Francona: The Red Sox Years (19 page)

After the implosion of 2003, Grady Little talked about some of his players not wanting the ball in the big moment, players thinking about the franchise’s past failures. Schilling was the antidote to that. He wanted the ball in the big moment, and he’d pledged to end the 86-year-old curse.

“He wanted to stick it up their ass,” said Francona.

The manager tweaked the Sox pregame routine before Game 6, granting players permission to skip on-field batting practice and hit in cages under the stands. It was Millar’s idea. Millar didn’t want his teammates to have to watch any more of the incessant Yankeeography videos celebrating Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Munson, and the rest of the Pinstripes who’d tortured Boston for eight decades.

Millar had another idea, one involving paper cups and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Just a sip to get warm and take the edge off. It became a celebrated ritual when Millar talked about it in television interviews after the Red Sox won the World Series, and the irony was lost on no one seven years later when Francona’s firing triggered a series of stories regarding starting pitchers drinking beer in the clubhouse during games in the disappointing season of 2011.

“I saw the Jack in New York,” confessed Epstein. “Millar came up to me and offered me a cup, and I said, ‘I don’t see that shit,’ and turned and walked away.”

“I never knew about it until the World Series,” said Francona.

Schilling didn’t have any Jack in his veins when he took the ball on the Yankee Stadium mound. With blood seeping into his sanitary sock, he pitched seven innings, allowing one run on four hits with zero walks and four strikeouts. Bellhorn’s three-run homer off Jon Lieber in the fourth inning gave Schilling all the runs he needed in a 4–2 Sox victory. The Yankees never attempted to bunt on one-legged Schilling.

After the Game 6 win, late at night, Ortiz went to a restaurant in Queens with his extended family. A year earlier, in New York before the infamous Pedro-Grady Game, Big Papi had stayed in his room all night, fretting about Game 7. He barely slept. In ’04, Ortiz rejected the safe route and went out on the town before the final game of the greatest comeback in sports.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to stress out this time,’” recalled Ortiz. “We went to my favorite place. My family and friends, we stayed until two in the morning, eating and drinking. There were Yankee fans by the exit, and when I walked by them they make jokes about how I wouldn’t get any hits in the game the next day. I told them I was going to go deep in my first at-bat against Kevin Brown.”

The Sox skipped batting practice and sipped Jack Daniels again before Game 7. Pedro Martinez ducked his head into Francona’s office and offered to pitch in relief. The panicking Yankees summoned all their ghosts. Yogi Berra gave a pregame pep talk in the ancient locker room, the nervous hosts made space for Red Sox owners in the Babe Ruth Suite, and Bucky Dent was brought in for the ceremonial first pitch.

The Yanks would have been better off leaving Dent on the mound to face Damon at the start of the game because broken-down Kevin Brown had a bad back and nothing else. With a few drops of Jack burning in their bellies, the scalding Sox scored six runs in the first two innings, sucking the blood from Steinbrenner’s face and removing all drama from the outcome. True to his word, Ortiz homered off Brown in his first at-bat. Damon hit two homers, including a grand slam. Lowe, wearing spikes purchased at a nearby sporting goods store because he’d forgotten to pack his game shoes, stopped the Yankees on one hit through six innings.

Leading 8–1 after six, Francona brought Pedro in to pitch the seventh. Fans scratched their heads. The Sox owners looked at one another and wondered.

“Pedro had come to me before the game and said he wanted to pitch out of the bullpen,” said Francona. “I was thrilled that he was ‘buying in’ to what we were doing. I also wanted to keep Bronson [Arroyo] behind him because Bronson was one of the guys that was fresh. I knew what I wanted to do. I wasn’t as concerned about the beginning of the inning as I was about the end of the inning. I knew Bronson could put the fire out if we needed him. When Millsie asked me what I was doing, I said I just wanted to get the crowd involved.”

Martinez quickly gave up a pair of runs, and Yankee Stadium came to life (“Who’s your daddy?”) for the first time all night.

On the bench, Mills looked at Francona and said, “Way to go! I think you accomplished your goal.”

The Yankees cut the lead to 8–3, but Pedro got through the inning and the Sox kept scoring in the eighth and ninth. At one minute after midnight, with Alan Embree on the mound for Boston, Ruben Sierra grounded to Sox sub second baseman Pokey Reese for the final out.

The Red Sox are still the only team in major league baseball history to win a seven-game series after trailing three games to zero.

