Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  On the afternoon of October 8, John Henry came down to Epstein’s office. For months, Henry had been worried about Epstein. He seemed, Henry thought, unhappy and exhausted. “I could see in his expression that he wasn’t having a good time,” Henry says. “He stopped sitting in the stands [during games]. I really began to be concerned.” Henry knew that for many people in the organization, the past year had been incredibly strenuous. “There were some people, especially the manager and the general manager, who had a hard time coping with it,” he says. Henry was now realizing what Patriots owner Bob Kraft had warned him about before the season began. “Success doesn’t necessarily make people happy,” Henry says. “People get a sense of entitlement, and it was Theo and Tito who mainly had to deal with that.”

  Over the time that Epstein had been the team’s general manager, Epstein and Henry had grown close. Epstein would frequently call Henry in advance of a big series simply to shoot the breeze about this or that pitcher or what the team’s scouting reports indicated. The two shared a passion for searching out new ways to understand the game, and their conversations sounded as much like two friends talking as they did an employee speaking to his company’s owner. But they had never, out of respect for the hierarchy of the organization, discussed Epstein’s disintegrating relationship with Larry Lucchino.

  That day, Epstein at last told Henry of his months of anxiety and frustration. He explained how he’d felt left out to dry after the Garciaparra trade, how he felt increasingly isolated from much of the organization, how he felt that the team’s obsession with generating more and more press coverage actually made it more difficult to focus on what he thought should be the team’s primary goal: winning baseball games.

  Lucchino had also opened up to Henry about how he felt that the criticism he received from the press originated, at least in part, from within the organization. During the 2005 season, Lucchino had become more agitated in the face of Peter Gammons’s pointed barbs. “A lot of the whole PR tension began over the A-Rod situation,” Lucchino says. “I look back to that as a time where there was a lot of pillorying going on, and I really started to be the preferred target.” Lucchino says he doesn’t know what caused this, but that “certain of those writers—like Peter [Gammons]” have been historically close to the team’s baseball operations department. “[Gammons] does have the ability to sort of protect young people for future jobs,” he says.

  Only now did Henry begin to appreciate the severity of the rift between Epstein and Lucchino. “With Larry, there was the A-Rod stuff and the Gammons stuff, so you had this situation as far back as before we won the World Series where both [Epstein and Lucchino] felt the other was throwing him under a bus with the media, that they were out to get the other,” Henry says. “Until then, I never realized it. I didn’t realize it was a big deal.” Instead of letting the situation fester, Henry told Epstein he had to speak with Lucchino. “You need to lay it on the line and have a difficult conversation,” Henry told Epstein. “You guys need to trust each other. You have to have each other’s back. Tom and Larry and I, we have each other’s backs. We’ve always felt that way, from day one.” Henry says he told Lucchino the same thing.

  And so, at Henry’s urging, Epstein and Lucchino met on Tuesday, October 11. But Henry had underestimated the calcified rancor and bitterness that existed between the two men. Instead of helping to clear the air, their recitation of grievances only further poisoned the atmosphere. “It didn’t work,” Henry says. “It blew things up. It drove them further apart as opposed to bringing them together.” With just less than three weeks left before Epstein’s contract expired, it seemed less likely than ever that the boy-hero GM would stay with the Red Sox.

  Over the next several weeks, the Boston media, after largely ignoring the issue during the season, began to focus on Epstein’s future. Even as the New England Patriots geared up for a run at their third straight Super Bowl title, Boston’s sports pages and airwaves were dominated by debates concerning Epstein and his contract and endless speculation about the possibility of a rift between Epstein and Lucchino. For the first time, the new-era, feel-good Red Sox were being compared to the dysfunctional clubs of old. “Epstein is young, smart, and 31—and he isn’t signed yet?” asked the Herald’s Tony Massarotti. “How in the name of John Harrington does that happen, particularly to an organization that has otherwise taken so many strides in the last 3½ years? Not so long ago, the Red Sox front office was perceived as being badly out of touch…. [T]o be in this position, now, reminds all of the old days.”

