Francona: The Red Sox Years

by Terry Francona

  Nine days before Fenway’s 100th celebration, news of Francona’s rejection of the Sox invite hit the front page of the Globe.

  “It’s a shame,” Francona said in the article. “I’m sure they’ll have a great event and I was part of a lot of that stuff there, but I just can’t go back there and start hugging people and stuff without feeling a little bit hypocritical. . . . I just feel like someone in the organization went out of their way to hurt me and the more we talked I realized we’re just not on the same wavelength. They’re probably better off going forth and leaving me out of it. . . . Until I’m more comfortable with some answers on what happened at the end of the year, I don’t want to have much to do with the organization and that’s a shame. With all the good things that were accomplished, I just feel pretty strongly about that. . . . When I spoke to John he made me think they were going to make an effort. John and Larry made it clear to me they weren’t responsible for what was said. I thought they owed it to me to get to the bottom of it a little bit.”

  “I understand how strongly he feels on this matter and I accept that,” Lucchino said in the Globe story.

  After disclosure of his refusal to attend Fenway’s 100th, Francona received phone calls from friends urging him to return for the celebration. Nomar Garciaparra called the ex-manager, no small deed given the acrimony that had accompanied Nomar’s departure from the Red Sox. Commissioner Bud Selig called to deliver the same message: Francona owed it to the fans.

  The ex-manager started to have second thoughts. He called his 78-year-old father in New Brighton, Pennsylvania.

  “Dad, you’ve always been the voice of reason,” said Terry Francona. “They want me to come back. What should I do?”

  “Tell them to shove it up their ass!” said Tito Francona.

  “Thanks, Dad, I just needed to hear you say that.”

  Then he got a letter from Red Sox vice chairman Phillip H. Morse, a limited partner in the ownership group who had been close to the manager during his eight years in Boston. Francona trusted Morse and valued his opinion. Morse informed Francona that if the ex-manager did not see fit to return to Fenway, Morse would also skip the celebration.

  “That really floored me,” said Francona. “Phil was one of my favorites, and his letter made me think hard about it. I wanted to acknowledge the fans. My strong feelings about what happened with the organization didn’t change, but I was making myself the story and I wasn’t comfortable with that. I didn’t feel good about myself. So I decided to go.”

  He called Pam Ganley two days before the event to tell her that he’d changed his mind. He didn’t want to interact with his old bosses, but he wanted to be there for the fans.

  Francona was in Connecticut, working for ESPN, on the morning of Friday, April 20, the 100th anniversary of the inaugural Boston–New York baseball game at Fenway. After the morning broadcast, ESPN senior vice president Jed Drake drove the ex-manager from Bristol to Fenway High School on Ipswich Street outside the ballpark, where more than 200 ex-Sox players, coaches, and managers were gathered for the pregame ceremony. Francona was issued Red Sox uniform top number 47, a jersey fans rarely saw during the eight years he worked in the Boston dugout.

  Departing from his modus operandi, Francona arrived at the holding area across the street from Fenway just a few minutes before the group boarded buses for the ceremony. He was happy that he was too late to hear the welcoming remarks delivered by Henry, Lucchino, and Werner. Ganley arranged for him to wait in a private room in the high school where he could escape unwanted attention.

  Lucchino still found him.

  “I opened the door to his room and said hi,” recalled Lucchino. “We shook hands. We didn’t talk. It was just a greeting. He was kind of cold and distant. . . . I would hope that the passage of time would allow him to appreciate the gigantic contributions he made here. There has to be a way that there can be a rapprochement that will allow us to accord him the kind of respect and gratitude—we owe an enormous debt of gratitude—and there has to be a time when we could do that.”

  On the short bus ride from Fenway High to gate C behind center field, Francona sat with Dave McCarty, one of his 2004 warriors. He didn’t know what to expect when he got off the bus and walked into the ballpark underneath the center-field bleachers.

