Francona: The Red Sox Years (13 page)

It was Francona’s first chance to see the new-generation executives at play. He enjoyed them. He brought his high school senior son, Nick, a few times and once fell asleep on a couch while Nick sat at the poker table with Theo, Cherington, O’Halloran (nicknamed BOH), and Hoyer. These Sox officials wound up drafting Nick Francona with their 40th-round pick four months later, but the manager’s son eschewed professional baseball in favor of the University of Pennsylvania.

Theo’s frat house was the site of Francona’s first encounter with the estimable Bill James.

It is impossible to understate James’s impact on 21st-century baseball. He is the godfather of sabermetrics—officially defined as the study and mathematical analysis of baseball statistics and records with the goal of discovering objective knowledge about the basic principles that underlie the game. James grew up in a tiny town in Kansas, studied economics and literature at the University of Kansas, and was a night watchman at a pork-and-beans factory when he self-published his first
Baseball Abstract
in 1977. In his 1985
Abstract,
James wrote, “Baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the power of language.” Tall, bearded, and quiet, James rarely made eye contact and had limited interpersonal skills. He didn’t believe in fielding percentage because the assignment of errors was completely unscientific. Errors were
scorer’s decisions,
therefore subjective, unquantifiable, and unreliable. Ever-contrarian, James believed that standard numbers of value like batting average and RBI were overrated. He told his readers that “baseball statistics are not pure accomplishments of men against other men, which is what we are in the habit of seeing them as. They are accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances.”

James invented new measures of player accomplishment and value. He devised a formula for runs created: an estimate of the number of runs each hitter contributes to the team. He created the “win share,” which compares players across positions, teams, and eras and measures in a single number the total sum of a player’s contribution to his team. He created “secondary average”—a method of summarizing the things a player does to create runs, other than batting average. Cofounder of STATS Inc., James accurately described himself as “a mechanic with numbers.”

He also gave Francona a headache, and the new manager was only too happy to break chops when he found himself opposite James at the poker table in the spring of 2004.

“I yelled at him,” Francona said. “It was all in good fun, but I let go a little bit when I saw him that first night over there. I’d had a few beers, and I was telling him, ‘You may know numbers, Bill, but you’re not street-smart! I can read you!’ The cards fell my way, which made it even better. I took him to the cleaners at the poker table. It was fun, but I don’t know if he appreciated my humor as much as everybody else did.”

“Tito’s a really good card player,” added Mills. “He feels he can match up with anybody. He’s got that confidence. So those guys might have had the upper hand in the clubhouse, but at the card table it was like, ‘Don’t mess with me.’ When they’d mess up at the card table, he’d say, ‘Hey, I hope you’re doing better with that hit-and-run stat you had, or the numbers on hitting the 3–1 fastball.’”

“There was a lot of smack-talking that night,” said Epstein. “Bill James was doing a lot of math in his head. People were talking shit at one point, and Bill, who is pretty stoic and guarded, looked up from his cards and said, ‘Up yours, Tito,’ then, ‘Fuck you, BOH.’ We all cracked up. It was pretty funny.”

James never visited the Red Sox clubhouse. He was aware of how baseball people viewed him. But he had his revenge over the next eight years of Francona’s life as Theo and his baseball men bombarded the manager with data, much of it rooted in the philosophy of James and the generation of number-crunchers he’d inspired.

Early in the spring of ’04, before the first exhibition game was played, Epstein and Hoyer met with Francona and Mills and presented the foundation of the Red Sox statistical approach. It was a skull-imploding three-hour meeting that wore down the manager and his aide-de-camp.

“It wasn’t just numbers,” said Francona. “There was a lot of stuff about ‘types’ of pitchers and how a certain type of pitcher would be good against a certain type of hitter. It was interesting. We had talked about it all during the interview. I think maybe Grady wasn’t interested, but I wanted the information. It was stuff that I used. But there was a little panic that day after the long meeting. You could skew those numbers any way you want.”

When the meeting was over and Epstein and Hoyer left the room, Mills turned to Francona and said, “Whoa. We’d better win.”

“I looked at it a little different than he did,” said Mills. “In my view, all that stuff was just going to prove that he was making the right decisions anyway. But our heads were spinning a little bit because it was the first time we’d seen anything like that.”

