Francona: The Red Sox Years

by Terry Francona

  “At first we had a 24-hour rule,” recalled Epstein. “We wouldn’t talk about anything. If something fucked-up happened in the game, I promised not to talk about it. We could calm down and both get perspective. We lived up to it for a while. Then one time he asked me, ‘Hey, would you have done this?’ And the rule was out the window for a while. We got away from it, but we really had to get back to it. There was some real-time stuff that had to happen. I would get down there in the ninth inning, and I picked up on the fact that after a tough game he would benefit from having ten minutes to himself to spit out his chew and brush his teeth. It was always a delicate balance.”

  Postgame toothbrushing was part of Francona’s daily ritual. Immediately after every game, he took a few minutes to purge the Lancaster chew from his mouth and gums. It was good for his teeth, and it kept Epstein at bay for an extra moment.

  “Sometimes I’d take some extra time brushing that shit out because I was trying to get my thoughts in order,” said Francona.

  “It was like a marriage in that respect,” Epstein acknowledged. “We did little shit to piss each other off.”

  During one of the difficult summer stretches, Francona was surprised to find a thoughtful, concerned email from owner John Henry. He didn’t feel like he knew the reclusive billionaire very well and hadn’t had much contact with the big boss, other than occasionally shaking hands and chatting when Henry would come into the manager’s office before a game or say hello from the owner’s box next to the dugout. (Henry usually watched from his box upstairs, where his computer was more handy.)

  The late-night missive from Henry was warm and caring.

  “We were scuffling, and he said he was worried about me,” remembered Francona. “He wanted to know if I was feeling okay. I got it late at night, in my hotel room after another tough loss, and it really made me feel good. It was a nice gesture. It didn’t come across as fake, more like, ‘Hey, I hope you can sleep. I hope you’re okay.’”

  Henry had a nice ritual of visiting with any Fenway fan who was struck by a foul ball, but otherwise he rarely interacted face to face. Like stat guru Bill James, the Red Sox owner found optimum comfort in front of the keyboard. Inanimate objects never pushed back.

  John Henry was born on September 13, 1949, in Quincy, Illinois, and his family moved to Forrest City, Arkansas, when he was a small child. By his own admission, he was a loner as a young boy. He grew up on a farm and his recreation was listening to Harry Caray’s St. Louis Cardinals broadcasts on the radio. Henry went to his first Cardinals game at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis when he was ten, while his dad was being treated for a brain tumor in a St. Louis hospital. After graduating from high school, Henry enrolled in a succession of California colleges, but never graduated. He spent much of his youth writing music and playing bass in his band, Elysian Fields. When his dad died in 1975, Henry moved back to Arkansas and ran the family soybean farm. In his late twenties, he took to studying commodities, and he started John W. Henry & Co., offering managed futures funds, when he was 31. The company tracked prices and identified market trends. It was all about numbers. And it was wildly successful. Within ten years, Henry had enough money to consider buying his own baseball team. Instead of buying the Kansas City Royals (by this time Henry was a Californian, and he didn’t think he could move back to middle America), he moved to Boca Raton, Florida, and bought into the West Palm Beach Tropics, who were part of the Senior Professional Baseball Association. The Tropics were managed by Dick Williams. After one season with the Tropics, Henry bought a 1 percent share in George Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees. Then he bought his own big league team. From 1998 through 2001, Henry was chairman and sole owner of the Florida Marlins. He was frustrated that he was never able to get a stadium built in southern Florida. In 2001, hemorrhaging money and unable to get his new ballpark, Henry looked into moving the Marlins or buying the Angels of Southern California.

  The Red Sox were for sale in the autumn of 2001. John Harrington, keeper of the Yawkey Trust, was mulling offers from as many as six groups when Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino inadvertently aligned.

  The unlikely trio came together because Henry wasn’t able to buy the Angels, Werner (a former owner of the San Diego Padres) didn’t have the means to buy the Red Sox, and Lucchino was looking for a new gig after a nasty split with John Moores, his partner in San Diego.

