On Monday, December 6, with Francona and most of the Boston baseball media gathered at the winter meetings in Florida, Epstein—still in Boston—announced that the Sox had acquired the 28-year-old Gonzalez for prospects Casey Kelly (pitcher), Anthony Rizzo (first baseman), Reymond Fuentes (outfielder), and a player to be named (outfielder Eric Patterson). The key to the deal was the ability of the Sox to work out a seven-year, $154 million contract extension for Gonzalez, an extension that, in order to save millions in luxury taxes, would not be announced until after opening day of 2011.
It was the grandest Red Sox player acquisition since Dan Duquette signed free agent outfielder Manny Ramirez to an eight-year, $160 million deal in December 2000. The press conference to make the announcement was held at Fenway on Tuesday, December 7.
Epstein wasn’t done. Still in contact with Crawford’s agents, he flew to Florida, where Francona waited.
“It was exciting for us,” said the manager. “Youk was on board with moving from first base to third, and Gonzalez gave us a legitimate bat in the middle of the lineup. It was a good way to start the meetings.”
Two nights later, Epstein closed in on a deal for Crawford. He had to work quickly because the Angels were bidding for Crawford and the Yankees and Rangers were at a make-or-break point with lefty Cliff Lee. The Sox feared that the loser of the Lee sweeps would set its sights on Crawford.
“There were about ten of us in a suite at the Dolphin, and there was a lot of discussion about Carl,” said Francona. “Theo was on the phone in another room, and he came out and said, ‘We can do this. This is what it’s going to take.’”
What it was going to take was $142 million over seven years. Werth’s deal with the Nationals had set the bar.
Late at night in Florida, Epstein called Henry and Werner, who were in England overseeing the new Liverpool soccer acquisition. The GM had to wake his owners after 3:00 AM (Liverpool time) to get permission to make the deal.
“I was in bed,” remembered Werner. “I thought there was no deal and that Crawford was going to the Angels. Theo said we had a very limited amount of time to make a decision and he felt very strongly about it. I asked him if Larry and John were supportive, and I said that I was if they were.”
When he was reached in Liverpool, Henry granted permission (though he would later say he was never in favor of the deal). Crawford’s contract package was one of the ten largest in baseball history.
“That ended the meetings on a high note for all of us,” said Francona. “I was ecstatic. Carl had always killed us. It was a lot of money, and it made us heavily left-handed, but I thought this guy would put us over the edge to be a team that was athletic. With him and Ellsbury together, holy shit. All that speed was what we had been fighting, and now we were going to be that team.”
The Sox outbid the Angels by $34 million in the Crawford deal. Henry had committed $296 million to two new ballplayers. Tickets for the 2011 Red Sox season went on sale Saturday, December 11, the day Crawford was introduced to the Boston media at Fenway Park.
Ten days later, Epstein was back at it, signing veteran White Sox closer Bobby Jenks to a two-year, $12 million contract. It was a curious acquisition. The Sox already had Jonathan Papelbon and a potential emerging closer in Daniel Bard. Jenks had been a World Series–winning closer in 2005, but his skills had waned, he had health issues, and there were whispers of personal problems.
We Won’t Rest Until Order Is Restored.
“It was my fault,” said Epstein. “I fucked up by giving in to that. There was always a tension between the scouting and development approach and what I call ‘The Monster.’ ‘The Monster,’ especially after we won the first time, was that we had to be bigger, better. There had to be more, more, more. We had to push revenues. It became a bit of a distasteful, self-congratulatory tone to some of the things we were doing as a franchise. It’s hard to take winning and translate that into a day-to-day modus operandi for the club. There was always an inherent tension between what we were good at, what we wanted to do—the long-term approach—and this Monster. Talk about the arc of the decade. I think our group was really good at fighting that Monster and being true to our approach in the early and middle years, then toward the end—and I blame myself for this—we sort of gave in to it. Seeing the reaction we had when I mentioned the ‘horror’ of seeing young players develop, seeing the impact it might have had on revenues, and having some discussions with the business people. There came a point where we were almost too big and I lost my willingness to cling to that patience and the approach I thought made us good. I thought we gave in and tried to take the shortcut, and I don’t think there are any shortcuts in baseball. We tried to take a shortcut by throwing money at some problems, and the irony is that that led to even more problems.”
