-against-the-world stance a bit odd. The Red Sox, after all, were in first place and were arguably the most beloved team in baseball. The average salary of the players on the roster was over $4 million. What were these unnamed forces against which the Red Sox had to band together?

  For Millar, the FUCK ’EM ALL shirts came to represent a kind of sorry coda to his career in Boston. After energizing the team and helping push it toward its successes in 2003 and 2004, both the press and Millar’s teammates had begun to tire of his antics. Trot Nixon, whose locker was next to Millar’s, found himself barking at his teammate to quit aping for the cameras so he could get to his clothes. Millar had even lost his starting job, and was now platooning at first base with John Olerud. The fans at Fenway booed his feeble at-bats, and his prospects for the future seemed limited.

  Toward the end of the month, he finally found an outlet for his frustrations. On September 21, Howard Bryant, in his Boston Herald column, quoted an anonymous teammate of Curt Schilling’s slamming the pitcher. “When he comes into the game people cheer him like he’s the Pope,” the player said, complaining that Schilling wasn’t confronted with the jeers the rest of the team faced when they struggled. “You think they’d let Pedro get away with this? Why does he get the pass?” That Millar was Bryant’s source was no secret to the team. Millar, while palling around with Schilling in the clubhouse—the two had even dyed their hair similar shades of platinum blond not long before Bryant’s column came out—had been overheard several times making these exact same comments. To those who knew him, it was clear Millar wasn’t asking why Schilling didn’t get booed; Millar wanted to know why he did.*

  The Schilling-Millar spat bubbled up in the local newspapers and on sports radio during the season’s final week, although only The Eagle-Tribune publicly hinted that Millar was the source of the comments. Millar responded by saying, “I 100 percent deny it. You can write whatever you want about anything and it’d become a story for no reason. That’s why we deal with it.” In the end, no one really cared—which may have been Millar’s worst nightmare.

  On September 30, the Red Sox began the final series of the year, a three-game set at Fenway Park versus, naturally, the New York Yankees. After leading their division for most of the season, Boston had slipped into second place on September 20, and for the last 10 days, the two teams had been circling each other in the rankings. Now Boston was one game back. A sweep would give them the division, while winning two out of three would leave the teams tied, but even that wouldn’t guarantee a playoff spot for the Red Sox. The Cleveland Indians were tied with Boston and just one game behind New York. If Cleveland won two of its final three games and the Red Sox took two out of three from the Yankees, all three teams would end the year with identical records, forcing one-game playoffs to determine who would w
in the American League East and the wild-card slot.

  That weekend’s series was, as always, hyped to no end, and there was much talk of how these two teams would likely face each other again in the American League Championship Series. However, there was also a definite sense—among the press, among the team executives, and even among the players—that enough was enough. Heading into the weekend, the Red Sox and Yankees had already played each other 68 times since the beginning of 2003. For all the pronouncements about how perfect it would be for there to be a third straight Red Sox–Yankees series to determine the American League pennant winner, the overheated atmosphere and the incessant teasing out of this or that storyline began to feel contrived and suffocating. “We had 26 heavyweight fights a year for two years,” John Henry says. “Fifty-two fights. Then another 19 [games during the 2005 regular season]. We needed a break. We needed a rest from the Yankees–Red Sox.”

  The Red Sox won Friday night’s game, bringing the two teams even, before dropping Saturday’s match. On Sunday, the last day of the regular season, Curt Schilling pitched Boston to a 10–1 win, and the Red Sox and Yankees finished the year with identical 95-67 records, tied atop the American League East. Or so it seemed. Because the Indians had lost their three final games of the season, and because the Yankees had won the season’s head-to-head matchup with the Red Sox, 10 games to nine, New York was named the winner of the division. For the third year in a row, Boston would enter the playoffs via the wild card.