  The 2001 purchase of the Red Sox got its unlikely start when Werner partnered with Les Otten, a charming businessman who had made and lost a fortune in New England ski resorts. Werner was an accomplished television producer with The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and That 70s Show on his résumé. Born to wealth and educated at Harvard, Werner experienced a failed tenure as owner of the San Diego Padres in the early ’90s. He’d been the mastermind behind Roseanne Barr’s crotch-grabbing national anthem, and while he owned the Padres he was cited by the Dallas Morning News as “the single-most hated man in Southern California.” According to Seth Mnookin’s Feeding the Monster, “Werner used to beep his horn at a heckler holding a ‘Honk If You Hate Tom Werner’ sign at the entrance to the Padres stadium in order to avoid detection.” Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was a big fan of Tom Werner’s.

  Werner and Otten stepped forward first when Harrington put the Red Sox up for sale in the winter of 2000–2001, but it was quickly apparent that they didn’t have enough money. With the likes of cable billionaire Charles Dolan and Boston business tycoons Joe O’Donnell and Steve Karp stepping forward as well, Werner and Otten needed help. Werner knew Lucchino from their days together with the Padres, and he asked Lucchino to join him with the Red Sox bid. Lucchino quickly sized up the situation. It was obvious there wasn’t enough money. Ever the facilitator, Lucchino brought Henry to Boston, even though Henry and Werner had never met.

  “I told Larry I was only interested if I could be the lead investor,” said Henry. “That’s how it happened.”

  Henry flew to California and met with Werner at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills. Henry demanded, and got, total control. He was bringing the money.

  The Sox were awarded to the Henry group for a purchase price of $700 million. The package included the Sox franchise, Fenway Park, and the lucrative New England Sports Network (NESN).

  Selig, who knew and trusted Henry, Werner, and Lucchino, brokered the transaction. Rather than take a chance on outlier Dolan (the highest bidder) or local favorites O’Donnell and Karp (who wanted to build a new ballpark near Boston’s waterfront), Selig awarded the team to the Henry group. The attorney general of Massachusetts was among many who termed the transaction a “bag job,” but nobody tells Major League Baseball what to do.

  A few months after the transaction was formalized, Selig denied all involvement, telling a Boston Globe reporter, “I had nothing to do with any of that,” then adding, “but someday you’ll thank me for it.”

  Within the walls of old Fenway, the roles of the new owners were defined immediately. Lucchino would be club president and CEO and run the team on a daily basis. Werner would serve as “chairman,” overseeing the club’s television operation and spending much of his time feeling “marginalized.” Henry would be the principal owner, the only vote that counted.

  “John was great to me,” said Francona. “He’d stick his head in my office and say hello before games sometimes. He wasn’t a real hands-on people person. When you own the team, you have a right to do whatever you want. He’d bring people into my office all the time. Tom liked to bring people in the clubhouse, and that got to be a point of contention a little bit because it was often women who would be with him. The players were a little uneasy. I didn’t make a point of going out there to meet them all the time, probably because I was hoping they would leave. The only times I saw Larry was if we were having a weather issue. He would come down to talk about it. That’s a tough time. When there’s a weather issue, I’ve got the starting pitcher sticking his head in my door and he’s pissed. Everybody’s on point and everybody’s ready to go.
There’s some anxiety going on. And that’s generally when I’d see Larry, so it could get a little tense.

  “John, Tom, Larry, me—we all wanted the same thing. I just wanted all of them to know that I was doing what I could do to help us win as many games as possible. I didn’t want them to think I was being stubborn, and sometimes that was frustrating. Sometimes that was a hard message to send.”

  Everyone knew there was tension between mentor Lucchino and protégé Epstein. Epstein bristled at the notion that he was Lucchino’s creation and was uncomfortable with the number of Sox employees who’d migrated from San Diego with Lucchino. Many of them had been with the Padres when Theo was handing out press notes and didn’t yet have his driver’s license.

  Francona knew none of the Lucchino-Epstein history and didn’t care. He didn’t go looking for Henry or Werner either.

  “I made a choice early on that I was answering to Theo,” said Francona. “I think John was doing the same thing, going through Theo to communicate with me. When Theo would ask me about some specific decision or strategy, I sometimes sensed it was coming from John, and I’d tease Theo about that, and he’d say, ‘Yeah.’ Whenever John did send me an email and I wrote back, I’d always tell Theo. Everybody knew I was going through him on everything, and that made things simpler. There was a little bit of tension with Larry and Theo, and it was easier for me to stay out of it.”

