Francona: The Red Sox Years (17 page)

Sitting at his L-shaped desk, Francona picked up the landline phone and punched “0.”

Making a call, any call, from the manager’s desk of a major league ballpark can be an ordeal. After the Black Sox scandal of 1919 almost killed big league baseball in the early 1920s, strict rules were put into place regarding phone calls to and from major league clubhouses. Typically, Fenway was among the slowest to change. Sox owner Tom Yawkey had hired Helen Robinson to operate the Fenway switchboard in 1941, and she was the guardian at the gate for more than a half-century. Yawkey ordered all calls to go through the switchboard, and the order was never rescinded. Helen was gone by 2004, but the telephone situation was unchanged. It didn’t seem to matter that managers and players had access to cell phones. Phone calls within the ballpark remained decidedly old-school. It was the glacial pace of change in baseball. Francona considered himself lucky that he wasn’t using a rotary device.

“The whole phone situation throughout baseball is amazing,” he said. “I lived through it in Cincinnati with Marge Schott. Somebody’s wife was having a baby late one night, and the switchboard guy went home cuz it was after midnight and there were no calls coming in or going out. It’s the Pete Rose thing. In most clubhouses, the manager can’t make a call. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve got a cell phone sitting right next to me. If I wanted to place a bet, I could place a bet on my cell phone. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be in my office in another park on the road and I would try to call Theo, and the lady at the switchboard would be like, ‘Who are you calling?’ and I’d be like, ‘We’re going to make a trade in about five minutes, put me through!’ In most of the ballparks you have to tell the operator who you are calling and log it in. It’s not worth it. It’s silly. At some parks it’s impossible. In Chicago, you cannot make a call. You have to sign your life away. It’s silly.”

Some Yankee players were already showered and dressed for a cushy day off in Boston by the time Francona got through to Torre.

“Joe was pissed, and I don’t blame him,” said Francona.

The phone call put things in motion for a pivotal day in Sox history. The fireworks started in the third inning when young Bronson Arroyo hit A-Rod with a pitch. Rodriguez stepped back, yelled at Arroyo, then noticed Varitek getting up in his face. It escalated quickly, and the photo of Varitek shoving his catcher’s mitt into A-Rod’s grill wound up on the cover of Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s best-selling book
Faithful.
It stands as the iconic image of the 2004 season. It represents the day the Sox wanted to play a game that the Yankees did not want to play, the day the Boston captain got into the face of A-Rod, and a day when the Sox beat the Yankees, 11–10, on Bill Mueller’s two-run homer off Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth. The game featured 27 hits, nine relief pitchers, four Red Sox errors (one another by Nomar), and five ejections.

“It was going to be a tough day to play to begin with,” said Epstein. “We had our seventh starter, Arroyo, going. We were playing bad. It was the type of game where, if there was a gray area, you just bang it. The players, I think, felt management was trying to bang the game because we couldn’t win that day. That created a burr under their saddle. They needed something to rebel against. It was like, ‘Fuck this, we’re going to play today and we’re going to win today.’”

“I saw most of that from the clubhouse because I got thrown out of that game pretty early,” said Francona. “Everybody thinks we stand in the tunnel, but at Fenway in those days you were doing yourself a disservice to stand in the runway. You couldn’t see the game. So I went to the clubhouse and watched with the clubhouse guys.”

He kept his lineup card with him. It was a Francona tradition. When he got tossed, he took the lineup card off the wall and monitored from behind the scenes.

“I remember thinking,
If we turn it around, this will be a game we point to.
But we didn’t really turn it around. We were still big and slow, and we didn’t catch fire for a couple more weeks.”

Until a week after Nomar was traded.

The last week of Nomar’s Boston career was messy. When the Sox were in Baltimore, three days before the July 31 deadline, Nomar met with Francona and told his manager that he’d be needing more time off and might have to go on the disabled list. Francona picked up his phone, dialed Epstein, and gave him the news. Epstein contacted Henry and Lucchino, who were in their Fenway offices upstairs, and asked them to come to the baseball operations offices. When he gathered the bosses, he called Francona and had him repeat Nomar’s request.