No one foresaw any problems when the Red Sox looked ahead to 2011. There was only more emphasis on revenue streams that would match the inflated payroll and expectations.
In this spirit, Lucchino called on his manager for an unusual errand in the winter of 2010–2011. Henry and Lucchino wanted to move the right-field bullpens closer to home plate. It was a radical idea, given that Fenway’s outfield dimensions had been untouched since the bullpens were installed for the 1940 season. Tom Yawkey had built the bullpens after Ted Williams’s rookie season of 1939. The owner wanted to boost the Splendid Splinter’s home run total, and the new bullpens were immediately dubbed “Williamsburg.” Oddly, Williams’s home run total dropped from 31 to 23 in the first year after the bullpens were built.
The notion of moving the bullpens closer to home plate was something Henry had contemplated for several years. During Sox home games in 2010, the owner asked guests what they thought of the idea and how they thought it would be received. The official reason for changing the configuration was alleged complaints from bullpen occupants who held that the bullpens were not wide enough to support double-barrel action without endangering everyone in the pen. The unofficial reason was that the Sox owners wanted to reconstruct the right-field area and cram a few more seats into Fenway Park.
Changing anything inside Fenway was complex. The Sox had successfully petitioned to have their ballpark declared a designated landmark, a distinction that earned the owners tax credits but required them to get permission when they wanted to make renovations. In January 2011, at the request of Lucchino, Francona appeared before the Massachusetts Historical Commission to explain why the bullpens should be wider in the interest of player safety. The manager agreed that the bullpens were too small and was interested in making them bigger to accommodate and protect his players.
“I went there and made the case that someone was going to get hurt, but this lady on the commission was having none of it,” Francona recalled. “She was having a bad day to begin with and didn’t care who I was. As I was telling her, I could tell she wasn’t buying it. She said, ‘Do you expect me to believe that this is why you’re doing this when you’re adding 400 seats?’ She laughed us out of the room.”
Not willing to take a chance on losing tax credits, the Sox decided the bullpens were not particularly dangerous after all.
“I went to Larry, just to break his chops,” chuckled Francona. “I said, ‘What about the bullpen safety?’ And he said, ‘Ah, they’ll be all right. They can be careful and work around each other out there. They’ll figure it out.’”
Francona was entering the final season of a deal with a two-year club extension that had to be triggered within ten days of the end of the 2011 season. Given Francona’s success, his seven years on the job, and the expectations for the 2011 ball club, there was remarkably little talk about the lame-duck status of the team’s field manager. Folks close to Henry knew that the owner had had the manager in his crosshairs for a couple of seasons. It would be impossible for any field boss to consistently satisfy and support the data Henry loved.
“A New York writer asked me about my contract the first day of spring training,” said Francona. “He t
weeted that my contract was going to be picked up the next day, and I actually got a little excited about it, but nothing happened. If anyone asked me about it, I deflected it. I had told them I wouldn’t bring it up, so I didn’t. I wanted them to appreciate that, but I don’t think they did. This was when I was starting to feel that maybe they weren’t that big on me. When it was all over later, I told Larry, ‘I could have made things a lot tougher on you guys.’”
He stayed in a condo at the Miromar Lakes country club in February of 2011. It was his first year away from the Bell Tower’s Homewood Suites. Miromar had a pool Francona could use in the dark hours of morning before driving to the Sox minor league complex.
The manager’s recently married middle daughter, Leah, came to visit for a few days with her husband and was disturbed when she came across a bottle filled with as many as 100 Percocets. Like everyone else around her father, Leah Francona knew her dad took pain medication. He had considerable history with pain pills and joked about it regularly.