  The final weekend of the Red Sox season felt, in a weird way, like the end of the era. “The whole weekend had a little bit of an odd feel,” Theo Epstein said at the time. “It was supposed to be the most hyped regular season series in history, but I don’t think the ballpark had the same intensity everyone was expecting.” Everyone knew what a Red Sox–Yankees series was supposed to mean: baseball’s ultimate winners against the game’s ultimate losers. But the Yankees were no longer invincible, and the Red Sox were no longer cursed. Now they were just two division rivals, battling it out at the end of an exhausting year.

  After Boston lost the first two games of its playoff series in Chicago, there was talk of how staring elimination in the face was nothing new for this team. Epstein even joked that the Sox didn’t even start trying until they were trailing 2-0. But this year really was different. There would be no miraculous last-second escapes, no coming together as a team. Unlike 1999 versus Cleveland, or 2003 versus Oakland, or 2004 versus the Yankees, the 2005 Red Sox did what most teams do when facing elimination: They were eliminated.

  *Mantei, in 34 appearances from the beginning of the season through July 1, posted a 6.49 ERA, although that figure is a bit deceptive: Mantei added more than a run and a half to his ERA in his final appearance of the year, a third-of-an-inning outing in which he gave up five runs in a 15–2 Red Sox loss. On July 21, Mantei underwent season-ending ligament surgery on his left ankle. Embree, after being so valuable to the Red Sox in 2003 and 2004, completely fell apart in 2005, posting a 7.65 ERA in 43 games with Boston before being cut by the team in late July. After telling the Red Sox he wanted to play closer to his home on the West Coast, Embree signed with the Yankees. He was almost as bad in New York, putting up a 7.53 ERA in 23 appearances with the Yankees, and he was soon being booed by his new home fans. “Sometimes it seems like they still think I’m wearing a No. 43 Red Sox jersey,” he said of Yankees fans when Boston visited New York in September.

  †Normally, baseball teams are not required to play more than 20 games in a row without a day off. The Red Sox’s stretch was necessitated because of the rainout of an August 14 game versus the White Sox, which was rescheduled for September 5.

  *Schilling’s inaugural appearance as the Red Sox closer came in a home game against the Yankees in the Red Sox’s first game after the All-Star break. Schilling, who spent the previous night in California receiving an award from ESPN honoring his 2004 playoff performance, had to take a redeye flight back to Boston to make it to the park on time. He entered the game in the top of the ninth inning to the strains of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” and Aerosmith’s “Back in the Saddle” with the score tied at six. Gary Sheffield laced Schilling’s sixth pitch against the left field wall for a double, and Alex Rodriguez hit the first pitch he saw to straightaway center field for a game-winning, two-run home run. “That,” said one writer in Fenway’s press-box, “was the most effortlessly crushed ball I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  *Bill James, who traveled to the Royals games from his home in nearby Kansas, said the play would have been designated as a “failure to hustle” in his 2003 study “because there was at the least the possibility there would have been a different outcome” had Ramirez put in more of an effort.

  *Earlier in the year, Millar had been overheard complaining to Mark Bellhorn that, “We’re getting killed [by the fans], but we’re not the guys making $20 million a year.”

  Chapter 42

  Apocalypse Now, Redux

  ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2005, about 15 hours after the end of the Red Sox season, Theo Epstein dragged himself out of bed and into his Fenway Park office. On weekends, Epstein traded his pressed, button-down shirt and dress pants for the uniform of the average, thirtysomething bachelor: a loose-fitting flannel shirt, a Pearl Jam baseball cap, a stubbly goatee.

  The previous night’s playoff loss had been disappointing, but Epstein didn’t feel the sense of bitter frustration he’d experienced after Boston’s 2003 defeat at the hands of the Yankees. This year’s team, he knew, had been lucky to make it as far as it had. At the beginning of the season, he’d predicted the Sox would win 95 games. They’d done exactly that, but it had been a messy, exhausting, and occasionally ugly journey. “This was the best we’ve ever done,” Bill James said immediately after the conclusion of the 2005 season. “Our problems this year were huge: an accumulation of age at many positions, several players coming off of peak seasons, injuries essentially robbing us of our closer and our number-one starter…. We have more to be proud of this year than any other since I’ve been here.”

