Francona: The Red Sox Years (15 page)

“Once a week I saw a mouse running under the toilet,” said the manager. “That was okay, but it bothered me when I saw the stuff on the sink. I asked them to fix the place up for eight years, but they didn’t do anything until after I left.” (The office was overhauled, including a makeshift partition shielding the toilet and shower area, in the months before Bobby Valentine took over for Francona.)

He loved his office. He loved his job. He knew this was an opportunity to win. More than that, he was expected to win. This was nothing like Philadelphia. The expectations were fair. He’d never had a team like this before.

The 2004 Red Sox were not a wire-to-wire champion. They spent the entire summer in second place, sometimes more than ten games behind the Yankees. Given their payroll, star power, and expectations, they could be wildly mediocre. From April 29 to August 6—a stretch of 86 games, which is more than half of a 162-game major league season—they were a .500 ball club, an imperfectly average 43–43. This took its toll on everyone around the team, particularly the new manager.

Francona and Epstein worked to find a mutual level of comfort during their first season together, but the exhaustive November interview process and six weeks of spring training had done little to prepare the manager and general manager for the pressure and rigors of the regular season in Boston.

The pre- and postgame presence of the GM in the manager’s office was a new wrinkle in baseball. Terry Francona’s dad, 15-year big leaguer Tito Francona, would have been shocked to see the amount of time the modern-day Red Sox general manager spent in the manager’s office. This was not the way it was when Tito played in the 1950s and 1960s. GMs stayed in the executive suites and let the managers manage.

The notion of separate orbits for the manager and GM is nicely demonstrated by a story told by onetime Twins manager Ray Miller about his interaction with the late Howard Fox, GM of the Twins in the 1980s. The Twins were on a road trip when Miller got a call in his hotel room in midmorning. It was Fox, Miller’s boss.

“How’d we do last night?” the GM asked the manager.

Miller was shocked. The general manager of the team had somehow gone to bed without checking to see if the Twins won or lost. He was calling to get the news firsthand from his manager. Thirty years later, this detached dynamic was unthinkable. GMs were demanding accountability before players stopped sweating. Francona would come into his office after a tough loss, and Theo would be sitting there with Francona’s son, Nick, asking why Mike Timlin got up to throw in the eighth, or why the Sox pitched to Alex Rodriguez with first base open. Epstein wanted to talk to his manager after every game. Immediately.

“Theo, you can ask anything you want,” Francona would tell his young GM. “If I don’t have a good answer, that’s on me. But sometimes there’s a way to maybe ask it so it’s not the minute I walk in the door. We all got emotions going.”

“At first we had a 24-hour rule,” recalled Epstein. “We wouldn’t talk about anything. If something fucked-up happened in the game, I promised not to talk about it. We could calm down and both get perspective. We lived up to it for a while. Then one time he asked me, ‘Hey, would you have done this?’ And the rule was out the window for a while. We got away from it, but we really had to get back to it. There was some real-time stuff that had to happen. I would get down there in the ninth inning, and I picked up on the fact that after a tough game he would benefit from having ten minutes to himself to spit out his chew and brush his teeth. It was always a delicate balance.”

Postgame toothbrushing was part of Francona’s daily ritual. Immediately after every game, he took a few minutes to purge the Lancaster chew from his mouth and gums. It was good for his teeth, and it kept Epstein at bay for an extra moment.

“Sometimes I’d take some extra time brushing that shit out because I was trying to get my thoughts in order,” said Francona.

“It was like a marriage in that respect,” Epstein acknowledged. “We did little shit to piss each other off.”

During one of the difficult summer stretches, Francona was surprised to find a thoughtful, concerned email from owner John Henry. He didn’t feel like he knew the reclusive billionaire very well and hadn’t had much contact with the big boss, other than occasionally shaking hands and chatting when Henry would come into the manager’s office before a game or say hello from the owner’s box next to the dugout. (Henry usually watched from his box upstairs, where his computer was more handy.)

The late-night missive from Henry was warm and caring.

“We were scuffling, and he said he was worried about me,” remembered Francona. “He wanted to know if I was feeling okay. I got it late at night, in my hotel room after another tough loss, and it really made me feel good. It was a nice gesture. It didn’t come across as fake, more like, ‘Hey, I hope you can sleep. I hope you’re okay.’”

