By all accounts, Pedroia gets his combative personality from his mother, and Francona witnessed an up-front-and-personal demonstration of the family dynamic when he and Dr. Ronan went to visit the Pedroias at the hospital before the All-Star break.
The American League MVP was in the middle of a wrecking ball weekend against the Royals. In four games against Kansas City, Pedroia went 8–19 with four doubles, a triple, and a homer. He also struck out swinging once, flailing at a curveball and leaving the bases loaded. This unfortunate at-bat was the focus of conversation when Francona and Dr. Ronan tiptoed into Kelli Pedroia’s hospital room after a game against the Royals.
“It was unbelievable,” said Francona. “We walked into the room, and poor Kelli was laying there and Pedey and his mom were going at it over him swinging at that breaking ball in the dirt. I looked at Larry and said, ‘This is like a reality TV show.’”
“All true,” confirmed Pedroia. “My mom just blew me up for swinging at that ball in the dirt. We’re all in the hospital room for Kelli, and my mom was motherfucking me, saying, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ and Kelli’s mom was there, and then Tito and Dr. Ronan walked in. If I play bad and the media gets on me, that’s a piece of fucking cake compared to my mom and what I have to go home to. I never hear the end of it. So when Tito and Doc walked in and heard all that while Kelli was laying there, I was like, ‘Welcome to my world.’”
As Kelli Pedroia’s due date neared, Pedroia had Francona’s blessing to leave the ballpark anytime he felt it was necessary to support his wife.
Major League Baseball has lagged behind most of America through virtually every social and cultural change over the last 110 years—the sport did not have any black players until 1947—and big league clubhouses remain the last bastions of the old ways. In 2009 there weren’t many other American workplaces supplying employees with chewing tobacco and beer.
Francona’s sensitivity to family matters was largely due to his own experiences. Cleveland outfielder Tito Francona was in Detroit with the Indians when his only son was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on April 22, 1959. The elder Francona did not see his son for three weeks. Twenty-eight years later, veteran infielder/outfielder Terry Francona was getting ready for opening day at first base with the Cincinnati Reds when Jacque Francona’s water broke back home in Tucson. He told manager Pete Rose that he needed to go home because of Jacque’s situation.
“That’s fine,” said Rose. “Just don’t come back.”
Terry Francona got the message. He stayed in Cincinnati and hit an opening day home run in an 11–5 win over the Expos. His first daughter, Alyssa, was born the next day, and he was not there. It was the only one of his children’s births that he missed, and he never shed the regret. Pete Rose was a friend and was friendly with Francona’s wife, but none of that mattered in big league baseball in 1987. Francona pledged that he would do things differently if he ever managed, and that’s why he was okay going with an infield of Aaron Bates, Nick Green, Julio Lugo, and Youkilis in a 6–0 loss to the A’s in the summer of 2009.
Pedroia was voted starting second baseman of the American League All-Star team, but he skipped the midsummer classic in St. Louis and returned to be with Kelli at Mass General. When Dylan Pedroia was born August 18, 2009, his dad was there. The Red Sox beat the Blue Jays in Toronto, 10–9, improving to 67–51, seven games behind the scalding Yankees.
For most of the summer the Sox were without the services of Daisuke Matsuzaka. On the heels of his 18–3 season in 2008, Matsuzaka developed shoulder soreness and was placed on the disabled list after going 1–5 with an 8.23 ERA early in the season. The Sox were losing patience with the training methods of the stubborn righty, and things came to a boil late in the summer when Dice-K, rehabbing in Florida, told a Japanese publication, “If I’m forced to continue to train in this environment, I may no longer be able to pitch like I did in Japan. The only reason why I managed to win games during the first and second years was because I used the savings of the shoulder I built up in Japan. Since I came to the major leagues, I couldn’t train my own way, so now I’ve lost all those savings.”
Farrell was livid when he was told of the remarks. Speaking with the media, the physically imposing pitching coach had difficulty masking his anger. Inside the manager’s office—gathered with Francona, Matsuzaka, and a translator—Farrell was allowed to speak freely.
