Francona: The Red Sox Years (14 page)

“That was a helpless feeling,” he said.

Theo brushed it off, chalking the whole thing up to “unusual circumstances.”

“Theo was always good about things like that, and I appreciated it,” said Francona.

The Sox met the Yankees seven times in a ten-day stretch at the end of April, winning six of the seven, including a three-game sweep in New York. Selig called it “a playoff atmosphere in April.” Francona wondered how any baseball team could sustain such intensity. What was it going to be like if they played the Yankees again in October?

His first in-season team meeting came after a fifth-straight loss in Cleveland in late May.

“Guys, I just want to let you know that we’re good and we’re going to be good,” he told them. “We’re in it for the long haul. I’m not panicked. Just go about your business and pay attention to detail and we’ll be okay. I love every one of you guys. You’re going to be fine, trust me. That’s it.”

The Sox won their next four games, and 15 of their next 23.

Meetings are risky. It’s the Earl Weaver Theory. The Hall of Fame Orioles skipper was reluctant to call a team meeting for one simple reason:

“What happens if you lose the next game?” asked Weaver. “Then what do you do?”

“I didn’t like team meetings where the manager ranted,” said Francona. “When you get to that point, you’ve waited too long. All you are doing is relieving stress. It didn’t help. I was in those meetings as a player. When I was with the Cubs we had one, and Dallas Green was the GM, and he wanted to yell at us. We had the meeting in the old clubhouse at Wrigley, and when I plopped myself down in the front, other players told me not to sit so close to the front, and they were right. Dallas Green was ranting and raving, and there was stuff flying everywhere, and I was scared to death. It didn’t help us win, though. It never does. When I was managing the Phillies, I called them together one night in Houston and I was out of control. I was so mad. I was lurching. You get so mad you don’t even know what you are saying. Scott Rolen told me he thought I was gonna fall down because my knee was so fucked up. I asked Millsie, ‘What did I say?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows!’ And that’s what happens in a meeting like that.”

It was early in the 2004 season, and Francona was looking at everything for the long haul. March, April, and May are months in which a new manager is building relationships. Francona wasn’t worried about Johnny Damon’s shoulder-length hair or David Ortiz’s jewelry. Francona had worn a necklace as a teen, and he knew it bothered his dad (“He thought that made me rebellious”), but those things didn’t matter in 2004.

“We never had a rule about not wearing jewelry on the field,” he said. “Still, not one player did it. I’m kind of proud of that. I didn’t feel right making it a rule. I told them I didn’t like it and I wouldn’t appreciate them wearing jewelry, but it was not a rule. It was a personal thing, that I didn’t think was appropriate to make a rule. When we’d trade for a guy, I’d tell him he could wear stuff, but I didn’t like it. Nobody ever did. David [Ortiz] was the best. He’d forget sometimes. He’d have that diamond earring in, and then before he’d go up to hit he’d hand it to me, and I’d put it in my pocket and I’d be thinking,
Holy shit, that’s $50,000 in my pocket.
”

Eliminating traditional boundaries was part of Francona’s strategy. With Epstein’s blessing (and participation), the manager and his coaches played cards with the Sox ballplayers.

Francona believed that a deck of cards could get a team through a 162-game season better than any training regimen or motivational program. Spades, hearts, clubs, and jacks kill downtime, engage minds, and teach strategy. Egos are stroked or dented, and money changes hands. It’s
action
—the lifeblood of young men who make their living competing against one another. Poker. Pluck. Hearts. Texas Hold ’Em. Boo-Ray. Tonk. The names of the games change, but the concept is forever. It’s an important part of managing and can be a foundation for team-building.

“We started playing on flights early in the season,” said Francona. “I’d always play with the coaches. Millsie and Dale Sveum. I’ve always contended that no one could be a good big league manager if he’s a shitty card player. It’s got all the things you need to do to manage. It’s the same mentality. You have to not be afraid, gamble a little bit, think quickly. I started off playing with the coaches, but then David came up front one day and called us a bunch of pussies. We were playing Boo-Ray, a guts game where you hold the cards. He got into it, and then Mark Bellhorn, who was quiet but really funny and loved to gamble. Johnny Damon was next. The coaches and me would be at the end of the first-class section, and the players would be right behind the bulkhead, and we didn’t get in anybody’s way. The games got really good. When Theo traveled with us, I asked him if he was okay with me playing poker with the players, and he didn’t care. He joined right in. I started to really look forward to it. I’d get all my work done on the plane as quickly as possible so I could get in those card games. I felt the team coming together with it. There would be a group of us playing, and another group standing over us screaming and yelling. We’d have 12 or 13 guys standing around.”