From the day he got the job, Francona’s computer skills were overstated by a media machine eager to demonstrate the Red Sox departure from old-school Grady Little. It was easy to see the computer on Francona’s desk and paint him as a hardball Bill Gates, but Francona’s wife, his four tech-savvy children (aged 11 to 18 when he got the job), and Mills knew better.

“I didn’t know how to use a computer,” Francona said. “When I was in Philadelphia, I didn’t have one, and I did everything by hand. I had a computer in Oakland when I worked with Macha, and it was kind of a running joke. You have no idea how many printers I broke on the road. It was a fiasco. It was like the games couldn’t start because I didn’t have a printer working in my hotel room. I was horrendous. Unfortunately, the only thing worse than my computer skills was my penmanship, so it was better for me to put the lineup into the computer so everybody could read it. That’s what I did in Boston. I’d have the computer on the desk, and I’d type the lineup into it. I liked having the information, and I could use the information if somebody made it easy and pointed me in the right direction. Our computer guy on the road was Billy Broadbent, and he was never very far away. He knew if I called, he was the only one who could help me. It was amusing to everybody. Theo and those guys knew I was trying, but if I veered off the path, it was death.”

“He’s better than my parents,” said thirtysomething O’Halloran. “But not by too much. And he went through computer equipment faster than any human being alive. I was the one approving those expenses, and his computer was always broken. He went through four or five laptops a year. Sometimes it was just tobacco juice on the keyboard. I’d get a message that Tito needs a new laptop, and I’d go down to his office and say, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ It was ridiculous. In fairness to Tito, he did seem to have a lot of legitimate issues. Sometimes our IT guys could not fix it. It was a mystery what he was doing to it.”

No computer program could have prepared Francona for New England’s fixation on the New York Yankees. He was walking into a firepit of frustration built on eight decades of suffering, compounded by the ’03 playoffs and the winter of frustration. New York fans and the New York media were having a field day with the Red Sox in the spring of ’04, and the Sox had no answer. The Yankees had a 26–0 lead in World Series championships since the Sox last won in 1918. The Yanks had pilfered Babe Ruth and a succession of Sox stars in subsequent seasons. Whether it was Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Bucky Dent, or Aaron Boone, the Yankees stole the Sox lunch money every time. And New York fans taunted the empty-handed New England fans. It was not easy being a Red Sox fan and a college student in Boston or New York. You had to hear it from the New Yorkers, and there was no good response. The Empire State kids, meanwhile, could afford to be dismissive of their pathetic Boston counterparts. It was a one-sided dynamic.

In 2004 John Henry was firing off emails to reporters, complaining about the Yankee spending and comparing George Steinbrenner to Don Rickles. George retaliated by comparing Henry to Ray Bolger’s scarecrow character in
The Wizard of Oz.

The Red Sox had a week of exhibition games under their belts when Francona got out of bed on the morning of March 7, grabbed his coffee from the Homewood lobby, and drove in the dark toward Edison Road in sleepy Fort Myers. The Red Sox were scheduled to play the Yankees that day. His jaw dropped when he neared the City of Palms Park parking lot and saw fans sleeping on the sidewalk at 5:30
AM
.

Game 8.

“I thought to myself,
Holy shit. I better change the lineup and put somebody in there that the fans will know.
”

A-Rod and Jeter both made the two-hour-and-15-minute bus trip from Tampa, and more than 250 media members covered the spring training game, an 11–7 Yankee win. It remains the most overhyped spring training game in baseball history.

Francona took comfort knowing that Epstein would not be bothered if the team lost Grapefruit League games. The Sox were not worried about selling tickets for the ’04 season, and Boston fans were sophisticated enough to understand that spring training scores and standings didn’t matter. The Sox went 17–12–1 in Florida in 2004.

They traveled to Baltimore for the start of the season, and Francona got to Camden Yards at 12:30 for an 8:05
PM
start.

“When I woke up this morning, I was right in the middle of an inning,” he said in his late-afternoon press conference. “I know that sleep as I knew it is done. That’s just the way it goes. You guys may think I’m not looking too good right now, but wait until the end of the season.”