Henry had a nice ritual of visiting with any Fenway fan who was struck by a foul ball, but otherwise he rarely interacted face to face. Like stat guru Bill James, the Red Sox owner found optimum comfort in front of the keyboard. Inanimate objects never pushed back.

John Henry was born on September 13, 1949, in Quincy, Illinois, and his family moved to Forrest City, Arkansas, when he was a small child. By his own admission, he was a loner as a young boy. He grew up on a farm and his recreation was listening to Harry Caray’s St. Louis Cardinals broadcasts on the radio. Henry went to his first Cardinals game at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis when he was ten, while his dad was being treated for a brain tumor in a St. Louis hospital. After graduating from high school, Henry enrolled in a succession of California colleges, but never graduated. He spent much of his youth writing music and playing bass in his band, Elysian Fields. When his dad died in 1975, Henry moved back to Arkansas and ran the family soybean farm. In his late twenties, he took to studying commodities, and he started John W. Henry & Co., offering managed futures funds, when he was 31. The company tracked prices and identified market trends. It was all about numbers. And it was wildly successful. Within ten years, Henry had enough money to consider buying his own baseball team. Instead of buying the Kansas City Royals (by this time Henry was a Californian, and he didn’t think he could move back to middle America), he moved to Boca Raton, Florida, and bought into the West Palm Beach Tropics, who were part of the Senior Professional Baseball Association. The Tropics were managed by Dick Williams. After one season with the Tropics, Henry bought a 1 percent share in George Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees. Then he bought his own big league team. From 1998 through 2001, Henry was chairman and sole owner of the Florida Marlins. He was frustrated that he was never able to get a stadium built in southern Florida. In 2001, hemorrhaging money and unable to get his new ballpark, Henry looked into moving the Marlins or buying the Angels of Southern California.

The Red Sox were for sale in the autumn of 2001. John Harrington, keeper of the Yawkey Trust, was mulling offers from as many as six groups when Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino inadvertently aligned.

The unlikely trio came together because Henry wasn’t able to buy the Angels, Werner (a former owner of the San Diego Padres) didn’t have the means to buy the Red Sox, and Lucchino was looking for a new gig after a nasty split with John Moores, his partner in San Diego.

The 2001 purchase of the Red Sox got its unlikely start when Werner partnered with Les Otten, a charming businessman who had made and lost a fortune in New England ski resorts. Werner was an accomplished television producer with
The Cosby Show, Roseanne,
and
That 70s Show
on his résumé. Born to wealth and educated at Harvard, Werner experienced a failed tenure as owner of the San Diego Padres in the early ’90s. He’d been the mastermind behind Roseanne Barr’s crotch-grabbing national anthem, and while he owned the Padres he was cited by the
Dallas Morning News
as “the single-most hated man in Southern California.” According to Seth Mnookin’s
Feeding the Monster,
“Werner used to beep his horn at a heckler holding a ‘Honk If You Hate Tom Werner’ sign at the entrance to the Padres stadium in order to avoid detection.” Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was a big fan of Tom Werner’s.

Werner and Otten stepped forward first when Harrington put the Red Sox up for sale in the winter of 2000–2001, but it was quickly apparent that they didn’t have enough money. With the likes of cable billionaire Charles Dolan and Boston business tycoons Joe O’Donnell and Steve Karp stepping forward as well, Werner and Otten needed help. Werner knew Lucchino from their days together with the Padres, and he asked Lucchino to join him with the Red Sox bid. Lucchino quickly sized up the situation. It was obvious there wasn’t enough money. Ever the facilitator, Lucchino brought Henry to Boston, even though Henry and Werner had never met.

“I told Larry I was only interested if I could be the lead investor,” said Henry. “That’s how it happened.”

Henry flew to California and met with Werner at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills. Henry demanded, and got, total control. He was bringing the money.

The Sox were awarded to the Henry group for a purchase price of $700 million. The package included the Sox franchise, Fenway Park, and the lucrative New England Sports Network (NESN).