The manager of the Red Sox had undergone an extraordinary number of surgeries in his 51 years. The most recent knee replacement followed the 2006 knee replacement, knee scopes, knee reconstructions, cervical disk surgery, and numerous wrist, elbow, and shoulder surgeries. He’d cheated death during the Christmas season of 2002, surviving a pulmonary embolism on each side of his lungs, as well as subsequent blood clots, staph infections, massive internal bleeding, and the near-amputation of his right leg. He had a small metal device (a Greenfield filter) implanted into his vena cava vein to prevent clotting. He was unable to jog and would be on blood-thinning medication (Coumadin) for the rest of his life. He still wore sleeves on both legs, and still got cold easily. Anytime he sat too long, his legs swelled and needed to be elevated. He had a hard time remaining comfortable. Blood-level maintenance and pain management would be part of his daily life for as long as he lived.
The vial of Percocets had been stockpiled over a long period of time.
“I saved ’em up,” said the manager. “I had hoarded them.”
Francona’s daughter was concerned that his pain was not being carefully managed and asked him to consult with Dr. Larry Ronan, Red Sox head team internist since 2005. Francona knew Ronan well and trusted him.
“I had that bottle, and Leah was worried,” said the manager. “It was legal, but it wasn’t good. I didn’t even open ’em. It wasn’t under the Red Sox umbrella. She knew what I’d gone through, and she wanted me to go to Larry [Dr. Ronan], so I did. I told Larry the truth and that it was no big deal. I didn’t want to lie to him. I told him, ‘I have these, didn’t open them, but I like the idea of having them if I need them.’ I wanted to be up-front. He said he’d keep an eye on me. The next day he said he wanted to tell Theo. He told me, ‘I know you’re okay, I see your eyes, but I want you to meet with somebody, a pain management guy.’ He said he had to document this.”
As Epstein recalled, “I got a call from Dr. Ronan telling me what happened and what he thought we should do about it. We talked about how we could handle this in a way that fulfilled our responsibility to the organization, protected Tito, and, most importantly, protected Tito’s confidentiality. We had to limit the amount of people who knew about this and get Tito the help if he needed it. We had to alert MLB that something was going on, but do it without mentioning Tito’s name. Terry’s name was not specified in our report to MLB. It was just reported that there was a staff member who had an issue. And that was pretty much it. I have tremendous trust and faith in Dr. Ronan. He’s one of the special people in the world. So I felt like as long as he was the point guy handling it, that Tito would be in good shape and we’d ultimately be covered too.”
Francona agreed to participate in the MLB program and see a pain management specialist several times per month during the upcoming season. Still, he was uncomfortable with the arrangement and worried about his privacy.
“It was just Theo, Dr. Ronan, and me with that agreement,” said Francona. “I remember Larry [Dr. Ronan] looking at me as a friend and saying, ‘Tito, nobody outside of this room will ever know.’ And I said to him, “This will come back to bite me in the ass. I know how shit works here. This will fuck me someday.”
According to Major League Baseball’s executive vice president Rob Manfred, the only people authorized to know the identity of an individual in the MLB drug program would be the three-man MLB drug policy oversight committee (Manfred, MLB drug abuse consultant Dr. Larry Westreich, and Jon Coyles, director of MLB’s drug policy) and the “employee assistance professional” at the participant’s own ball club. The employee assistance professional for the Red Sox in 2011 was Dr. Larry Ronan. Under the terms of the program, Francona met with a pain management specialist a couple of times a month, usually at Ronan’s office.
Lucchino said that ownership was initially unaware of Francona’s participation in the program, adding, “Later in the season I became aware of it, but not earlier in the season.”
“They weren’t supposed to know,” said Francona.
There didn’t seem to be much else to worry about. Spring training 2011 was a lovefest.
On Saturday, February 19, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino made their way to the Sox minor league complex in Fort Myers for the annual full-squad team meeting. Minutes before the owners walked in for the start of the annual meeting, Francona had a word with Varitek.
“’Tek, these guys just emptied their wallets for us over the winter,” said the manager. “They dug deep. Maybe we should show them some appreciation.”
“I’ll take care of it,” said the 38-year-old catcher/captain who’d been with the Sox since 1997.