“He was struggling more than we thought,” said Francona. “He was frustrated. The whole Boston thing. He was getting criticized a lot. It was something that wasn’t going to get better, and I wanted Theo to hear what I heard.”

Three days later, while the Sox were getting ready for a night game at the Metrodome against the Twins, Nomar was traded to the Cubs as part of a four-team deal. It was a long, uncomfortable day. There was no manager’s office in the visitors’ clubhouse of the Metrodome, only a small room that managers and coaches had to share, and cell reception was poor. Francona had to keep trudging up and down the formidable steps to the field to get reception to talk to Theo. It was difficult for the physically challenged manager.

“Imagine if we couldn’t have made that trade because the manager has a blood clot,” he joked.

When the deal finally went down, Francona asked his coaches to vacate the tiny office, and he called Garciaparra in.

“Nomar, we traded you to the Cubs,” said Francona, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the office air conditioner. “You need to call Theo. Jack [McCormick] has a ticket for you to get a plane out of here.”

The manager and shortstop exchanged a quick hug, then Garciaparra exited the clubhouse to make his call. After the call was made, Garciaparra came back into the room, said his good-byes, and hugged everybody, including a few media members.

In exchange for Garciaparra, the Sox received flossy Twins first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz and Montreal shortstop Orlando Cabrera. In a separate deal, Epstein also acquired speedy Dave Roberts from the Dodgers.

The young GM was nervous after making the blockbuster deal. Fearful of what he might see in the Sunday morning Boston papers, he took an Ambien and went to bed.

There was no immediate bounce from the dramatic deals. The Red Sox lost four of their first six games after the trades, including the opener of a weekend set in Detroit.

“A lot of people thought we were off and running after the July 24 game, or after the trade,” said Epstein. “No. We played under .500 for the next two weeks.”

On Saturday, August 7, Francona and Mills were in a cab, en route to Detroit’s Comerica Park, when the manager’s cell phone rang. It was Lucchino, and the CEO was hot. He kept saying, “This is not acceptable.” The Sox had dealt an iconic ballplayer, putting Theo and management on the hot seat, and Lucchino did not like the way the ball club was responding. They’d been playing .500 ball for more than three months. At least four times during the rant, Lucchino told Francona that things were “not acceptable.”

When Lucchino was done, Francona clicked off his phone, turned to Mills, and sighed.

“What was that about?” asked Mills. “You didn’t have much to say.”

“I don’t know, Millsie,” said the manager. “All I know is that apparently what we’re doing right now is not acceptable.”

CHAPTER 7

T
HE RED SOX WERE
the best team in baseball in August, September, and October. The acquisitions of Cabrera, Mientkiewicz, and Roberts did exactly what the Sox brass had hoped. Before the trades, the Sox were big and slow and led the league in surrendering unearned runs. The deadline deals made them more nimble and defensively tighter. Francona started to substitute at the end of games when the Sox were leading. Mientkiewicz would come in to play first base, and Pokey Reese would come in to play second. Players accepted their roles. The Sox went 40–15 after Lucchino’s “this is not acceptable” rant—21–7 in August. They led the majors in runs, slugging percentage, and on-base percentage.

“We got on a roll,” said Francona. “There was a definite difference. We were able to use our strength, which was our offense. And when we’d get a lead, we could get guys out and get our defense in, and it worked great. Using Kapler, Pokey Reese, and Mientkiewicz late in games made us really good defensively. We ended up playing everybody, so everybody was involved and that gave us a little personality, and it all came together.”

But there were still a few tough nights against the Yankees, including Friday, September 24, at Fenway Park.

It was the final home weekend of the regular season, one last chance to play the Yankees before an expected rematch in the American League Championship Series. Pedro Martinez got the Friday night start and had thrown 101 pitches when he took the mound with a 4–3 lead at the start of the eighth. When Hideki Matsui led off the inning with a game-tying homer, Francona never moved. Then came a Bernie Williams double and a Ruben Sierra single before the manager finally lifted his ace.

Fenway fans booed. It wasn’t any better across the Charles River at Quincy House, where high school senior Alyssa Francona, being recruited by Harvard, was watching the game with a large group of Harvard student-athletes.

