Francona: The Red Sox Years

by Terry Francona

  “We looked into it [video], and we found out that it was just a courtesy to them [the pitchers],” said Lucchino. “It was [approved by] someone who didn’t have the decision-making authority on this. It was all very casual and never went up the chain of command, and we weren’t aware of it until after this issue developed.”

  “I never even knew about it,” said the manager.

  Beer and baseball have walked hand in hand since the game was invented. Through the decades, many teams (St. Louis Cardinals, Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles) were owned by beer companies, and no one ever objected to the name of the Milwaukee Brewers. Baseball players, coaches, and managers are on the road for 81 games, most of which are played at night. There is beer in the clubhouse, on the plane, on the bus, and in every major league city hotel. Baseball hours encourage the drinking life. Games are late, and participants can sleep late the next morning. Under Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver, Baltimore Oriole ballplayers were not allowed to use the hotel bar. The hotel bar was home to Weaver and his coaches. Weaver reasoned that banning players from the hotel bar eliminated all possibility of late-night encounters between inebriated, disgruntled ballplayers and their manager. The Sox did not have any such rule.

  Rules and traditions changed in baseball and across America in the 1990s and in the new millennium. Drunk driving fatalities, DUI arrests, and liability concerns prompted many major league ball clubs to limit or ban alcohol in the clubhouse. By 2011, 18 of 30 major league baseball teams had officially banned beer from the clubhouse (though it was well known that clubbies had access to beer, even in the “dry” ballparks). The Red Sox of 2011 were not among the clubs with a clubhouse alcohol ban.

  Francona understood the clubhouse culture as well as anyone and believed in treating his ballplayers like adults. Privileges were extended with the understanding that the players would not take advantage of the system. The manager was proud of the fact that the Red Sox did not have a single DUI arrest in his eight seasons in Boston. He knew some of his players drank beer in the clubhouse after the game, and if one of the pitchers had a beer in the late innings of a game in which he was not involved, the manager wasn’t going to make a big deal of it.

  He remembered the words of the late Chuck Tanner, a teammate of Tito Francona and a World Series–winning manager with the Pirates in 1979. When Tanner made the trip to New Brighton for Birdie Francona’s funeral in 1992, young Terry, then a first-year minor league manager, asked the senior skipper how he knew when to step in and when to look away when ballplayers misbehaved on charter airplanes.

  “If I didn’t turn around, I didn’t see it,” Tanner told 33-year-old Francona.

  “When would you know to turn around?” asked Terry.

  “If the plane was going down, I’d turn around,” said Tanner.

  Point taken. If you wanted to stick around as a big league manager (Tanner managed the White Sox, A’s, and Braves in addition to the Pirates), you sometimes looked the other way. Tanner was not going to make a big issue out of a little beer in the clubhouse.

  “I’m not saying it was right,” said Francona. “But if somebody was drinking, they weren’t drinking a lot. It was more disturbing for me to think that they would not protect each other, or one guy wouldn’t tell another guy to knock it off. I wanted them to protect each other ferociously. If somebody felt that strong about it, fuck, they could have told me. Most of all, they needed to care enough about each other to stop it, because that’s what good teams do. The chicken and beer didn’t bother me, but I wanted them there together in the dugout, being all in.

  “You noticed it on Sundays when football started. You’d lose the pitchers. I caught Jonny Lester one day. He came bounding into the dugout during our game, and I said, ‘What’s the score of the Jets game?’ He was mortified. It just crushed him. That’s all I had to say to him.

  “They knew the rules. I always told them, ‘The day you pitch, you’re fully vested. The other days, there are gonna be days you don’t feel like coming down to the dugout. But kick yourself in the ass, because that’s the day the position player is going to need a little help.’ That’s what bothered me with this group. There was too much sitting around and not enough caring on the days they weren’t pitching.”

  “I feel like I was in the dugout just as much as any other year,” grumbled Beckett. “I have a hard time grasping what everybody else thinks. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to figure that out.”