  As the press coverage intensified during these final weeks of October, Epstein’s salary demands were leaked to the media. Even as Epstein considered the leaks further evidence he couldn’t trust certain people in the organization, Henry, who’d first learned of Epstein’s salary request through a newspaper report, found himself angry with his general manager. Epstein was asking to be the highest-paid GM in the game, double what most other general managers were making. Henry, who’d talked often with Epstein about their determination to accurately read the market, was confused. “How can that be the market?” Henry asked. One of the ways Henry deals with his displeasure is by simply ignoring a person. “Theo and I had been very close,” says Henry. “But when money became the issue, we basically stopped communicating. At that point, I was mainly on Larry’s side.”

  Despite Epstein and Lucchino’s strained relationship and despite John Henry’s newfound anger, Epstein and the Red Sox began to inch slowly toward an agreement. By late October, the main stumbling block seemed to be Epstein’s bitterness over the continual leaks about the negotiations. Early in the week of October 24, Epstein, while turning down a three-year offer worth $1.2 million annually, gave Henry, Werner, and Lucchino what he considered his bottom line: He wouldn’t come back for less than $1.5 million a year. By Thursday, October 27, Epstein and the team had come to terms for precisely that amount. “We pretty much had a deal,” says Henry. “All of the [outstanding] issues had been laid to rest,” says Henry, “except these ongoing leak issues.” But instead of signing the deal before the end of the week, Lucchino recommended they wait until Monday, October 31, the last day Epstein was still under contract. Henry was confused. “I said, ‘Why are you pushing it back to Monday?’ ” Henry says. “And Larry said, ‘To give him three extra days to think about it. It’s a big decision.’ I wasn’t in favor of waiting, but I said fine.”

  Epstein did think about it, and by the time he woke up on the morning of Sunday, October 30, he was at peace with his decision. He would remain with the Boston Red Sox. He’d reconciled himself to a lack of privacy for as long as he stayed in the job. He’d promised John Henry he would no longer isolate himself in the baseball operations basement fortress, and now, after more than a year of resenting and blaming Lucchino, he realized he shared responsibility for their damaged relationship.

  Then he got a phone call alerting him to an article in that day’s newspaper. On the front page of the Globe’s sports section was a Dan Shaughnessy column entitled, “Let’s iron out some of this dirty laundry.” When Epstein began reading, he felt his stomach drop. After weeks during which he’d talked with Henry, Werner, and Lucchino about his unease about the organization, here was confirmation of his worst fears. In his column, Shaughnessy, who’d known Lucchino and Charles Steinberg since the 1980s, when all three men worked in Baltimore, chided and belittled Epstein for not properly respecting his superiors. After all, Shaughnessy wrote, it was Lucchino and Steinberg who’d “discovered” Epstein and “held his hand” during his first years in baseball. Now, Shaughnessy wrote, Epstein was exhibiting an “alarming…need to distance himself from those who helped him rise to his position of power.” Epstein, according to Shaughnessy, didn’t even know all that much about baseball. “[I]t’s a mistake to say [Epstein] knows more about baseball than Lucchino or anyone else in the Red Sox baseball operation,” he wrote. Lucchino, after all, “was a good high school baseball player” and starte
d working in the game “as an executive…when Theo was 5 years old.” Finally, Shaughnessy gave Lucchino credit for “fall[ing] on” Epstein’s sword by taking the blame for the aborted Larry Bigbie trade with the Colorado Rockies—presumably because Epstein was too much of a coward to do so himself—and implied that Epstein had recently been spurring Peter Gammons into “trashing the Sox CEO.”

  Either Lucchino or Steinberg, Epstein felt sure, had prompted the column. The two men were, after all, the heroes of the piece, and both had said lines almost identical to some Shaughnessy had used.* Where else could Shaughnessy have gotten the incorrect notion—repeated in the column as fact, without any attribution—that Epstein had asked Lucchino to shoulder the blame for the Bigbie trade?† It was actually Henry and Epstein who had decided to nix the deal; Lucchino had never been a part of the conversation.