  The night of Thursday, July 1, in Yankee Stadium was one of the most important nights of the 2004 season. Nearing the midpoint of their season, the Sox were seven and a half games behind the Yankees, trying to avoid a three-game sweep in the Bronx. They had suffered an excruciating defeat in the second game of the series when the Yankees rallied for two runs in the seventh and two more in the eighth. A Nomar throwing error was the key play in the eighth, and this came one night after Garciaparra made two errors in the Yankees’ 11–3 win in the series opener.

  The season was not going well for Nomar, who had developed a serious Achilles tendon problem. He was still angry at the front office for attempting to trade him and replace him with Alex Rodriguez. He was fretting about his next contract. And he was turning into a defensive liability, which did not go unnoticed by Theo Epstein and his young men in baseball ops.

  The root of Nomar’s Achilles tendon injury was shrouded in mystery. He’d slumped at the end of 2003, batting .170 in September. There was a rumor that he’d bruised his right heel playing soccer over the winter, but others believed that Garciaparra sustained the injury working out in Scottsdale. Nomar had a story about a batting practice ball that bounced off his heel. Wiseguy reporters thought it was his ego that was bruised.

  When Garciaparra woke up on the morning of July 1—the first day of the last month of his Red Sox career—he decided he was not going to play the third and final game of the series. He was sitting out one of every three games during this stretch of his comeback, and he opted not to change the routine even though the Sox were scuffling. Committing three errors in two games and seeing the image of himself booting a ball under the headline “April Fools” on the back page of the Daily News did nothing to improve his mood.

  Remembering that his shortstop would not be available for the series finale, Francona’s mind flashed to his first impressions of 20-year-old Nomar a decade earlier in the Arizona Fall League:

  “He was an off-the-charts good kid. Michael Jordan loved him. We all loved him. In those days, the Fall League went into December, and Nomar hand-delivered Christmas cards to everybody. Nobody does that. That’s good manners. He was polite and asked the best questions of any kid I’d been around. He was hungry to be good. I remember getting a visit from Red Sox manager Kevin Kennedy and his coach Tim Johnson. They wanted an update on their first-round pick, so they stopped by and had a few beers in my office. They asked me if I thought Nomar could make a switch to second base. I told them, ‘I don’t know who the fuck your shortstop is, but move that guy to second! Just let this kid play short. He throws on the run sometimes, so you need to have a first baseman who can catch it, but you want Nomar to be your shortstop. This kid can play!’”

  It was good advice. In 1997, still playing shortstop, Garciaparra won the American League Rookie of the Year Award, hitting .306. Two years later—a year in which the Sox played the Yankees in the American League Championship Series—Garciaparra won the AL batting title with a .357 average. In 2000 he hit an astonishing .372 and became the first right-handed batter to win back-to-back batting titles in the American League since Joe DiMaggio.

  The DiMaggio comparison was not a stretch, not in the early years. Nomar wore number 5, just like Joe D. Ted Williams was fond of saying how much Nomar reminded him of DiMaggio. Even Joe’s brother, Dominic DiMaggio, a former Sox center fielder, got on board with the comparison.

  Those were heady days for Garciaparra in Boston. After Roger Clemens and Mo Vaughn . . . before Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez . . . Nomar was the face of the Sox franchise. Nationally, he was part of a “who is the best shortstop?” debate, posing for magazine covers with A-Rod and Jeter. Red Sox and Yankee fans enjoyed the Garciaparra-Jeter argument, just as they’d debated the merits of Teddy Ballgame versus Joe D, and Carlton Fisk versus Thurman Munson. Even Nomar’s name was fun. A Saturday Night Live parody poked fun at New Englanders’ pronunciation of “No-maaaaah.”

  In 2001 Garciaparra ruptured a tendon in his right wrist in the spring, underwent major surgery, and played in only 21 games. He was never the same player when he came back. The ball no longer jumped off his bat. He went from Hall of Fame–bound to being just a very good, injury-prone player. As his skills diminished, it became increasingly difficult for him to stay out of the trainer’s room.

