Francona: The Red Sox Years

by Terry Francona

  Not anymore. The Sox blew every team out of the water to get Dice-K, and they threw money at Drew when no one else was bidding. At the same time Henry worked out a deal to join Jack Roush’s NASCAR racing group for a tidy sum of $50 million. It would not be Henry’s final foray into a sporting venture other than baseball.

  The manager had mixed emotions about the Drew signing. Drew had a reputation as a talented player who would not play hurt. Francona was aware that Tony La Russa had made harsh comments about Drew in Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August. Fans and media were also suspicious of Drew as a solution in right field for the Red Sox, but none of it mattered to the stats-crazed young men in Boston’s baseball operations department. Drew was the Bill James/Theo Epstein prototype. He was a hitter who worked deep into counts and knew the strike zone better than any umpire or pitcher. He got on base. And he could play defense. He played without passion or emotion, but he was a Moneyball warrior, and Epstein wanted him badly.

  “If I sign him, will you make this work?” asked Epstein.

  “Yes,” promised Francona.

  Lugo inspired more consensus. John Henry loved Lugo. Bill James loved Lugo. And Terry Francona loved Lugo.

  “When we got him, we were all excited, and nobody was more excited than me,” said the manager. “He was always a guy who could turn on Schilling’s fastball. He used to kill us.”

  Things were lining up nicely when the Sox gathered in Fort Myers in late February. On the second day of organizational meetings, before any of the players arrived, there was a lot of talk about Pedroia. The September sample had been underwhelming, but Theo and his baseball operations people wanted the manager to stick with the kid at second. No matter what.

  Francona valued the opinions of the organization scouts. Returns from his off-season letter to the scouts gave him the information and opinions he needed to kick-start camp. The reports created conversation, and perhaps just as important, they made the scouts feel heard and included. There were plenty of disagreements, but it was a healthy exercise in organizational harmony and team-building.

  “They kept talking about Pedroia and saying, ‘You’re going to see that swing and you’re gonna laugh, but stick with him,’” said the manager. “I did, and they were right. Over the course of the eight years, the guys they liked, they were right on. Papelbon, Lester, Ellsbury, Youkilis, Pedroia. I remember early on when they were having an argument about whether Lester was better than Papelbon. I hadn’t seen Lester pitch yet, but the fact that they were arguing about it was amazing to me. I was thinking, If this kid can be anywhere close to Papelbon, holy shit! But they were right.”

  Manny didn’t get to spring training until February 26, but by 2007 Manny’s tardiness was barely story-worthy.

  “By this point, I wasn’t losing much sleep over what day he came,” said Francona. “The veteran players all understood. I’d have those get-togethers with them, and they’d always say, ‘We understand it, but we want Manny to play.’ I think David got more tired of it than anybody. Gene Mato, one of Manny’s agents, was part of the problem. He was always telling Manny how he was getting disrespected.

  “I could always tell when Manny had been talking with Gene, because he’d put shit in Manny’s ear. Theo and Ben had Gene on the speakerphone one day in Ben’s office, and I got wind of it. I was in full uniform—which always makes me more aggressive—and I went in there. Gene started saying some shit, and I let him have it with both barrels.

  “You motherfucker!” Francona screamed into the speaker as he leaned over the desk. “You’re half the fucking problem here, telling Manny all that shit about being disrespected.”

  Somewhat nervous, Epstein and Cherington looked at one another . . . then elected to let their manager keep venting.

  “None of the shit you’re telling Manny is true!” Francona continued. “Cut that shit out! Everybody here respects Manny. Knock this shit off!”

  “It went on and on,” Francona said later. “I fucking buried him. I think it was all the shit that Theo and Ben wanted to say, and they let me say it. I crushed him. When I walked out of Ben’s office, all the secretaries looked away. I don’t think they’d ever heard me curse like that. But I think Theo and Ben were secretly amused.”