  After reading Shaugnessy’s column, Epstein sat down and wrote John Henry an email. The next day, Epstein wrote, he would resign as general manager of the Boston Red Sox. “I have a huge pit in my stomach,” Epstein wrote. “But it’s nowhere near as big a pit as I’d have if I’d already signed a contract.”

  “I love baseball,” Epstein said two weeks earlier while discussing his future plans. “It dominates my life because I’m a part of it so much. But the big picture is, there’s so much fucking more out there. You become such a prisoner of the game, because there’s 162 games…. The best thing [any baseball executive] might be able to do is, in between teams, take a year and do other things. That might be the single most valuable thing you can do.” Now, Epstein would have just that opportunity.

  *As far back as June, the Red Sox had been in discussions with the Atlanta Braves about sending Renteria to Atlanta and bringing Chipper Jones to Boston.

  †In November, Rowand would be traded for another injury-prone slugger, albeit one with better credentials than Nixon: Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Jim Thome.

  *In December, the Red Sox did manage to get rid of Edgar Renteria, trading him to the Braves for third base prospect Andy Marte, one of the most highly rated minor league players in baseball. The Red Sox agreed to pay $8 million of the $26 million remaining on Renteria’s contract, as well as the $3 million he’d be owed if his 2009 option weren’t picked up.

  *About a week earlier, several sources confirm that Charles Steinberg had a conversation with Dan Shaughnessy and another reporter in which he said many of the things that ended up in Shaughnessy’s column. Steinberg says he never “spoke ill against Theo.” “Nor would I,” he says, “because that’s inconsistent with how I’ve felt about him all these years, and I still know with the grace of God he’s destined for more greatness.”

  †Over the next several months, Dan Shaughnessy repeatedly insisted that neither Lucchino nor his allies within the organization had urged him to write his October 30 column. But, on November 1, Shaughnessy wrote that the version of the Bigbie trade he wrote as fact was “the version held by Lucchino’s camp (three sources).” Wherever he got the information, it simply wasn’t true. “I vetoed the trade,” says Henry. “It was me, after Theo and I talked about it. It was never Larry. He had nothing to do with it.”

  Chapter 43

  Putting It All Back

  Together Again

  ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, there was, fittingly, one final leak, as The Boston Globe announced that Epstein and the Red Sox had agreed on a three-year contract extension worth $1.5 million a year. A press conference announcing the deal, the Globe said, would be held “either today or tomorrow at Fenway Park.” In fact, there would be no celebratory press conference at Fenway Park. Even as the Globe was being read across New England, the Red Sox offices were in a state of chaos. At one point, Lucchino charged down into the baseball operations department’s basement offices and shouted at Epstein to get ready to clean up the public-relations mess his resignation would create. By midafternoon, the Herald had broken the news of Epstein’s departure on its website. Epstein released his own statement soon after. “In my time as General Manager, I gave my entire heart and soul to the organization,” the statement read. “During the process leading up to today’s decision, I came to the conclusion that I can no longer do so. In the end, my choice is the right one not only for me but for the Red Sox.” If the strained relationship between Epstein and Lucchino had received intermittent coverage in the weeks before, it was about to become the region’s central story.

