Francona: The Red Sox Years

by Terry Francona

  The strain was all over the 2004 Red Sox. Epstein had not planned on going to Atlanta for the next series, but changed his mind and went south to check on his team. He wanted to talk to Nomar and would reluctantly answer questions from the media. Most of all, he wanted to talk to his manager.

  “It’s really uncomfortable to be the GM and have the team go off the rails when you’re not there,” said Epstein. “That was the meat of the three-month stretch where this great team was playing .500 baseball and was playing really soft and was letting bad defense and mental mistakes sabotage game after game after game. We weren’t a good outfit at that time. We weren’t playing the game the right way, and it was tough to watch. People were getting pretty upset, and we all thought we were wasting this great opportunity with this great team. So I flew to Atlanta in part to answer questions about Nomar and calm that whole thing down and pat Nomar on the butt and try to stabilize things, but I really wanted to talk to Tito. I felt like he needed some support and that he was on the verge of letting the outside storm—which he was usually good at insulating himself and the team from—he was on the verge of letting it get the better of him. He wasn’t being himself.”

  It was their first formal closed-door meeting dealing with an uncomfortable topic.

  “Tito, you’re not yourself,” started the GM. “Remember what we talked about when you had your interview? Remember everything you said you stood for in the interview? Everything that’s important to you? The type of leadership you said you could pull off? How you said you would handle situations and deal with the media and interact? Well, that was only six months ago, and there’s a lot going on now. There’s a storm going on, and the wolves are circling. Let’s make sure we do this our way. We only get one chance to do this. All the things you said? That’s the guy we hired. Go be that guy. Don’t worry about what happened in this one game, or what this one player is doing, or what somebody wrote. Be that guy you were in the interview. That’s what this team needs, and that’s who we hired, and we need to be able to look in the mirror and know that we did it our way.”

  Francona was a little surprised. He didn’t sense any urgency.

  “Theo, I don’t even know what people are writing or care,” he responded. “Fuck, I know we’re not playing great, but I believe in all the things I said, and we’re gonna fight through this. That’s the only way I know how to do it. We’re okay. I believe in myself. What I told you in that interview, that’s what’s happening here. Our clubhouse is fine. Guys aren’t complaining. We’re spinning our wheels a little bit, but we’re going to be fine.”

  Years later, Francona said, “I know Larry was worried and sent Theo down. And I know John was worried about me at that time. But there was nothing any different really going on. I knew we weren’t playing great, but I didn’t think we were panicked. When you go to New York and have a 13-inning loss, it exaggerates things. Those games were on television, and sometimes people tend to think that the games they see are the only ones going on. I never really knew what Larry and Theo were worried about there. Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t think it was as big a deal as they did. It probably flew over my head. I didn’t feel any different before or after Theo came down. The reality for us is that we wake up the next day and we’ve got another game. That’s baseball. You do the same things the same way every day, and I never thought we got away from that.”

  In the first game after the Yankee Stadium debacle, Nomar was back in the lineup and managed to get three hits in another Red Sox loss. Theo thought his manager looked fine. The GM was comfortable with what he heard and saw from his manager.

  The Red Sox were 48–39, eight games behind the Yankees, at the All-Star break. On the morning of the final game before the break, Manny said he couldn’t play. He said his left hamstring was sore. Everybody knew the real reason. Pedro had been allowed to go home to the Dominican Republic a couple of days before the break. Sitting out the final game gave Manny his own little vacation.

  It was always the hamstrings with Manny. It was the perfect ruse. A sore hamstring doesn’t show up on X-rays. There’s no bruising. For an elite athlete looking for a day off, it’s the equivalent of “Not tonight, honey, I have a headache.” It’s impossible to prove or disprove.

  While Pedro kicked back under a mango tree in the DR, Manny went to Houston with Schilling and Ortiz for the All-Star Game. When the Sox gathered in Anaheim for the second half of their season, Francona had Manny in the lineup for the first game of the series, but Manny said he could only serve as designated hitter. Manny had homered in the All-Star Game. This was another Manny test for the manager. Francona stood up to his slugger when the team moved on to Seattle. He told Manny he’d only put him in the lineup if he was well enough to play left field.