A manager could get a lot of good work done in subtle fashion during card games. It was something Francona had learned on those ten-hour bus rides when he was managing in the Southern League. In the big leagues, airspace over the heartland was a place where he could talk to a player and make a suggestion or correction without tension or fear of misunderstanding. In his rough years with the Phillies, Francona had invented what he called “the Mississippi River Rule”: no sulking after the plane crossed the Mississippi; break out the playing cards.

Francona was a master of building relationships at 35,000 feet.

“One of Tito’s greatest strengths was to empower players and put them at ease and let them be themselves and feel great about themselves,” said Epstein. “In a collegial way, he created this atmosphere. He created this atmosphere where you show up to the clubhouse and the outside world ceases to exist. It was just a group of guys doing what guys always want to do, hang out, have fun, make fun of each other, be themselves, show off, and find some sort of conflict on which they could all be on the same side, which was that night’s game. That 2004 team had great camaraderie. They could go out and stand shoulder to shoulder, play hard together, then come in and laugh about it at the end.

“To accomplish that, Tito needed freedom. We couldn’t have pulled that off with a lot of rules, so there was a conscious effort to create space for that to happen. It meant putting up with some stuff that wasn’t at times the most professional, but it was a means to the end. It was also an incredible amount of fun. Some managers use fear, power, and intimidation. Tito managed brilliantly by giving in to it, accepting it for what it was, and removing his ego from it, selflessly and brilliantly. It created this insulated environment where the only thing that mattered was competing and having each other’s backs. So of course we had very few rules, and of course the players were allowed to play cards, and of course Tito got in the mix, and at times I got in the mix. We had to because of what we were trying to do. We were trying to let our hair down and get past the puritanical, anxiety-filled, rigid conflicts of the era that preceded us in the late 1990s and 2001. We just wanted to relax and go play, and I think Tito really pulled that off.”

Francona noted, “It’s amazing what you can tell someone at three in the morning on a plane when you’re playing cards—something that you could never say in the dugout during the game. You’re having a beer, and you’re relaxing and talking about the game. I could say to Mark Bellhorn, ‘Were you out far enough on that cutoff relay?’ It was better than calling someone into your office. This was more like a conversation among peers, and maybe Bellhorn would say, ‘Yeah, I could have been out farther.’ I could say to David, ‘When you hit that pop-up down the left-field line, if you had run harder, do you think you could have been at second?’ It was a way to get them to see things. You’d get other players chiming in, and it ends up being good. I got a lot of shit accomplished on those plane rides around those card games.

“You don’t know how it’s going to end up. But I liked the way we were coming together that season. And I knew where we’d better be going.”

CHAPTER 6

F
RANCONA LOVED HIS CORNER
office at Fenway, the same space where Joe Cronin closed his door and met with Ted Williams in the 1940s. It was remarkably unchanged through the decades. When the office door was open, anyone in the Sox clubhouse could see the manager sitting at his L-shaped desk. Francona’s desk was outfitted with a landline telephone and a printer, computer, and monitor. There were three drawers on the right side of the desk, which was a tad inconvenient for the left-handed manager. The office walls were adorned with black-and-white “subway” tiling, and there was natural light from two back-wall opaque windows—protected by diamond-patterned metal grates. In the dismal Fenway years in the early 1960s, unsuspecting Sox fans walking down Van Ness Street toward Jersey Street could have tapped on those frosted windows and interrupted Pinky Higgins making out his lineup card or perhaps swilling some scotch.