  Francona knew his dugout was crowded late in the season with the September call-ups. He knew J. D. Drew, close to retirement, ever on the disabled list, was addicted to the hunting video game in the clubhouse. He didn’t mind players occasionally ordering fried chicken from nearby Popeye’s during games (a tradition started in 2010 by Mike Cameron, perhaps the best teammate and most fit player on the club).

  “The fact that they ordered from Popeye’s every once in a while, that doesn’t matter,” said Francona. “The fact that maybe guys were getting heavy, that does matter.”

  Late in the summer, he pulled Beckett aside for a talk—something he’d done just about every year Beckett was with the Sox.

  “JB, don’t forget the leader you are,” said Francona. “Come on, man. I expect a lot from you. I know you are not going well now, and I want to make sure you are okay. You’re not going late in games. You seem mad at the world. Let’s get going now.”

  “A week later, I was looking at the same things,” said Francona later. “That’s where I thought I lost my ability a little bit. That talk normally got him back on track. I used to be able to get to him, and it wasn’t working anymore.”

  “I don’t think I took advantage of Tito,” said Beckett. “He may think I did, but it’s probably not coming from something that I did to him. It’s coming from somebody else telling him that’s how he should feel. I thought I was prepared to pitch every time I went out there.”

  Poor conditioning shed light on the ball club’s training and medical staffs. Rising star Ellsbury was among the players who did not trust the Sox medical team, and the ball club was constantly overhauling systems of caring for the players. Dr. Bill Morgan, who performed the crucial surgery on Curt Schilling, was removed after the 2004 season. Trainer Paul Lessard was let go after four seasons in 2009. There would be a complete overhaul of the medical and training staffs after the collapse of 2011.

  “We had conversations with Theo about what was going wrong before the last day,” said Werner. “And we had conversations with Terry. . . . There were certain things that I was surprised about at the end, but we were aware of certain issues, like conditioning issues and medical issues.”

  “Our medical was all fucked up,” said Francona. “There were more egos on the medical staff than there were on the team. Without Larry Ronan, it wouldn’t have worked. Without him, we wouldn’t have made it. People don’t know how many fires we put out there. We tried to set this mold, and we broke it. We kind of outsmarted ourselves. It was terrible. I remember being really pissed when Paul Lessard was let go. Now they know. Some of us paid a price for that.”

  Late in the 2011 season, Henry talked about the methods of Liverpool soccer strength and conditioning coaches, hoping the Red Sox could adopt similar policies.

  “They were explaining how their athletes punch in every day,” said the manager. “The players recorded what they ate and how many hours they slept. John wanted to do that here. I said, ‘John, are you shitting me? You can’t do that with these guys. Just be happy they show up at the ballpark.’”

  On August 3, Ortiz stepped up to the plate with runners on second and third and drove a single to left. Cleveland left fielder Austin Kearns did not field the ball clearly and Youkilis scored from second. Kearns was charged with an error, and Ortiz received only one RBI. The Red Sox won, 4–3, improving to 68–41 and holding their first-place lead over the Yankees.

  The next day Francona was conducting his pregame press conference with the Boston media at Fenway when Ortiz
burst through the door to the left of the stage, pointed at Francona as he was met by Ganley, and said, “I’m fucking pissed. We need to talk this out, you and me.”

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” said Francona.

  Ortiz turned and left, yelling, “Okay. Fucking scorekeeper always fucking shit up.”

  “I was fired up,” Ortiz admitted later. “It wasn’t like I was mad at Tito, but I needed to talk to him. I wanted him to talk to the scorekeeper because he’s my manager. They knew they screwed up. I wanted my RBI.”

  Ortiz was correct in his assessment. Youkilis had never broken stride on his route from second toward home plate and would have scored on the hit regardless of Kearns’s error. Ortiz was particularly sensitive about his numbers after he had finished with 99 RBI in 2009. Ganley petitioned the league and had the decision changed.

  Video of the press conference incident went viral.