“Normally I would try to settle him down, but not this time,” said Francona. “Dice had spoken out of turn, and John was fucking irate. He wore Dice out. There was nothing lost in translation. Dice knew just from the tone. I was nervous about it, but it turned out to be kind of a breakthrough day. Dice was contrite, and we didn’t have many problems with him after that.”
“I probably didn’t handle that too well,” said a chagrined Farrell. “There were challenges with someone as accomplished as Dice-K. There were differences, and we had concerns about the volume of throws.”
“He had to maintain his shoulder program or he was putting his shoulder at risk,” said Francona. “He believed all the throwing just made his shoulder stronger. That’s where we were banging heads.
“I didn’t pitch, but as a manager, you have to pay so much attention to everything regarding pitchers. I knew the best way to ruin your team was to fuck your bullpen up. You have to watch them. And there were certain things I felt. We kept things monitored very closely regarding usage and the intensity of usage. If I got Alan Embree up quickly some night—you could do that with Embree because he could get ready in a hurry—I’d put a little star next to his name to remind me that he got ready in a hurry and might be a little more stiff the next day. I thought the biggest mistakes a manager could make was not the in-game pitching, it was about warming guys up and not paying attention to that. It was easy to see that you keep the pitchers healthy, they’re going to be more productive.”
Two days after the Farrell-Matsuzaka storm, the Sox took a hit when the New York Times disclosed the names of Ortiz and Manny Ramirez on a list of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003. The tests had been conducted with the approval of the Major League Baseball Players Association as a means of determining the extent of usage of banned substances in baseball. Players had been assured that results would remain sealed and anonymous. Names would never be released and punishments never issued. The union was in the process of destroying the tests when they were subpoenaed by federal authorities in November 2003. One hundred and four players tested positive in 2003, but as of August ’09, the only names that leaked were those of Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, Ramirez, and Ortiz. By this time Ramirez was a confirmed cheater, having been suspended by Major League Baseball in May ’09 for 50 games for taking hCG, a women’s fertility drug typically used by PED users trying to restart natural testosterone production at the end of a drug cycle. Seeing Manny’s name on the list did not shock many folks in Red Sox Nation. The inclusion of Ortiz was another matter altogether. Sox fans were being told that there was no Santa Claus.
Francona called Ortiz into his office the day the story broke. He closed the door. He sat at his desk while Ortiz took a seat on the Pesky couch.
“David, look at me,” said the manager. “Tell me the truth.”
“I’m okay,” said the slugger.
“Good enough,” said Francona. “I’m with you. This meeting is over.”
Ortiz had even less to say to the media. The Players Association had told him not to say anything. Ortiz told reporters he intended to get to the bottom of things.
And then there was silence for ten days until a Saturday afternoon when Ortiz, accompanied by Players Association director Michael Weiner, faced more than 100 reporters in the sprawling basement interview room of the new Yankee Stadium. Behind Ortiz and Weiner, who were seated at a table, Francona stood off to the side, in uniform, arms folded across his chest, visible to everyone in the room. Sox players had planned to attend the nationally televised press conference en m
asse as a show of support, but the team bus was caught in traffic, so it was left to the eternally early manager to stand behind David Ortiz in his moment of need.
“It was important to me,” said Francona. “I’d been with David since 2004, and I believed him.”
A nervous Ortiz admitted only that he’d been “a little careless” when he bought supplements and vitamins over the counter in the United States and the Dominican Republic. He apologized to Sox fans, owners, teammates, and his manager for the distraction. The Players Association and Major League Baseball both issued statements defending Ortiz. MLB’s statement acknowledged that “the names on the list . . . are subject to uncertainties with regard to the test results.”
It was a stunning show of support, one that had not been available to Alex Rodriguez months earlier when his name was leaked. When it was over, Ortiz walked back to the clubhouse with Francona and thanked his manager for standing by his side.
“Having Tito there meant a lot to me,” said Ortiz. “I had nothing to hide, and I didn’t want people to look at me like I was hiding. Tito did what a father would do for his son.”