  The scene under the stands had the feel of a livestock auction. Fenway’s 100th was a complex ceremony that required planning and organization normally reserved for a presidential inauguration. Every Sox alum was issued a number, and the men were lined up in four rows of fifty. While he waited, Francona visited with old-timers Gary Bell and Tommy Harper, who asked him about his dad. When Garciaparra and Lou Merloni came over for a visit, the anxious ex-manager thanked Nomar for his phone call, but reminded both ex-players that he was not ready to extend an olive branch to the Red Sox owners.

  “I’m not in the mood for any public hugs,” said Francona.

  The beloved World Series–winning manager was not one of the first to appear in the 20-minute parade of alums. Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, Bill Buckner, Frank Malzone, Jerry Remy, Luis Tiant, and other gods of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s were in the initial wave of ex-greats, while 92-year-old Johnny Pesky and 94-year-old Bobby Doerr sat in folding chairs positioned outside the first-base dugout. None of the individuals’ names were announced to the crowd, but each man’s image appeared on the center-field scoreboard as he walked in from the imaginary cornfield beyond the warning track.

  When Francona finally emerged from the shadow of the doorway, a wave of noise and love washed over the Fenway lawn. The ex-manager held his hand over his heart as he walked toward the infield amid chants of “We want Tito!”

  His was the loudest reception.

  “Sounded like a Learjet,” said Millar.

  “It felt good, but I didn’t know if they were clapping for me or the next guy,” said Francona. “Mostly, I just wanted to find my place on the field and get it going. I was trying to be a little bit inconspicuous.”

  Standing in the Fenway infield with 200 other Sox veterans and present-day players, Francona visited with Pedroia and the trio of pitchers who broke the rules back in September: Lackey, Lester, and Beckett. He got emotional when he saw Nate Spears, a 26-year-old utility player, who’d been in professional baseball for nine years.

  “He was a great kid, and we’d taken him on every spring training road trip,” recalled Francona. “When we sent him down in 2011, I had told him, ‘Kid, you’re going to play in the big leagues.’ For some reason, seeing him there that day really got to me.”

  Sox bench coach Tim Bogar saw Francona getting emotional.

  Pointing to Spears, Bogar asked Francona, “Are you all misty-eyed because of him?”

  “Yeah,” said the ex-manager, shaking his head, wiping his eyes. “All this fucking shit and I’m crying because of him.”

  Spears was optioned to Pawtucket six days later.

  After the ceremony, Francona marched shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Randy Kutcher, Jody Reed, and Buddy Hunter toward the center-field triangle. After he reached the warning track, the ex-manager peeled off his Red Sox jersey, rolled it into a ball, spotted a young girl in the front row of the bleachers, and hurled the shirt over the wall toward the girl. Typically, the gift was intercepted by an adult, but Francona got the man’s attention and directed him to give the jersey to the young girl.

  Then the ex-manager raised his left fist in the air and disappeared under the stands. He walked toward the ESPN compound, where he was picked up by a driver and escorted to the Langham Hotel in Boston’s Post Office Square.

  Terry Francona accomplished the impossible; he got out of Fenway faster than Carl Yastrzemski.

  “They took me right to the car and got me the heck out of there,” said Francona. “I was probably halfway to the hotel by the time everybody got off the field. I was just uncomfortable and didn’t want to linger.”

  Had he stayed at Fenway a little longer he would have noti
ced personnel changes at security stations around the ballpark. There was a new guard outside the Sox locker room. Inside the clubhouse, veteran clubbie Joe Cochran had been banished to the visitors’ side, replaced by Tommy McLaughlin, who’d been working in the visitors’ room for more than a decade. There was also paranoia upstairs, where Werner had a veteran Boston sports columnist evicted from the EMC level.

  The Yankees beat the Red Sox, 6–2. A day later, on national television, the Sox blew a 9–0 lead, losing 15–9. Valentine was booed every time he popped his head out of the dugout as fans continued to chant, “We want Tito!” After the stunning loss, Valentine said the Sox had hit “rock bottom.” Little did Valentine know, but there would be many more rock bottoms in 2012.

  The ESPN Sunday Night Baseball game was rained out, saving Francona an awkward evening of dodging his old bosses on his 53rd birthday.