Selig, who knew and trusted Henry, Werner, and Lucchino, brokered the transaction. Rather than take a chance on outlier Dolan (the highest bidder) or local favorites O’Donnell and Karp (who wanted to build a new ballpark near Boston’s waterfront), Selig awarded the team to the Henry group. The attorney general of Massachusetts was among many who termed the transaction a “bag job,” but nobody tells Major League Baseball what to do.

A few months after the transaction was formalized, Selig denied all involvement, telling a
Boston Globe
reporter, “I had nothing to do with any of that,” then adding, “but someday you’ll thank me for it.”

Within the walls of old Fenway, the roles of the new owners were defined immediately. Lucchino would be club president and CEO and run the team on a daily basis. Werner would serve as “chairman,” overseeing the club’s television operation and spending much of his time feeling “marginalized.” Henry would be the principal owner, the only vote that counted.

“John was great to me,” said Francona. “He’d stick his head in my office and say hello before games sometimes. He wasn’t a real hands-on people person. When you own the team, you have a right to do whatever you want. He’d bring people into my office all the time. Tom liked to bring people in the clubhouse, and that got to be a point of contention a little bit because it was often women who would be with him. The players were a little uneasy. I didn’t make a point of going out there to meet them all the time, probably because I was hoping they would leave. The only times I saw Larry was if we were having a weather issue. He would come down to talk about it. That’s a tough time. When there’s a weather issue, I’ve got the starting pitcher sticking his head in my door and he’s pissed. Everybody’s on point and everybody’s ready to go. There’s some anxiety going on. And that’s generally when I’d see Larry, so it could get a little tense.

“John, Tom, Larry, me—we all wanted the same thing. I just wanted all of them to know that I was doing what I could do to help us win as many games as possible. I didn’t want them to think I was being stubborn, and sometimes that was frustrating. Sometimes that was a hard message to send.”

Everyone knew there was tension between mentor Lucchino and protégé Epstein. Epstein bristled at the notion that he was Lucchino’s creation and was uncomfortable with the number of Sox employees who’d migrated from San Diego with Lucchino. Many of them had been with the Padres when Theo was handing out press notes and didn’t yet have his driver’s license.

Francona knew none of the Lucchino-Epstein history and didn’t care. He didn’t go looking for Henry or Werner either.

“I made a choice early on that I was answering to Theo,” said Francona. “I think John was doing the same thing, going through Theo to communicate with me. When Theo would ask me about some specific decision or strategy, I sometimes sensed it was coming from John, and I’d tease Theo about that, and he’d say, ‘Yeah.’ Whenever John did send me an email and I wrote back, I’d always tell Theo. Everybody knew I was going through him on everything, and that made things simpler. There was a little bit of tension with Larry and Theo, and it was easier for me to stay out of it.”

The night of Thursday, July 1, in Yankee Stadium was one of the most important nights of the 2004 season. Nearing the midpoint of their season, the Sox were seven and a half games behind the Yankees, trying to avoid a three-game sweep in the Bronx. They had suffered an excruciating defeat in the second game of the series when the Yankees rallied for two runs in the seventh and two more in the eighth. A Nomar throwing error was the key play in the eighth, and this came one night after Garciaparra made two errors in the Yankees’ 11–3 win in the series opener.

The season was not going well for Nomar, who had developed a serious Achilles tendon problem. He was still angry at the front office for attempting to trade him and replace him with Alex Rodriguez. He was fretting about his next contract. And he was turning into a defensive liability, which did not go unnoticed by Theo Epstein and his young men in baseball ops.

The root of Nomar’s Achilles tendon injury was shrouded in mystery. He’d slumped at the end of 2003, batting .170 in September. There was a rumor that he’d bruised his right heel playing soccer over the winter, but others believed that Garciaparra sustained the injury working out in Scottsdale. Nomar had a story about a batting practice ball that bounced off his heel. Wiseguy reporters thought it was his ego that was bruised.

When Garciaparra woke up on the morning of July 1—the first day of the last month of his Red Sox career—he decided he was not going to play the third and final game of the series. He was sitting out one of every three games during this stretch of his comeback, and he opted not to change the routine even though the Sox were scuffling. Committing three errors in two games and seeing the image of himself booting a ball under the headline “April Fools” on the back page of the
Daily News
did nothing to improve his mood.