  “Spending time with stuff like that is draining,” said the manager.

  Then came the game that took on a life of its own. Red Sox 11, Yankees 10. Varitek 1, A-Rod 0.

  It unfolded on the weekend of July 23–25 (Nomar’s 31st birthday was July 23), the eve of the Democratic National Convention, which was held in Boston.

  The Yankees won the series opener Friday night, and it rained hard overnight, casting doubt about the field’s readiness when everyone returned to the ballpark Saturday morning for a nationally televised game scheduled to start at 3:15. Four hours before the game, Henry, Lucchino, and Epstein met with Nomar and his agent, Arn Tellem. Garciaparra expressed his unhappiness with everything related to Boston and the Red Sox.

  Francona was not at the meeting. He was worried about the field. He knew Sox officials and television officials would want the game to start on time, and he prepared for Lucchino’s “Doppler weather” visit. Routinely, the decision to play is made by the home team, then becomes the domain of the umpires once the first pitch is thrown. Before the inevitable visit from Lucchino, Francona inspected the field with Torre, Sox chief operating officer Mike Dee, and Fenway groundskeeper Dave Mellor. The outfield was swampy, and there were puddles on the warning track. Dee, the managers, and the groundskeeper agreed that the field was unplayable. Torre went back to his clubhouse. Still standing in the outfield, Francona took a call from Epstein.

  “You need to come back to your office now,” said Epstein. “There’s a mutiny here. The players want to play.”

  Francona and Dee went back to the Sox clubhouse and found Epstein, Henry, Lucchino, Varitek, and Millar waiting in the manager’s office. The players wanted to play the game. Pedro even volunteered to come in as a relief specialist. It didn’t make the field playable, but it was a good sign that the Sox wanted to get back out there. Francona agreed. The game would be played.

  “Somebody better tell Joe,” Dee told the Sox manager.

  Sitting at his L-shaped desk, Francona picked up the landline phone and punched “0.”

  Making a call, any call, from the manager’s desk of a major league ballpark can be an ordeal. After the Black Sox scandal of 1919 almost killed big league baseball in the early 1920s, strict rules were put into place regarding phone calls to and from major league clubhouses. Typically, Fenway was among the slowest to change. Sox owner Tom Yawkey had hired Helen Robinson to operate the Fenway switchboard in 1941, and she was the guardian at the gate for more than a half-century. Yawkey ordered all calls to go through the switchboard, and the order was never rescinded. Helen was gone by 2004, but the telephone situation was unchanged. It didn’t seem to matter that managers and players had access to cell phones. Phone calls within the ballpark remained decidedly old-school. It was the glacial pace of change in baseball. Francona considered himself lucky that he wasn’t using a rotary device.

  “The whole phone situation throughout baseball is amazing,” he said. “I lived through it in Cincinnati with Marge Schott. Somebody’s wife was having a baby late one night, and the switchboard guy went home cuz it was after midnight and there were no calls coming in or going out. It’s the Pete Rose thing. In most clubhouses, the manager can’t make a call. It
’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve got a cell phone sitting right next to me. If I wanted to place a bet, I could place a bet on my cell phone. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be in my office in another park on the road and I would try to call Theo, and the lady at the switchboard would be like, ‘Who are you calling?’ and I’d be like, ‘We’re going to make a trade in about five minutes, put me through!’ In most of the ballparks you have to tell the operator who you are calling and log it in. It’s not worth it. It’s silly. At some parks it’s impossible. In Chicago, you cannot make a call. You have to sign your life away. It’s silly.”

  Some Yankee players were already showered and dressed for a cushy day off in Boston by the time Francona got through to Torre.

  “Joe was pissed, and I don’t blame him,” said Francona.