  There was considerable debate regarding how to use Papelbon. The GM wanted Papelbon to start. The manager wanted him to finish. Theo had his way at the start of spring training, but dissent from the manager’s office was stronger than usual. When Lucchino learned of the Theo-Tito dispute, he gleefully rubbed his hands together, saying, “This is what I like, a good, heated difference of opinion. We need more of this!”

  Ten days before the start of the season, with Joel Pineiro, Brendan Donnelly, Mike Timlin, and Hideki Okajima failing to seize the job, Papelbon went to Jason Varitek and told the Sox captain that he wanted to close. When Francona walked past the veteran catcher and kid pitcher, Papelbon said, “If you want to give me the ball in the ninth, I want it.” That was all Francona needed to hear. Papelbon would be the closer.

  Lester was another story. Francona started the ’07 spring with Lester just as he had in 2005—telling the lefty that he needed to relax. Don’t be in a rush. Work your way back. For his spring training debut, the manager sent Lester to Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers to pitch an inning of a “B” game against Twins minor leaguers. It was a baby step. Lester threw eight pitches in a one-two-three inning, which is exactly what the Sox wanted. Lester was still ten pounds underweight and far from baseball-ready. He was not part of the plan for the start of the season, but the manager knew the lefty was eager to get back to the majors. Francona called Lester’s dad.

  “We’re going to have a meeting with your son and really piss him off,” said the manager. “He’s not ready to do this. We have to take care of him. And it’s going to be slow.”

  Francona called Lester into his office.

  “Jon, you’re not going to start the season with us. We understand how hard you’ve worked, and this is not an indictment on your work. But you’re going to get hurt if you try to come back right now. I don’t want you to get discouraged. You just need to go slowly here.”

  The spring stories of Ramirez, Lester, Papelbon, Drew, and Lugo all paled in comparison with the attention lavished on Matsuzaka. One Japanese television station had 19 people on the ground for 24/7 Dice-K coverage. Red Sox fans were told they could no longer park near the training site; they were instructed to drive to City of Palms Park and take shuttle buses to the workouts.

  “This is different than any other spring training in baseball,” observed veteran Schilling. “There are 200 media people here just because of him, but he gives off the impression that he doesn’t want to be an inconvenience to people. He’s a good kid. He’s an ace in the making. He’s like Pedro in a sense because he has multiple strikeout pitches.”

  “I got tired of it pretty quickly,” said Francona. “It was too much for me. The Japanese media was relentless. Every time he ran out of the clubhouse they would all pounce and take a picture of his every move. One day when he came out and they started in on him, I heard somebody yell, ‘Hey, Dice-K just took a shit.’”

  Unless he was on the mound, Matsuzaka had an interpreter by his side whenever he was working at his baseball job. The Sox supplied a translator, and Dice-K brought a second one from Japan. The Sox initially ruled that Matsuzaka could not have his interpreter with him on the field during practice at spring training, but they quickly relented.

  The presence of Matsuzaka’s interpreter at team meetings was a problem for the manager.

  “I was up in front of the room addressing the team, and I heard this fucking mumbling and I started getting the red ass,” Francona recalled. “I almost flared on somebody. Everybody knows it’s a pet peeve of mine if somebody is talking when I’m talking. Then I realized it was Dice-K’s interpreter telling him what I was saying. That took a while to get used to—hearing somebody in the back mumbling every time I talked to t
he team.”

  “We knew there were going to be challenges,” said John Farrell, Francona’s former Indians teammate who was serving as the Sox pitching coach for the first time in the spring of 2007. “I took language classes with Dice-K and Okie three times a week in spring training. The instructor would teach them a phrase in English, and they would teach me in Japanese. I thought it was a way for a coach to better understand their culture and their structure so we could connect in some other ways. To what extent it helped, I don’t know. But I wanted them to know I was making every effort to ease the transition for them.”

  Matsuzaka was on his own throwing program, a rigorous regimen that often frustrated Farrell. When Farrell was late getting to the dugout for the start of a spring training game, he often explained that he’d been occupied watching Dice throw an extra-long bullpen session. The Sox worried about Matsuzaka losing strength in his shoulder.