  “I’m glad I brushed my hair that day,” said Ganley.

  Back in the clubhouse, Francona found Ortiz, and they met in his office, Ortiz taking a seat on the Pesky couch.

  “David, if you want an RBI, I’ll try to help you, but you did wrong,” said the manager.

  Pleading his case, Ortiz started, “But . . .”

  “No ‘buts,’ David,” said Francona. “You did wrong.”

  The moment came to symbolize the 2011 Red Sox. They would be remembered as individual stars who cared about themselves more than their team or their manager.

  “It wasn’t the end of the world, but if that bothered him that much, that was a warning sign for me,” said Francona. “Guys were starting to think about themselves. It was a concern. I took a lot of pride in having teams where guys got mad if we lost, not if they went 0–4.”

  By this time the roundtable meetings involving Lucchino and the players—a staple of the Sox structure for most of the eight Francona seasons—started to ring hollow. It became difficult for Jack McCormick to find willing participants.

  “I think the players were starting to think it was a little transparent,” said Francona. “By the end, I was asking Jack to get a couple of coaches because you couldn’t get players.”

  There was a long-distance player-management issue when the Sox played in Texas late in August. The Texas series concluded a stretch in which the Sox had played 14 of 17 games on the road with stops in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Kansas City. The schedule called for the Sox to return from Texas for a three-game weekend series against Oakland at Fenway, but Hurricane Irene was scheduled to slash through Boston by the end of the weekend. There was almost certain to be a rainout Sunday. Baseball ops wanted management to absorb the rain and reschedule any lost games for September 29 after the end of the regular season. The Sox did not want to lose the gate. (Lucchino was obsessed with getting all 81 home games played every season.) Lucchino called his manager and proposed that the Sox move up the Sunday game and play a day-night doubleheader on Friday.

  “That was a tough one,” said Francona. “We were not going to get home from Texas until six in the morning on that Friday. I was against it all the way around. I told them, ‘This doesn’t help us. I know you have other concerns and there are revenue things to think about.’ I wasn’t trying to be a fly in the ointment, but they asked me a baseball question, and I told them. Daniel Bard got into it because he was the player representative and they wanted to have a vote on it. The players were feeling like they wanted some help on that one. We were beat up. We were tired. We were on fumes. For me, a rainout wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. I know it costs them some money, and I respect that, but we had a decent lead and couldn’t give the guys a blow.”

  “Larry Lucchino called me when we were in Texas,” said Pedroia. “I said, ‘Larry, I don’t give a fuck. I’ll play whenever you tell me to play, but I’ve got to talk to the guys.’ It taxes the team. I would have been dead the rest of the year if we’d done that doubleheader Friday. We didn’t want to do it. We wanted to play it at the end of the year if we got rained out.”

  Lucchino said, “We’d made a major investment around 2004 to change the drainage and the turf around the ballpark so that there would not be so many rainouts. We’ve had pretty good luck doing it. We’ll tell our players we’re going to play 81 home games and try to get them all in.”

  The compromise was a Saturday day-night doubleheader. Sox players were angry, but won both games. It would be the last time in 2011 that they would win two games in a row.

  When Henry got word that players were upset about the doubleheader, he offered them a night on his boat (no children allowed) and had a set of $300 headphones delivered to the stall of each of the players. Sox coaches were not invited on the boat and did not receive headphones.

  “There was this growing sense of disconnection,” said Epstein. “The players were pissed at the world, including management. There was a sense of discord in the clubhouse. Ownership felt disconnected, and there were these nice headphones lying around. We’d done it in the past. In 2004 we gave them iPods.”

  “I never got the headphones, but about 20 of us went on the boat, and that was pretty sweet,” said Pedroia. “But we started playing bad right after that doubleheader.”