  The phone call put things in motion for a pivotal day in Sox history. The fireworks started in the third inning when young Bronson Arroyo hit A-Rod with a pitch. Rodriguez stepped back, yelled at Arroyo, then noticed Varitek getting up in his face. It escalated quickly, and the photo of Varitek shoving his catcher’s mitt into A-Rod’s grill wound up on the cover of Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s best-selling book Faithful. It stands as the iconic image of the 2004 season. It represents the day the Sox wanted to play a game that the Yankees did not want to play, the day the Boston captain got into the face of A-Rod, and a day when the Sox beat the Yankees, 11–10, on Bill Mueller’s two-run homer off Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth. The game featured 27 hits, nine relief pitchers, four Red Sox errors (one another by Nomar), and five ejections.

  “It was going to be a tough day to play to begin with,” said Epstein. “We had our seventh starter, Arroyo, going. We were playing bad. It was the type of game where, if there was a gray area, you just bang it. The players, I think, felt management was trying to bang the game because we couldn’t win that day. That created a burr under their saddle. They needed something to rebel against. It was like, ‘Fuck this, we’re going to play today and we’re going to win today.’”

  “I saw most of that from the clubhouse because I got thrown out of that game pretty early,” said Francona. “Everybody thinks we stand in the tunnel, but at Fenway in those days you were doing yourself a disservice to stand in the runway. You couldn’t see the game. So I went to the clubhouse and watched with the clubhouse guys.”

  He kept his lineup card with him. It was a Francona tradition. When he got tossed, he took the lineup card off the wall and monitored from behind the scenes.

  “I remember thinking, If we turn it around, this will be a game we point to. But we didn’t really turn it around. We were still big and slow, and we didn’t catch fire for a couple more weeks.”

  Until a week after Nomar was traded.

  The last week of Nomar’s Boston career was messy. When the Sox were in Baltimore, three days before the July 31 deadline, Nomar met with Francona and told his manager that he’d be needing more time off and might have to go on the disabled list. Francona picked up his phone, dialed Epstein, and gave him the news. Epstein contacted Henry and Lucchino, who were in their Fenway offices upstairs, and asked them to come to the baseball operations offices. When he gathered the bosses, he called Francona and had him repeat Nomar’s request.

  “He was struggling more than we thought,” said Francona. “He was frustrated. The whole Boston thing. He was getting criticized a lot. It was something that wasn’t going to get better, and I wanted Theo to hear what I heard.”

  Three days later, while the Sox were getting ready for a night game at the Metrodome against the Twins, Nomar was traded to the Cubs as part of a four-team deal. It was a long, uncomfortable day. There was no manager’s office in the visitors’ clubhouse of the Metrodome, only a small room that managers and coaches had to share, and cell reception was poor. Francona had to keep trudging up and down the formidable steps to the field to get reception to talk to Theo. It was difficult for the physically challenged manager.

  “Imagine if we couldn’t have made that trade because the manager has a blood clot,” he joked.

  When the deal finally went down, Francona asked his coaches to vacate the tiny office, and he called Garciaparra in.

  “Nomar, we traded you to the Cubs,” said Francona, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the office air conditioner. “You need to call Theo. Jack [McCormick] has a ticket for you to get a plane out of here.”

  The manager and shortstop exchanged a quick hug, then Garciaparra exited the clubhouse to make his call. After the call was made, Garciaparra came back into the room, said his good-byes, and hugged everybody, including a few media members.

  In exchange for Garciaparra, the Sox received flossy Twins first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz and Montreal shortstop Orlando Cabrera. In a separate deal, Epstein also acquired speedy Dave Roberts from the Dodgers.

  The young GM was nervous after making the blockbuster deal. Fearful of what he might see in the Sunday morning Boston papers, he took an Ambien and went to bed.

  There was no immediate bounce from the dramatic deals. The Red Sox lost four of their first six games after the trades, including the opener of a weekend set in Detroit.

  “A lot of people thought we were off and running after the July 24 game, or after the trade,” said Epstein. “No. We played under .500 for the next two weeks.”