“Someone said something pretty mean, so they got me out of there,” said Alyssa, who wound up playing softball at the University of North Carolina.

“I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy,” Pedro said after the 6–4 loss.

Francona defended his non-move and deflected all reminders of Grady Little and the recent past.

Waiting for Francona in the manager’s office, Epstein was furious.

“We fucked up,” muttered the young general manager.

“I could understand the irony there,” said Francona. “But for me it was completely different. It was a regular-season game and we were trying to keep our bullpen in order.”

The Red Sox recovered nicely, winning four straight, and seven of their last nine games, as they prepared to play the Angels in the American League Division Series.

Even though he’d never managed in the postseason, Francona was relaxed.

“I didn’t know how I was going to feel, but I was surprisingly at ease,” Francona said later. “We had prepared so extensively, I felt good about things. That doesn’t mean you’re going to win, but I knew what I was going to do. I didn’t think there were going to be any surprises.”

There were no surprises in round one. The Sox swept the Angels, winning the Game 3 finale on a tenth-inning walk-off blast by Ortiz at Fenway.

“Those boys are winning the World Series,” predicted Angel veteran Darin Erstad.

The big surprise came when the Sox lost the first three games of the ALCS against the Yankees, dropping Game 3, 19–8, on Saturday night at Fenway. The humiliating loss featured 22 Yankee hits, including four homers, two by Hideki Matsui who went 5–6. The Yankees led 11–6 after four innings, and 17–6 in the seventh. Francona used six pitchers, including Tim Wakefield, who gave up his Game 4 start by volunteering for three and a third innings of mop-up middle relief. In their private suite upstairs on the third-base side of home plate, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino opened a bottle of Glenlivet and wondered what happened to the dominant team they’d built.

“We had been steamrolling people,” said Francona. “And there we were wondering what the hell hit us. Everything was coming apart at the seams. We got embarrassed. But in a lot of ways that’s when I thought we were doing our best work. We ran out of pitching in Game 3, and everybody thought we were giving up, but we were doing just the opposite. The object that night was to keep Mike Timlin and Keith Foulke fresh. We were scrambling, trying to figure out how to keep the series going. Halfway through Game 3, we were already thinking about Game 4. When Wake came up the steps with his glove and volunteered to pitch, I was like, ‘Here we go. He’s going to eat up some innings, and we’re going to save our guys and be ready for Game 4.’ It kept me going. At that point it was all about how we were going to move forward.”

When the four-hour-and-20-minute debacle ended, Francona hopped into a golf cart to make his way across the field to the makeshift playoff interview room, which was accessible through the garage door along the wall down the left-field line. As the cart rolled along the Fenway warning track toward the left-field corner, the manager was pelted with beer cups, popcorn boxes, and insults tossed from the stands. It reminded him of a long-ago night in the Dominican Republic when fans banged on his dressing room door after a game in which he pinch-hit for local favorite Tony Pena.

Speaking to the media, Francona stayed the course. He said the Sox would not try to think about winning four straight games.

“We’re going to show up tomorrow and try to play one pitch at a time, one inning at a time,” he said.

When he returned to his clubhouse, Francona was asked to break up a fight in the family room, where Shonda Schilling and Michelle Mangum (Damon’s fiancée) were in each other’s face over some “lucky” scarves that Shonda had brought in for the players’ wives. Mangum hadn’t been wearing her scarf, made a sarcastic remark about the scarves not doing any good, and was rebuked by Ms. Schilling, who suggested that Damon might not be 1–13 in the series if Mangum had been wearing her scarf. That was it: go time.

All hope . . . all dignity . . . seemed lost.

Reeling from the hideous beating and the reality that the promising season was almost over, Francona drove Jacque and the kids back to the Brookline Courtyard Marriott. As the car maneuvered down Beacon Street in Brookline, 14-year-old Leah recounted her tale of the catfight in the family room. Leah wasn’t allowed to repeat some of the language she’d heard. Everyone in the car giggled.

“It was hard not to laugh,” said the manager. “It was like some Greek tragedy. It’s not that you don’t care, but man, we’re trying to win a World Series, and this is what we end up talking about. It seemed like we couldn’t even lose in a good way!”