  “He was strong-minded, and that was challenging in a number of ways,” admitted Farrell. “And it was the first time I ever had a press conference after long toss or a side session. That seemed a little out of the ordinary, but this guy was the Michael Jordan of Japanese baseball.”

  Dice-K’s final two spring starts were televised on ESPN, and he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual baseball preview issue when the Red Sox got to Kansas City for the 2007 opener. Royals Stadium hadn’t seen massive media coverage since the 1985 World Series against the Cardinals. After all the hype, Schilling was routed and the Sox were beaten, 7–1. Lugo struck out in his first three Red Sox plate appearances (a harbinger), and Okajima surrendered a home run on his first big league pitch. On the plus side, Pedroia had two hits in the opener. Two days later, Matsuzaka made his major league debut and struck out ten hitters in seven innings of a 4–1 win over the Royals.

  The learning curve was steep for the manager. He was informed that Dice-K viewed a visit to the mound as disrespectful. It wasn’t done much in Japan.

  Matsuzaka’s second big league win came on Sunday night, April 22 (Francona’s 48th birthday), in a 7–6 win over the Yankees. But Matsuzaka was not the story. For only the fifth time in major league history, four consecutive batters hit home runs: Ramirez, Drew, Lowell, and Varitek. Back to back to back to back. All off Yankee rookie Chase Wright. It was remarkable to watch, and ESPN was there. The feat had been achieved in 1963 by a Cleveland Indians foursome that included Tito Francona. (“My dad told me about it at least a million times,” said the manager.) In 2006 four Dodgers hit consecutive home runs in an inning against the Padres. Drew was part of the Dodger barrage in ’06, but if it meant anything to him, he hid it well. While Red Sox players slapped one another on the helmet and a national television audience gushed over the remarkable surge of power, Drew was overheard in the dugout tunnel talking about his latest hunting venture. Francona just shook his head.

  Five years later, after Drew’s unremarkable and expensive run in Boston, Francona said, “It wasn’t as hard for me as people thought, because I knew going in what to expect. I knew J.D. got beat up by Tony, and I knew it bothered him because J.D. and I talked about it when he came over here. I told him, ‘J.D., your personality is your personality, but the more you stay on the field, the better team we are. Even if you’re making outs, you’re a great right fielder and you’re a presence at the plate. For me, he was easy. He’s the nicest guy ever. He just . . . whether it was pain threshold or whatever, he came out of the lineup for a lot of things, things that maybe other players wouldn’t come out of the lineup for. He had a hard time staying in the lineup. There was nothing malicious ever. Sometimes he just couldn’t play. The one thing he took great pride in was his being in the right place on defense. Whenever we’d move him in the outfield, we’d notice him kicking the dirt a little. It pissed him off if we didn’t think he was in the exact right spot.”

  The 2007 Red Sox went 33–12 after a 2–3 start. It was a 119-win pace. They swept an April series against the Yankees. By June 2, they had a nine-game lead in the division and an 11½-game lead over the Yankees.

  “When people say you can’t lose the division in April, they’re guys who never won the division before,” said Pedroia. “We ran away with the division in the first two months of the season.”

  Winning routines were established early. Francona, Farrell, Pedroia, and Lowell played cribbage on spring training bus trips while Night Shift played on the luxury coach video screen. (“It was always Night Shift with Tito,” said equipment czar Tommy McLaughlin. “Even though none of the players were old enough to remember the movie.”) The cribbage games could be competitive and costly. Francona and catcher George Kottaras picked up $800 from Pedroia and Farrell when the Sox bus got stuck in traffic on Tampa’s Skyway Bridge after an exhibition game.

  “It was a lot of laughs and cash for him,” said Farrell. “One hand after the next. It was an ass-kicking.”

  Once the season started, Pedroia and Lowell played cribbage every day after batting practice. After hitting, they would come into the clubhouse, grab a sandwich and their game board, and retreat to the upstairs players’ lounge for cribbage and early dinner. Francona eventually invited them to play in his office, and the Francona-Pedroia cribbage games remained a staple long after Lowell left the Red Sox. It made sense: Francona and Pedroia were usually the first two uniformed personnel at the ballpark.