The writers didn’t have to wait until September. Francona looked horrible by midnight after he was tested by his ace, the ever-petulant Pedro Martinez.

Pedro was not sharp in the opener. He’d had a bad spring, was peeved with the attention Schilling was getting, and believed his lack of a contract extension was disrespectful. In his mind, Henry and Lucchino were making him pitch for his supper. They were making him prove himself instead of rewarding him for winning 101 games in six spectacular seasons in Boston. He was lifted in the seventh inning of a 7–2 loss to the Orioles and left the ballpark before the game ended, walking past a posse of reporters as if to bring attention to his defiance.

A player leaving the ballpark before the conclusion of a game violated everything Francona had learned in his formative years, but it wouldn’t do any good to publicly call out Pedro Martinez on your first night on the job with the Boston Red Sox. The new manager was furious when he learned that Pedro left, and he took note of Martinez’s going out of his way to make sure everybody knew. But when he was asked about it, Francona said, “In fairness to him, and everybody else, that [rule about leaving early] wasn’t conveyed correctly on my part, and I take responsibility for that.”

“That was bad for me,” said Francona. “Publicly, I took responsibility for it, but we had to have it out. Pedro was testing me. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I went to the park the next day looking for him. It was an off day, and we had an optional workout. Somebody told me that Pedro was with our trainer, Chris Correnti. Chris saw me and said, ‘Careful, he’s about to blow,’ and I said, ‘Fuck that. Where is he?’ I got Pedro to come into my office, and we had it out. He got real quiet. That’s what he would do when he was mad, he’d get all stone-faced. I just wanted him to know how things should be. I wanted him to understand that I’d take a bullet for somebody, but you got to do things right.”

Over the next eight seasons, when Sox players would misbehave, Francona would address it internally, then go in front of the media and minimize the transgression. It fortified his image as a manager who was too nice, too much of a players’ manager, but Francona cared more about what it did to help the team win. Ripping a player might feel good in the moment and satisfy fans and media, but it was not the way to get maximum production from a roster of 25 ballplayers. Not in 2004. Building trust with the players was more effective than playing tough guy for an ESPN sound bite.

Martinez took his sweet time getting to the ballpark before the second game of the season, strolling into Camden Yards an hour and a half before the first pitch, while all of his teammates were already on the field stretching.

“Overall, Pedro was tough on me,” said Francona. “He was one of the best pitchers in the game, but he was used to doing things his way, and that was difficult for me. He had the contract thing going too, and he and Schilling didn’t see eye to eye. He had so much pride, and it gets in the way sometimes. He pitched great in his second game for us, and I took him out right in the middle of the eighth when he got to 106 pitches. He was pissed. He was staring at me as I walked out there because he was on a roll. That was my way of saying, ‘Okay, I can play this game.’”

It was also a nod to Bill James, who’d calculated that opponents hit .231 against Pedro before 105 pitches and .364 after the 105th pitch.

The Sox split four games in Baltimore, losing the series finale when journeyman Boston southpaw Bobby Jones walked four Orioles in the bottom of the 13th. Things got worse after the late-night loss when a defective wing flap kept the Sox team charter plane sitting on a runway at Baltimore-Washington International Airport for four hours. By the time they switched to another aircraft, landed in Boston, and bused to Fenway, it was 7:30
AM
. Players were told that they needed to be back at the park by noon for a 3:00
PM
home opening start, awash in pageantry.

Standing in the clubhouse at 7:30
AM
, Francona had to make a decision. He could retreat to his temporary home at the Brookline Courtyard Marriott near Coolidge Corner (“They gave me a handicapped room, which seemed appropriate”), or he could sleep on the dirty old couch in his Fenway office.

He pulled a Red Sox fleece over his shoulders and lay down on the couch for an hour.

The home opener was worse than the finale in Baltimore. The Blue Jays routed five Boston pitchers for 14 hits in a 10–5 drubbing, and Francona was forced to use first baseman/outfielder Dave McCarty on the mound in the ninth. It was the first time the Sox had used a position player on the mound in seven years, and given that it was necessary on
opening day
at Fenway made Francona look a tad ill prepared. It was not his fault, but it didn’t look good.