  Lucchino understood that Francona felt betrayed and persisted in his efforts to find the leak. But there were limits. As a Yale law student, Lucchino had worked alongside classmate Hillary Rodham on the Senate Watergate impeachment committee. Lucchino rejected the notion of conducting what he termed a “Nixonian investigation.”

  “That would entail a special prosecutor and literally calling people in,” said Lucchino. “I’ve never done this, tempted as I’ve been in the past to have people come in and take a lie detector test. I’ve been frustrated enough about leaks that have been damaging to me and the organizations I’ve been with and the other people in the organization, and I know how hard it is to try to identify that person.”

  Lucchino believed the primary source was someone who had already left the organization.

  “The people who actually do know aren’t saying it,” said Lucchino. “So I’m not sure the responsibility falls on those of us who don’t know.”

  “That’s interesting coming from someone who promised to find out,” said Francona. “Maybe this will help people understand my frustration.”

  The Red Sox piled up dozens of injuries and underachieved throughout the season. Valentine got himself into a jam in mid-April when he criticized the commitment of Youkilis, claiming the veteran was not “as physically or emotionally into the game” as he had been in the past. Pedroia reacted, saying, “Maybe that works in Japan or something . . . but that’s not the way we do things here.” Cherington came to the rescue of an agitated Youkilis, and Valentine apologized to the veteran.

  Valentine was not happy with the constant presence of Cherington, O’Halloran, and other members of baseball operations in his office before and after every game.

  “Other teams don’t do that,” the new manager grumbled as he sat in the Fenway dugout before a Sunday afternoon game in May. “It’s just one meeting after another around here.”

  Watching the Boston circus from Chicago, Epstein responded to a reporter’s query with an email that read (in part), “Too bad for you nothing is going on in Red Sox land to capture a cynic’s attention. Wow. It’s even stranger to watch from afar than it was to be in the middle of it.”

  When the last-place Sox visited Wrigley Field in June, Epstein looked back at the path not chosen.

  “We joked about it all the time in the front office,” he said. “We’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just say, “Screw free agency altogether. We’re going with a purely homegrown lineup. We’re going with old-school, Branch Rickey–style, pre–free agency, pre-draft, whatever.” [Will] Middlebrooks at third, Lowrie or [Jose] Iglesias at short, Pedroia at second, [Anthony] Rizzo at first, Lavarnway catching, Ellsbury in center, Reddick in right, Kalish in left.’ Wouldn’t that have been fun? We kind of clung to that in the back of our minds, knowing it was impossible, recognizing that there was an inherent tension between that approach and bigger business. I kind of kick myself for letting my guard down and giving in to it, because that might be a better team in some ways and resonate more with the fans than what we ended up with.”

  Why, then, did he waste all that money?

  “As far back as ’04, I kept hammering everyone internally,” said the ex-GM. “I’d say repeatedly, ‘We can’t forget what we are. We’re a baseball team. We can’t get too big. We can’t promise things that aren’t going to happen. We have to be patient.’ . . . We did fight that battle. We protected ourselves in baseball operations. We were insulated. We were in our own little environment. We did well for a long period of time, but we became too big, and then I fucked up and kind of gave in to that and didn’t execute it well, and for a period of time we lost part of our identity, and it’s hard to get back.”

  Asked about the NESN survey of 2010, Epstein said, “It played into part of the reason why I thought it was time to move on.”

  In the hours before the Red Sox–Cubs finale at Wrigley (another ESPN Sunday night game), Francona wandered into the cramped visitors’ clubhouse with his ESPN crewmates, greeted Youkilis with “Mazel tov,” hugged McCormick and Bogar, and managed to cajole a smile out of Beckett. Chewless, wearing a gray suit and purple tie, the ex-manager looked slightly awkward in the familiar setting.

  “It was a little uncomfortable,” he said later. “I’d been with them for so long, and all of a sudden I was a visitor.”

  Spotting coach Alex Ochoa holding a cup of Gatorade, Francona peered into the container and said, “Is that beer? Where’s the chicken?”