  With all the attention on Matsuzaka, Francona enjoyed the work of Okajima. The Japanese southpaw had an unusual, almost-violent north-south delivery; he was facing the ground by the time he released each pitch, but he had tremendous success in his first trip through the American League. It took a while for the Sox staff to determine how Okajima might best be used. In the third week of the season, on a night when Papelbon was unavailable after saving back-to-back games, Farrell asked Francona before the game what the Sox would do in the late innings against the Yankees.

  “Who’s going to save this game?” asked Farrell.

  “Okie’s going to go right through the middle of the order,” said Francona, chuckling.

  Farrell gathered up his reports and said, “All right!”

  Seven hours later, when the manager summoned Okajima to protect a 7–6 lead against the Bronx Bombers—Jeter, A-Rod, and Abreu due up—Lowell approached Francona and asked, “Where’s Pap?”

  “Relax, big boy,” said Francona. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll be all right.”

  After Okajima pitched a hitless ninth, holding the lead for his first big league save, Francona looked at Farrell and said, “Well, that worked out pretty good.”

  Okajima wound up representing the Red Sox at the 2007 All-Star Game in San Francisco.

  Along the way, Francona learned one Japanese phrase: Ii kanji. It loosely translates to “way to go.”

  When Matsuzaka or Okajima came to the dugout after getting out of a tough jam, the manager would say, “Ii kanji, bitch.”

  After hitting .182 in April, Pedroia was over .270 by the end of May. He peaked at .331 in mid-June. He was on his way to winning the American League Rookie of the Year Award. Still, he was annoyed that his manager sometimes chose to run for him late in games. This came up more than once during the cribbage matches.

  “Why do you run for me?” Pedroia would ask.

  “Because you’re so fucking slow,” the manager would answer.

  Most professional athletes regard their speed or lack of speed as God-given. Like a player’s height, it is not something that can be changed. Pedroia was different. He couldn’t make himself taller (he insists he’s five-nine), but he found a way to get faster. In his mind, his speed was a variable—something he could improve.

  On baseball scouts’ 80-point scale, Pedroia was a 40 to 45 runner when he played in college. Working out at Athletes’ Performance Institute in Arizona, Pedroia learned to convert side-to-side motion to forward motion. He improved his fitness, strength, and technique. He made himself into a player who ran faster at the age of 28 than he did at 24. He improve
d to a 50 on the scouts’ 80-point scale. He became a high-percentage base-stealer.

  “That’s almost impossible,” Epstein told Sports Illustrated in 2011. “I can’t ever remember it happening. It always goes in the other direction.”

  “Somebody put their ass on the line scouting that kid, and they deserve a raise,” said Francona. “It’s hard to sit here now and say, ‘I knew it.’ I ended up sticking with him when he was struggling, but it wasn’t because I was this great baseball mind. I wish I could say that. The organization was pretty adamant that he could play, and we were playing well enough where we could handle it. I also loved the way this kid handled himself. He wasn’t throwing helmets or letting anything impact his defense.”

  Epstein approached Francona in midseason and asked if he wanted to talk about a contract extension. The manager was in the second year of a three-year contract that was paying him $1.5 million per season. Francona said he was agreeable to discussing an extension, but Epstein did not follow up. Later in the summer, with the Sox rolling toward the division title, Francona reluctantly reintroduced the topic.

  “Theo, I hate to bring this up, but you sort of broached this and then it went away,” said the manager. “Are we still going to talk about a contract extension?”

  “Ownership wasn’t into it,” said Epstein. “It’s a company rule that we don’t really do things early. Let’s wait until we get to the end of the year.”

  “I appreciate the honesty,” said Francona. “And just so me and you are on the same page, if we win, all bets are off.”

  “Okay,” said Epstein.

  “It wasn’t something I was thinking about every day,” Francona said later. “It never really bothered me much, but I was glad we had an understanding about how it was going to go later, especially if we won.”