  What didn’t change was his maniacal series of routines. All baseball players are superstitious, but Garciaparra took it to a new level. When he stood in the batter’s box, fans would see a series of toe taps and batting-glove tugs before every pitch. New England Little Leaguers easily mimed his motions. Kids paying close attention might also have noticed that Nomar put two feet on every dugout step every time he went on and off the field. It was like watching a two-year-old climb stairs.

  There was much more. Garciaparra became a virtual prisoner of his routines, and it was sometimes hard for the rest of the people in the clubhouse to be around him.

  Garciaparra loved the fans and they loved him back, but he didn’t appreciate attention away from the park. Boston was far removed from his southern California home in every way. Nomar grew up in an environment where baseball players went unnoticed at restaurants and in crosswalks. It was never like that in Boston, and Garciaparra did not understand why baseball was so important. He particularly loathed the Boston media. It was Nomar who got the Sox to embed a red line in the clubhouse carpet—a line in front of players’ lockers that could not be crossed by reporters. He had little use for the “new” Sox ownership, which had failed to extend his contract, then tried to trade him. He was also involved in a one-man licensing dispute with Major League Baseball. Nomar was the only player in the big leagues who objected to the MLB logo on the back of his helmet. He was fined for removing the logo. After he reluctantly agreed to allow the logo on his helmet, he smudged it with pine tar so that it was unrecognizable. Then he was fined again.

  “He was just Bostoned-out,” said Francona. “I told him that. Things that didn’t used to bother him seemed to be bothering him at that point.”

  The final night in New York in July ’04 was one of the better regular-season games of any season. It looked like a Red Sox victory when Manny Ramirez broke a 3–3 tie with a solo homer in the top of the 13th, but the Yankees rallied for a pair of runs after Sox reliever Curtis Leskanic retired the first two Yankees in the bottom of the inning. When the four-hour-and-20-minute epic ended, Boss Steinbrenner issued an official statement, declaring, “This was the most exciting game I have ever seen in all of sports.”

  It wasn’t received with the same glee in New England, larg
ely owing to the appearance of Nomar sitting on the pine while managers in both dugouts emptied their benches over the course of 13 innings. Francona used a five-man infield (lefty outfielder Dave McCarty playing second base) to get out of a jam in the 12th. Kevin Millar played third base, first base, and left field in the same inning. Torre used every player on his bench. The highlight came when Jeter dove into the stands behind third base, snaring a foul pop by Trot Nixon. Jeter walked back from the play holding the ball aloft, blood pouring from his chin. He was taken to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for stitches and X-rays. While all this was going on, Nomar sat. In one damning TV shot, Garciaparra could be seen in the background, sitting, while most of his teammates were on the top step of the dugout, supporting a Sox rally. The image was devastating.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be in the lineup,” Francona recalled. “We had an arrangement. When he came back from the Achilles injury, it was real obvious he couldn’t play every day. And I told the media that. He’d play two out of three, and it had to stay that way regardless of who we were playing. I checked with him that night because I knew he was going to get crushed by the media. So I went to him. He was in the whirlpool, and I wanted to get across to him that I wished he would play. The way we were playing, I thought people were going to start taking shots at him, and I didn’t want them to. When you start looking at people’s injuries, it’s really difficult. It wasn’t that I was mad at him. The weird part was, when he started getting loose in the 12th inning, I was stuck. I was confused. He was down in the tunnel kind of loosening up, and he said, ‘I’m getting ready.’ I was like, What do I do now? On a long night when a guy is unavailable for four hours, it puts the manager in a tough situation when he’s suddenly available and it’s the 12th inning.

  “The next day in Atlanta I told him, ‘Maybe it’s time for you to move on.’ I asked if he had thought about that, and he said he had. I wasn’t telling him that I didn’t think he could play or that I didn’t like him, but I was telling him that maybe it was time for him to move on. He had a lot going on. Obviously there were feathers that were ruffled. Thankfully, I wasn’t part of that. We didn’t ever bump heads, but it was obvious he wasn’t happy, and that puts a strain on your team.”