  “There was a conflict between pitchers and position players,” said Youkilis. “It shouldn’t be like that. Guys weren’t getting along, and we didn’t address it as players. Players wanted the manager or the general manager to do something. It just became a rift. You can point fingers all you want, but players have got to play. When you come in the door, you have to be accountable for your actions and what you are doing. It just sucked for Tito. We didn’t take care of what we needed to take care of. I wasn’t accountable when I could have been accountable.”

  By the end of August there was considerable speculation that Epstein was leaving. He was under contract through the 2012 season, but Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts had fired general manager Jim Hendry and recklessly identified Epstein as the man he wanted to run his team. Epstein went underground after the rumor surfaced and was careful with his words when he finally addressed the Cub question before a Sox-Yankees game at Fenway.

  “I’m completely focused on the Red Sox of 2011,” said Epstein.

  Werner called the Epstein rumor a “non-story.” But Epstein made no verbal commitment beyond 2011 and said nothing to squash the speculation. It was one more distraction leading into one of the worst months in baseball history.

  Hours after Epstein’s vague remarks, the Sox beat the Yankees, 9–5. Boston held a one-and-a-half-game first-place lead over the Yankees and had a nine-and-a-half-game lead over the closest wild-card contender. The Sox were 81–42 since their 2–10 start.

  Everything unraveled in September, and it had little to do with chicken and beer. The Red Sox folded because their starting pitching collapsed. In the month of September, Boston starters did not survive the fifth inning in 12 of 27 games. Beckett, Lester, and Lackey were an aggregate 2–7 in September with a 6.45 ERA. The Red Sox lost 11 of their 15 starts. Beckett gave up six earned runs in each of his last two starts, both against the last-place Orioles, losing leads in both games. Lester, in his last four games, went 0–3 with an 8.34 ERA, giving up 25 hits and 12 walks in 19 and two-thirds innings. Buchholz, who’d suffered a stress fracture in his back in June, never made it back to the mound. Erik Bedard, a lefty acquired at the trading deadline, won only one of eight starts in his two-month tenure in Boston and couldn’t get through four innings on the next-to-last night of the season in Baltimore. Setup man Bard, after not giving up a run over 25 consecutive outings from late May through the end of July, grew tired from too much work and lost three games in a single week in September.

  Tim Wakefield’s exhaustive quest for his 200th victory was difficult for everyone, including the manager. The 45-year-old knuckleballer picked up victory number 199 on July 24, then made seven starts without reaching the milestone. It was a strain on the team and the manager.

  “I wanted
Tim to get the 200th, but I also wanted us to win,” said Francona. “Part of the good thing about getting records is doing it during the normal course of events. Unfortunately, we kept losing his starts. After the fourth try, it was like, Damn. You try not to think about it, and I was careful to manage the same way I would always manage, but it seemed like energy was going toward personal things that weren’t team achievements. I don’t blame anyone for wanting that win, but for a manager, you want your guys to be concerned about team goals.”

  Wakefield finally beat the Blue Jays at Fenway on September 13, but that was his only win in September. Wakefield’s September ERA was 6.45, and the Sox lost four of his five starts.

  On Monday, September 5, after an 11-inning, 1–0 day game loss in Toronto, Francona had McCormick get a suite at the Park Hyatt Toronto so that Sox players could hold their annual NFL fantasy draft. Pizza, beer, and sandwiches were served. It was usually a good team-building event.

  The night did not go as well as Francona hoped. Francona noticed teammates rolling their eyes when other players were attempting to be funny. This was nothing like 2004 when the Idiots drank beer, played cards, and teased one another on charter flights. It was nothing like 2007 when there was always a friendly cribbage game, or the fantasy draft night in Baltimore in 2010 when players interacted, busted chops, and left the room feeling good about themselves and one another.

  “DeMarlo and I were looking about the room and I thought, These guys just don’t like each other like they used to,” remembered Francona. “It was a different atmosphere. You could tell the guys weren’t as close as the teams we’d had in the past.”

  “It’s usually a night with a lot of laughter and fun, and when you came out of it you felt good,” said Hale. “But Tito didn’t think this one connected like it did in the past. This team was just a little different that way.”