“I was really proud of him,” said Francona. “First of all, that’s a lot of pressure and he’s speaking in a second language. I’ve been in Venezuela, and I know the feeling of people talking at me when I have no idea what they are saying. I have respect for guys who can do that in a second language. I think that whole thing had an effect on David. People were hammering him. I think it’s where he started getting a little bit wary of people. I think he felt like he’d built up enough where he should be off limits.”
The Sox manager disputed the notion that Ramirez’s drug transgressions and Ortiz’s appearance on the list of 2003 tainted the Red Sox championships of the 21st century.
“Baseball as an industry buried its head in the sand in the early, mid ’90s, and the consequences are that now we’re fighting a fight that’s not fair for anybody,” said the manager. “I wouldn’t want to be a writer voting for the Hall of Fame. There’s no right answer, and that’s the price we’re paying for the industry burying its head in the sand. I see how hard these guys work. I think about what it’s like for a guy in Double A who wants to make it to the majors. That’s a tough one. If I’m a 22-year-old kid who just had knee surgery and I want to be a good player, would I use? I hope my answer would be no, but you want to be good so bad. . . . I’m not saying I condone it, but I understand how it happens.”
The Red Sox owner responded angrily to the Ortiz episode. In an email with a Globe columnist, Henry termed the episode “a deliberate attempt by someone to harm David and to harm the Red Sox. . . . David is a gentle soul. He is a prince of a man who only gets upset when he doesn’t perform. . . . If anyone in Boston’s great history of sports deserves the benefit of the doubt, David does.”
The summer of 2009 was a happy time for John Henry. Fifty-nine years old and twice divorced, Henry married 30-year-old Lynnfield native Linda Pizzuti in late June, and the couple was seen at numerous social and charity events around greater Boston. Pizzuti had a master’s degree in real estate from MIT and was LEED-accredited. With two championships in his pocket and a ballpark renovation near completion, Henry was content to let his baseball people run the Red Sox while he built a dream home in Brookline and explored new ventures for the ever-expanding Fenway Sports Group. He stayed in touch with his field manager through late-night emails, usually asking why certain decisions were made that ran contrary to the imposing database maintained by the baseball operations department.
Henry’s army of stat savants detected significant flaws with the Red Sox defense. The Sox could not stop enemy base runners. It was never much of a concern during the Francona years. Joe Kerrigan hadn’t cared about enemy base stealers when he was pitching coach under Jimy Williams, and the philosophy was unchanged during the Grady Little and Francona administrations. The Sox didn’t order their pitchers to slide-step. Making good pitches was more important than holding base runners. It led to some ugly stats. In 2009 Red Sox catchers caught only 23 of 174 base runners attempting to steal. Varitek threw out only 10 of 108 thieves.
“It was kind of an organizational joke when I got there,” said Francona. “We’d be talking about acquiring a pitcher, and Theo would say, ‘He’s got a 20–2 record, but we can’t get him because he doesn’t hold base runners.’ They were making fun of me because I cared about it, but we didn’t teach it much. It was funny until it got to a point where we couldn’t stop people at all. It’s hard to win like that. In my philosophy, if you’re a pitcher and you don’t walk people and don’t let people run, they have to beat you getting hits. But if you’re just letting them steal second and third, it’s a tough way to win. It started to get out of hand with us, and it bothered me. We steadily got a little better at it, and our pitchers paid more attention, but we were never good at it.”
The defense on the left side of the infield was equally bad, but less quantifiable. Lowell’s hip surgery had limited his mobility, and Lugo (nicknamed “Huggy Bear” by teammates) was not the player the Sox thought they were getting when they signed him to his big contract. Lugo was released in mid-July, and Francona went with a shortstop rotation of Jed Lowrie, Nick Green, and Alex Gonzalez (reacquired in August).
The GM gave his team a boost at the trading deadline when he acquired switch-hitting All-Star catcher Victor Martinez from the Cleveland Indians for righty Justin Masterson and a couple of pitching prospects. The Sox were in Baltimore on the day of the deadline, and for Francona the most difficult part of the busy day was calling young Masterson into his office to tell him he’d been traded. Masterson was only 24 years old and had pitched brilliantly in nine postseason games in 2008. He was talented, wide-eyed, homegrown, and smart. He was exactly the type of player you wanted in your organization. But he could not help the Red Sox the way Victor Martinez could help the Red Sox.