  In 2006, the Red Sox would field a dramatically different team, and Epstein and his staff were energized by the chance to remake the organization. “We’ve been on the cusp of being an aging team for two or three years,” James said. “We can’t push it anymore.” Almost every position on the team was up for grabs, or at least held the possibility of change. Kevin Millar, who’d gone from being a clubhouse catalyst to an annoying distraction, wouldn’t be offered a new contract. If either Alex Cora or Tony Graffanino, the two second basemen the team had picked up in 2005, returned, it would likely be in a part-time role. With any luck the team would even be able to trade Edgar Renteria,* who, since arriving in Boston at the beginning of the year, had appeared physically incapable of playing shortstop in the big leagues. Third baseman Bill Mueller, one of the players Epstein, and the team’s owners, respected most, would likely seek a two-year contract on the West Coast, closer to his Arizona home.

  The team’s outfield was in just as much flux. The Sox would, once again, need to deal with Manny Ramirez’s trade demands. Center fielder Johnny Damon was a free agent, and while the team hoped to re-sign him, Epstein didn’t think it smart to offer Damon, who’d turn 32 in November, the five- or six-year contract agent Scott Boras would likely demand. Right fielder Trot Nixon had been hobbled by injuries for the previous two years. In fact, only the team’s designated hitter and catcher—David Ortiz and Jason Varitek, respectively—were sure things for 2006.

  The opportunities all this change presented invigorated Epstein. The team had already considered trading Nixon to the Chicago White Sox for Aaron Rowand, perhaps the best defensive center fielder in the game.† The Sox had also been debating how much of Renteria’s $10 million per year contract they’d be willing to eat in order to get rid of the shortstop, who still had three years left on his deal. If Boston essentially gave Renteria to another team and agreed to pay, say, $4 million annually of h
is salary, could the team use the remaining $6 million a year to land a better player?* Finally, the Sox were counting on 2006 as the year that the carefully cultivated minor league system would yield dividends. After a discouraging season spent shuttling back and forth between the Red Sox and the minor leagues, third baseman Kevin Youkilis would finally get a chance to play regularly, while, over at second, 22-year-old Dustin Pedroia would likely begin his transition to the majors. The Sox pitching staff would go from being one of the oldest in baseball to one well-stocked with young arms. Twenty-four-year-old Jonathan Papelbon had already had some success in Boston, and there were high expectations for Craig Hansen and Jon Lester, a pair of hard-throwing 21-year-olds. Epstein and director of player development Ben Cherington had been monitoring and working with some of these players for years. This was Epstein and Cherington’s chance to create a team that learned how to work selflessly with one another from early in their careers. Here, finally, was their opportunity to assemble an exciting young club, one that would define Red Sox baseball for years to come.

  Despite this, Epstein didn’t feel unequivocally excited about the coming year. In fact, he hadn’t even made up his mind whether he’d return after his contract expired on October 31. His discomfort with Larry Lucchino and Charles Steinberg was weighing ever more heavily on his mind, and the stifling lack of privacy he felt in Boston was becoming a greater and greater burden. “When we suffer the inevitable off season or downturn in performance, however brief, things could get really ugly around here,” Epstein said late in the 2005 season, referring to the fan and media reaction. “If I’m going to commit to staying, I need to know we’re all in this together. I need to know the first time I make a controversial trade or something’s not going right, I’m not going to be undercut and thrown out there as chum.”

  At this point, after two years of mounting tension, Epstein and Lucchino had still never discussed their frustration with each other. Instead of having an open dialogue, the two executives transferred their mutual distrust into the negotiations over Epstein’s contract. After first approaching Lucchino in spring training, Epstein hadn’t gotten an offer from the team’s CEO until well into the year. The offer he did get—for around $750,000 a year, conveyed to him one night in a hurried phone call—would keep his salary in the lower tier of baseball general managers. Epstein eventually asked for $2.5 million a year, a figure that would make him the highest paid GM in the game. Resentful of the sacrifices he had to make in his personal life and convinced that Lucchino didn’t properly appreciate or respect him, Epstein decided to use money as the barometer of his worth to the organization.