  On Saturday, August 7, Francona and Mills were in a cab, en route to Detroit’s Comerica Park, when the manager’s cell phone rang. It was Lucchino, and the CEO was hot. He kept saying, “This is not acceptable.” The Sox had dealt an iconic ballplayer, putting Theo and management on the hot seat, and Lucchino did not like the way the ball club was responding. They’d been playing .500 ball for more than three months. At least four times during the rant, Lucchino told Francona that things were “not acceptable.”

  When Lucchino was done, Francona clicked off his phone, turned to Mills, and sighed.

  “What was that about?” asked Mills. “You didn’t have much to say.”

  “I don’t know, Millsie,” said the manager. “All I know is that apparently what we’re doing right now is not acceptable.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Just crazy enough to think we can do this”

  THE RED SOX WERE the best team in baseball in August, September, and October. The acquisitions of Cabrera, Mientkiewicz, and Roberts did exactly what the Sox brass had hoped. Before the trades, the Sox were big and slow and led the league in surrendering unearned runs. The deadline deals made them more nimble and defensively tighter. Francona started to substitute at the end of games when the Sox were leading. Mientkiewicz would come in to play first base, and Pokey Reese would come in to play second. Players accepted their roles. The Sox went 40–15 after Lucchino’s “this is not acceptable” rant—21–7 in August. They led the majors in runs, slugging percentage, and on-base percentage.

  “We got on a roll,” said Francona. “There was a definite difference. We were able to use our strength, which was our offense. And when we’d get a lead, we could get guys out and get our defense in, and it worked great. Using Kapler, Pokey Reese, and Mientkiewicz late in games made us really good defensively. We ended up playing everybody, so everybody was involved and that gave us a little personality, and it all came together.”

  But there were still a few tough nights against the Yankees, including Friday, September 24, at Fenway Park.

  It was the final home weekend of the regular season, one last chance to play the Yankees before an expected rematch in the American League Championship Series. Pedro Martinez got the Friday night start and had thrown 101 pitches when he took the mound with a 4–3 lead at the start of the eighth. When Hideki Matsui led off the inning with a game-tying homer, Francona never moved. Then came a Bernie Williams double and a Ruben Sierra single before the manager finally lifted his ace.

  Fenway fans booed. It wasn’t any better across the Charles River at Quincy House, where high school senior Alyssa Francona, being re
cruited by Harvard, was watching the game with a large group of Harvard student-athletes.

  “Someone said something pretty mean, so they got me out of there,” said Alyssa, who wound up playing softball at the University of North Carolina.

  “I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy,” Pedro said after the 6–4 loss.

  Francona defended his non-move and deflected all reminders of Grady Little and the recent past.

  Waiting for Francona in the manager’s office, Epstein was furious.

  “We fucked up,” muttered the young general manager.

  “I could understand the irony there,” said Francona. “But for me it was completely different. It was a regular-season game and we were trying to keep our bullpen in order.”

  The Red Sox recovered nicely, winning four straight, and seven of their last nine games, as they prepared to play the Angels in the American League Division Series.

  Even though he’d never managed in the postseason, Francona was relaxed.

  “I didn’t know how I was going to feel, but I was surprisingly at ease,” Francona said later. “We had prepared so extensively, I felt good about things. That doesn’t mean you’re going to win, but I knew what I was going to do. I didn’t think there were going to be any surprises.”

  There were no surprises in round one. The Sox swept the Angels, winning the Game 3 finale on a tenth-inning walk-off blast by Ortiz at Fenway.

  “Those boys are winning the World Series,” predicted Angel veteran Darin Erstad.

  The big surprise came when the Sox lost the first three games of the ALCS against the Yankees, dropping Game 3, 19–8, on Saturday night at Fenway. The humiliating loss featured 22 Yankee hits, including four homers, two by Hideki Matsui who went 5–6. The Yankees led 11–6 after four innings, and 17–6 in the seventh. Francona used six pitchers, including Tim Wakefield, who gave up his Game 4 start by volunteering for three and a third innings of mop-up middle relief. In their private suite upstairs on the third-base side of home plate, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino opened a bottle of Glenlivet and wondered what happened to the dominant team they’d built.