“Theo just made a trade for you,” Francona started, as the two sat in the manager’s office at Camden Yards. “We are not disappointed in you. But we have a chance to win this year, and this is what it takes. We’re sorry.”
Fighting back tears, the ever-polite Masterson nodded, said he understood, stood up, and shook his manager’s hand. Then he was off to join the Indians, and Francona would root for him to succeed in any game he pitched that did not involve the Red Sox. (After being hired as manager of the Indians late in 2012, Francona looked forward to reuniting with Masterson in 2013.)
Martinez delivered for Boston down the stretch. In 56 games he hit .336 with eight homers and 41 RBI. He also forced Francona to make some new and difficult decisions regarding the deployment of captain-catcher Jason Varitek.
In mid-September, with the Sox still chasing the Yankees but looking like a cinch for the playoffs, Francona picked up a newspaper and saw that the Houston Astros had fired manager Cecil Cooper with 13 games left in the season. Francona called Astros GM Ed Wade. Wade had fired Francona in Philadelphia in 2000, but the two were friends. Francona told Wade he should interview Mills for his managerial vacancy after the Sox completed their playoff run.
The Sox did not catch the Yankees, but they won 95 games and clinched a wild-card playoff berth for the seventh time in franchise history. It was Francona’s fifth postseason bid in six seasons. The 2009 Red Sox played .561 (56–25) baseball at home, their best season at Fenway since 1978, when Don Zimmer’s 99-win team went 59–23 at home.
Boston faced the Los Angeles Angels in the Division Series. The Sox had beaten the Angels in the first round in 2004, 2007, and 2008, dominating each time (two sweeps and a four-game set in ’08). But Boston was not built to win in 2009. It was quite the opposite. The Sox were swept out of the playoffs in three straight games.
“They did to us what we’d done to them all those times,” admitted Francona.
Angel righties John Lackey and Jared Weaver beat the Red Sox in the first two games, with Boston scoring only one run in 18 innings. Youkilis and Ortiz went
1–16 with five strikeouts. Aces Jon Lester and Josh Beckett were the Sox losing pitchers.
It was not a good time for Francona. He suffered a bout of food poisoning in Anaheim and disputed the notion that he was panicking when the Sox said they’d consider pitching Lester on three days’ rest in Game 4 if they were able to win Game 3 at home with Clay Buchholz on the mound.
The Fenway finale looked good at the start as the Sox roared to a 5–1 lead through five innings on a splendid, crisp New England October afternoon. The Red Sox led Game 3, 6–4, in the top of the ninth with two out, nobody aboard, and the indomitable Papelbon on the mound throwing nothing but smoke. In that moment, Papelbon was working on a string of 27 consecutive scoreless innings in postseason play. The only pitcher in big league history to start a career with more scoreless frames in October was Christy Mathewson, who did it from 1905 to 1911.
“At that moment, I was thinking, We’re going to win this series,” said Francona.
And then it all went away. Erick Aybar singled on an 0–2 pitch. Throwing only fastballs, Papelbon walked Chone Figgins (0–12, six strikeouts in the series) on a full count. Old friend Bobby Abreu fouled off a 1–2 pitch, then banged an RBI double off the Wall. Francona ordered an intentional walk to Torii Hunter to load the bases. The next batter was Vlad Guerrero, and he ripped a first-pitch, two-run single to center to give the Angels a 7–6 lead.
Francona came out to get his closer.
“He knew I wasn’t trying to embarrass him,” said the manager. “I’m still thinking we can win the game and get him back out there for Game 4. That’s how I always felt. I always thought we could come back. But when you put yourself in a hole like that, you make a mistake and you’re going home.”
“I don’t think anything that happened in this series was completely out of the blue,” said Epstein. “We saw things that were reflected early in the season.”
Francona: The Red Sox Years Page 30