  Across the room, Pedroia, sitting next to Daisuke Matsuzaka, spotted his old cribbage partner, burst out of his chair, and screamed, “Tito, you should have seen it, man. Dice came back and pitched for the first time last week. He struck out a guy in the first inning, and we were throwing the ball around the infield, and I caught it and went over to Dice and said, ‘Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!’ He should pitch with a samurai sword, man.”

  It was as lively as the room had been all season. Hours later, Francona’s ESPN teammate Buster Olney characterized the Sox clubhouse as “toxic.’”

  Youkilis, who’d been miserable around Valentine for four months, was traded to the White Sox in late June. He immediately went on a tear, hitting .478 with three homers and 10 RBI in the week leading into the All-Star break. The Red Sox lost eight of 11 before the break. Lucchino sent a pandering letter to season-ticket holders, reminding fans that the Sox “look forward to the return of the varsity.”

  Francona came back to Fenway Park with the ESPN Sunday Night crew July 8 and participated in the standard manager’s briefing session with Shulman and Hershiser. It was the ex-manager’s first visit to his old office since he’d been fired. On orders from Henry, the ancient space had been totally renovated for Valentine. Plush red carpet covered the floor, the Pesky couch had been replaced with a new model, and a privacy wall had been erected to separate the skipper’s desk from the latrine.

  The former Sox manager found himself surprisingly unmoved by the renovations and said little while Shulman and Hershiser peppered Valentine with questions.

  “My pictures were gone, the couch was gone, and it looked so different,” said Francona. “I can’t believe they put that wall up. That’s where I did some of my best work. I conducted a lot of meetings from that bathroom. The place was completely changed and didn’t even feel like I had worked there.

  “. . . For eight years I had asked them to redo that office,” he said with a chuckle. “It was the first thing I asked for at every one of those roundtable meetings. It was kind of a running joke. I’d say it, and Larry would write it down on his yellow legal pad. I guess we should have won a third World Series.”

  In late July, when the Sox had an off day after flying from Texas to New York, Sox owners agreed to meet at the Palace Hotel with players who wanted to complain about Valentine. The meeting was requested via text by someone using Adrian Gonzalez’s cell phone. Players were angry that Lester had been left on the mound to take an 11-run beating against Toronto at Fenway on July 22. One player complained that Valentine had been harsh with rookie third baseman Will Middlebrooks, saying, “Nice inning, Will,” after
Middlebrooks had a tough inning in the field. Players were unhappy with Valentine’s limited communication skills.

  When the clubhouse mutiny was first reported by Yahoo Sports in August, the Sox were in Baltimore, the same place where everything imploded at the end of 2011. In an effort to stop the bleeding, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino made an emergency trip to Camden Yards. They tried to explain the meeting as another in their series of “roundtable” discussions, but according to Francona, in his eight years on the job there had never been a roundtable without the manager or outside of Fenway Park. A fuming Lucchino disputed Francona’s contention.

  Beloved Sox ambassador Johnny Pesky died August 13. Fans reacted angrily when it was learned that only four Red Sox players took the time to attend Pesky’s funeral. That same week, the Sox fell to seven games under .500, effectively eliminating themselves from playoff consideration for a third straight season.

  A poll conducted by Channel Media & Market Research revealed that 70 percent of respondents said the Red Sox had changed for the worse over the last five years. In the same poll, Boston’s baseball owners were ranked least popular among owners of New England sports teams.

  Lucchino blamed the Boston media for exaggerating the ball club’s dysfunction. Werner burst into the NESN broadcast booth defending the beleaguered Sox ownership group. Henry issued a few “votes of confidence” for Valentine, then withdrew almost completely.

  Rarely answering questions from reporters, the Sox principal owner also ignored multiple emails from Francona requesting cooperation for this book.

  Francona’s final email to John Henry, sent in August 2012, read: “Hello John. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was that after 8 years together and what I thought was mutual respect you chose not to even respond to my email. I guess I know now where I stand with you. Good luck. Tito.”