The Sox manager’s space was spartan. The new-millennium Red Sox were a $1 billion enterprise, and employees were equipped with state-of-the-art technology and the full force of John Henry’s resources, but there were limits to what could be done with the old bricks and small spaces of a ballpark creeping toward 100 years old. The manager’s office was a great example of these limitations. The office had its own toilet, encased in a small corner stall just a few feet to the left of the desk. Privacy was minimal. In army barracks fashion, the latrine featured a brown swinging door, offering maximum exposure and minimal privacy. You could see under the door. You could see over the door. And you could hear the manager turning the pages of
USA Today
as he sat on the throne.

Jack McCormick said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’d knock on the office door and Tito would say, ‘Come on in,’ and I’d open the door and look across the room and see his feet underneath that stall door.”

“We got a lot of work done that way,” said Francona. “I used to mess with the players too. Ortiz would knock and I’d be on the toilet, and I’d say, ‘Come on in,’ and he’d go, ‘Oh, no,’ and I’d say, ‘Let’s go over the signs.’ I loved that old saloon door.”

“This is a subject that’s unfortunately impossible to avoid,” said Epstein. “This gets back to what really appeals to Tito. He loves baseball. He loves the game. He physically loves the clubhouse. Emotionally, I think he loves to let go of the outside world. Some people compartmentalize the job. Tito compartmentalizes the real world, throws himself into the clubhouse, loves every aspect of the clubhouse. He loves being down there and loves nakedness, vulgarity. Loves joking around, loves busting people’s balls, loves playing cards. He loves everything about it. It’s part of the fabric of who he is. So the social norms about going to the bathroom, those don’t always translate to the clubhouse to begin with, and he took it to a whole other level because of how deeply he believed in the clubhouse ethos. He would find satisfaction in a way that wasn’t always satisfactory to others. He would stimulate the senses, all of them, olfactory, auditory. It was a way to disarm people too. I think he felt like once you had a conversation with him where he was involved in a natural act like that, he felt like it brought you closer to him. You were sort of in. He did it to media, PR guys, front office. It was basically impossible to have a conversation with him without seeing things that only a toilet paper holder should see.”

The office was equipped with its own shower stall, no small perk in a home clubhouse in which the coaches’ room had no bathroom facilities.

“That office has the best shower head in baseball,” said Francona. “It’ll knock you right through the door.”

The manager’s office also featured a small closet and a pedestal sink next to two frontal exit doors. A 42-inch plasma screen covered the wall space between the two doors. Guests could sit in one of three rollaway chairs or on the faux-leather couch situated against the wall to the right of the manager—the couch that sometimes served as Francona’s hotel bed.

“I swear that couch had Johnny Pesky stains on it from when Pesky was a player,” said the manager. “People would come into my office, sometimes not in a very good mood, and it was adding insult to injury to have them sit on that couch. I slept on it a couple of times a year.”

There was a thermostat on the wall behind the desk, and Francona hung a few photos there to make the stark space feel homey: framed images of Tito Francona, Nick Francona, and the Francona girls. In later years the family pictures were joined by a photo of Muhammad Ali, a poster of David Ortiz hoisting Dustin Pedroia, a shot of Francona with Ted Kennedy, a tiny photo of Johnny Pesky in baseball underwear, and a framed letter from an angry Red Sox fan “telling me to stick the lineup card up my ass.”

The Pesky photo always generated commentary and laughter.

“I used to tease Johnny that you could see his balls hanging on the floor in that picture,” said Francona. “It was taken one of my first years there. Johnny was in spring training with us, and he was coming out of the shower, and I was kidding with him, and I put my arm around him and told someone, ‘Take a picture of me and Johnny.’ They took the photo and gave it to us the next day, and I said, ‘Sign this picture, Johnny.’ He laughed like hell. I used to fuck with him when he’d come into my office and say, ‘I’ve got the only framed Johnny Pesky picture with his balls hanging on the floor,’ and he’d laugh and say, ‘Don’t let anybody see that!’ One year, after they did some remodeling in the office, the picture disappeared, but it’s out there somewhere!”

The old Fenway office had New England barn–like qualities. Sox clubhouse workers kept sticky-traps in the corners of the office, and Francona sometimes found dead mice in the traps when he returned from road trips. When he found mouse droppings in his sink, he suspected they were deposited by mice scurrying on the exposed pipes overhead.