  “I think it caught everyone by surprise,” says Terry Francona. “I guess everybody, myself included, figured, you know, it will play itself out and there will be a nice press conference. It’ll be a hugfest and he’ll sign a three- or four-year contract, because Theo is the Red Sox. In the end, it didn’t work out that way. It was tough to watch.” That night, in order to evade the assembled media hordes, Epstein was forced to exit Fenway Park in a borrowed gorilla suit a Red Sox employee had brought in to work as a Halloween joke.* After another day and a half of trying to avoid the media camped outside his house, Epstein returned to Fenway Park for a November 2 press conference. John Henry was in attendance; Larry Lucchino and Charles Steinberg,† conspicuously, were not. After Epstein spoke, Henry came to the microphone. He appeared shaken and at times near tears. “This is a great, great loss,” Henry said. “I feel responsible. What could I have done? There’s plenty I could have done…. I have to ask myself, Maybe I’m not fit to be the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox…. Did I blow it? Yeah, I feel that way.” Both Epstein and Henry stressed that Epstein’s departure had not been a result of tension in his relationship with Lucchino. “I can tell you,” Henry said, “that one of the problems in this process was the media did not have access to what was going on, so they had to rely upon unnamed sources…. I don’t blame the media, but there were things that were said that were inaccurate.”

  Even as Epstein and Henry were giving their tortuous explanations for Epstein’s departure, Henry had begun a campaign to secure his return. He began by asking Epstein outright to come back. When Epstein said no, Henry tried a different approach. How, Henry asked Epstein, would he recommend running the team’s baseball operations department in his absence?‡ As much as he didn’t want to discuss his own future with the team, Epstein couldn’t help but get excited when discussing the Red Sox and how they could best achieve their goals. The team, Epstein told Henry, had to be less concerned with the next day’s headlines. “The reason the Red Sox never win the World Series is because they’re always concerned with what the newspapers are saying,” he said. “There’s a sort of extreme short-term thinking, always trying to build a super-team that wins the World Series that year. They’re way too concerned with the Yankees, the fans, and the media. And now that we’ve won the World Series, it’s a great opportunity to do what’s right: ignore all that and build something that will last, something for the long haul.” Henry agreed wholeheartedly, and over the next several weeks, the two men spoke in more detail and with more passion than they had in months. “The experience of us doing that, of having these conversations, definitely brought us closer together,” says Henry. As they kept talking, “it became clear that he and I were completely on the same page with respect to our long-term vision for the organization,” says Epstein.

  Here, Epstein realized, was what he had been craving for much of the last year: more direct involvement from John Henry. The reason the Red Sox were such a good opportunity for him wasn’t because he’d grown up rooting for the team, or because his family still lived in Boston. If anything, those were the very factors that made working for the Red Sox difficult. The reason the Sox presented a uniquely appealing environment was because John Henry and Tom Werner were perhaps the only owners in all of baseball with whom Epstein felt truly simpatico.

  By mid-November, Epstein was already getting job offers from around the league—Frank McCourt, the native Bostonian who now owned the Los Angeles Dodgers, offered Epstein an ownership stake in the team if he’d sign on as the team’s new GM.* Toward the end of
November, Henry again broached the subject: Would Epstein consider returning to the team? After a month of conversations, Epstein’s stance had softened. “If [Henry] does [become more involved],” Epstein remembers thinking, “and we pledge mutual commitment for a certain ideal, then does it go from being a bad situation that was ripe for leaving to possibly one of the best situations I could imagine? Yes, it does.” By the time of baseball’s winter meetings in early December, Epstein, Henry, and Werner had agreed Epstein would return to the team in some capacity. “I guess some people might take this as a slap at Larry,” says Henry, “but it’s not. But the one thing we agreed to was that I would be more in baseball operations.”

  As Henry and Epstein were talking, it was Lucchino who was taking the hit in the press and in popular opinion. Now, he seemed determined both to shift attention away from Epstein’s absence and to offer proof that his former protégé was not as vital as the press believed. In late November, Lucchino pushed through a deal that sent two of the Red Sox’s top minor league prospects, shortstop Hanley Ramirez and pitcher Anibal Sanchez, along with two lesser prospects, to the Florida Marlins for pitcher Josh Beckett, third baseman Mike Lowell, and reliever Guillermo Mota. The 25-year-old Beckett is one of the best young pitchers in baseball, with a wicked fastball and a tremendous curve. Two years earlier, he’d shut down the Yankees in the midst of being named the MVP of the 2003 World Series.