“’Tek was such a leader,” said Francona. “He was our captain before we ever put the ‘C’ on his jersey.”
When the owners walked into the lunchroom, Varitek popped up out of his chair and started applauding. Everyone followed the captain’s lead, and Henry, Werner, and Lucchino smiled and bowed.
“I think this was a sort of spontaneous appreciation for our commitment to the organization,” said Werner.
“I think they appreciated it,” said Francona. “They’d just spent a lot of money, and I wanted to let them know that we didn’t take it for granted.”
After the meeting, the owners took questions from the media. Werner noted that the Sox had 16 players on their roster who had been All-Stars at one time or another. Henry said, “This off-season was tremendous.” Asked about Crawford, Henry said, “He’s the right player for us,” words he would come to regret. Lucchino said the Sox paid $85.5 million to Major League Baseball’s revenue-sharing fund in 2010 and another $1.3 million in luxury tax. The Sox 2011 payroll came in at $161 million, one of the top three payrolls in baseball.
“We come to camp with a sense of high expectations,” said Lucchino. “There’s very definitely a sense of confidence, a sense of optimism, a sense of what could possibly be, and you feel it when you first walk into the camp.”
The players were no less enthused. Beckett said that he’d never been on a team that won 100 games. (The last Red Sox team to win 100 was the 1946 team returning from World War II.)
“I think it’s important to remember that we haven’t done anything yet,” said Epstein. “We didn’t even finish second last year. . . . Baseball is such a humbling game. If you get ahead of yourself even for a minute or two, it kind of knocks you right back down on your backside.”
“As good as people thought we were, I thought we were going to be even better,” Francona said later. “I thought the pieces fit. I was really excited. Adding Adrian Gonzalez. Adding Carl. I thought, Wow, this is going to be unbelievable. We were going to be fast and athletic. Defensively, the balls weren’t going to hit the outfield grass. I was thrilled.”
When the spring games started, the manager was presented with the annual problem of building a team while splitting squads for two- and three-hour bus trips in southwest Florida. The Red Sox Fort Myers site was a logistical problem. Many major l
eague teams had migrated to Arizona or the east coast of Florida, and the Sox faced long bus rides anytime they were not playing the Twins, who trained on the other side of Fort Myers.
“I never felt like I could get my hands on the team enough because of where we were in Fort Myers,” said Francona. “Every trip is a bitch. You can go two or three days without seeing people, and it’s hard. It’s a little bit of a disadvantage as far as getting your work done. I used to tell Theo, ‘If I take what I am supposed to on the road, it’s gonna fuck us up.’ Theo was inevitably going to be getting a complaint from the league because we weren’t taking a lot of regular players sometimes. He always said he’d handle it, and I really appreciated that. I’d leave guys back to get their work done. Guys are supposed to be getting ready for a season, and when you put them on a bus for two hours for two at-bats, it doesn’t help ’em. We had a lot of new guys in 2011, and that worried me as far as getting ready for the season.
“Expectations are great. That’s how you’re supposed to feel. That’s the way spring training is. But there’s a process. You can’t go from one mile an hour to 100 miles an hour. You’ve got to go through spring training and prepare and pay attention to detail. I understand expectations are great, and that’s okay, but if you skip the process, you got a chance to have some problems. In 2011 I felt just like I felt after we won in 2007. I had to put up a fight to make sure they knew—if we don’t win, all that other stuff isn’t going to be there. I wasn’t excited about talking about winning 100 games. Those are dangerous things to say. You’re forgetting about the process.”
Sports Illustrated picked the Sox to win 100 games and beat the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. The magazine also projected Crawford as 2011 American League MVP. Six of six Boston Globe “experts” picked the Sox to finish first, but more unlikely respect came from the New York Post, where seven of seven “experts” picked the Sox over the Yankees.
“We’ve got a World Series kind of team when you look at our 25 guys,” said Clay Buchholz, who had won 17 in the “shitty” season of 2010. “There really aren’t any weak spots.”
Francona: The Red Sox Years Page 34