While the Idiots of ’04 were soaking the visitors’ clubhouse with champagne, Francona sat at his desk and answered a call from Torre. Tito Francona’s long-ago teammate congratulated Terry Francona, then asked to speak with Wakefield, the man who’d given up the crushing home run to Boone one year earlier. Wakefield was a veteran who commanded respect in both dugouts, and Torre was among those who’d admired the way the knuckleballer handled himself in the 2003 ALCS, especially after giving up his start in Game 4. Francona waded into his chaotic clubhouse, found the veteran knuckleballer, and brought him into his office to speak with the manager of the vanquished Yankees.

“Time to play Finland now,” said Theo Epstein.

The young GM was barely old enough to remember “The Miracle on Ice,” but he had a great sense of history. America’s 1980 hockey gold medal represents one of the great sports stories of all time (topped perhaps only by the ’04 Red Sox), but it’s often forgotten that the USA victory over the USSR was not the gold medal game. After Al Michaels asked America, “Do you believe in miracles?” the USA skaters had to beat Finland in order to secure the gold.

In 2004 the St. Louis Cardinals were Finland. They were the team standing in the way.

Boston fans were happy the Sox were playing St. Louis. The Cardinals are a signature National League franchise. St Louis beat the Red Sox in a seven-game World Series in 1946 and again in 1967. New England baseball fans were in no position to be choosy, but winning a World Series against the Cardinals had more meaning than beating the Houston Astros or the Colorado Rockies.

The Cards were not only traditional, they were beatable. St. Louis won 105 games in 2004 and had three players (Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, and Jim Edmonds) who finished in the top five in the 2004 National League MVP vote. But the Sox felt they could beat the Cardinals. On Friday night, October 22, while most of the Sox front-office employees ate and drank at a lavish World Series gala at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Francona gathered with his coaches, his catchers, Epstein, and several scouts and members of the baseball operations department in a conference room outside Theo’s office. They went over a scouting report that had been prepared by a team of scouts and baseball ops executives, including Dave Jauss, who’d played baseball with Dan Duquette at Amherst and came to the Sox as part of the Duquette regime. Jauss and his men were confident that the Red Sox would be able to handle St. Louis pitching. The report was very specific regarding how to pitch to Pujols (curveballs breaking back over the inner half of the plate). The reports were spectacular.

Two months after the World Series, when Francona learned that Jauss hadn’t received a full playoff share, he sent him a personal check for $20,000 for Christmas.

“Dave Jauss busted his ass for us, and I wanted him to know I appreciated it,” said Francona. “Those reports were great.”

Epstein agreed.

“When the World Series began, Theo was a completely different person,” John Henry said. “He was so confident. I have never seen a man in the game of baseball that was as confident as Theo was.”

The Sox won Game 1, 11–9, on a two-run homer off Pesky’s Pole by Bellhorn. Sox fans were rough on Bellhorn throughout the 2004 season. He was a player who seemed to do only three things at the plate: walk, strike out, or hit a homer. He was the model Francona player, and the manager stuck with him when others would have abandoned him.

Game 2, the final Fenway game of the season, was a 6–2 victory, another spectacular outing by bloody-sock Schilling (six innings, four hits, no earned runs).

The Red Sox made four errors in the first two games, but it didn’t matter. Boston did not trail for a single inning in the entire World Series.

Game 3 was played in St. Louis on Tuesday, October 26. It was the first game the Red Sox had played in Busch Stadium since the fifth game of the 1967 World Series, when Jim Lonborg beat the Cardinals, 3–1. It was a return to the scene of Francona’s worst baseball moment, when he blew up his knee in 1982. The game was played on the 18th anniversary of Bill Buckner’s fateful error in the 1986 World Series, and it turned out to be the final game that Pedro Martinez pitched in a Red Sox uniform.

It was in the visitors’ clubhouse at Busch that Francona saw the Jack Daniels ritual for the first time.

“I was already in the dugout when they were doing that the first few times,” recalled the manager. “But before Game 3 in St. Louis, I came back into the clubhouse because I forgot something, and I saw them all in the middle of the room, toasting. I saw what they were doing, and I was laughing, thinking it was funny, and they were like, ‘Hey, you’ve got to have one.’ Well, I didn’t ever think it was real. So I took a drink and I was like, ‘Goddamn! What the fuck.’ I walked by and saw Theo in my office, and I said, ‘Theo, I wasn’t here.’”

Pedro finished his Sox career brilliantly, hurling seven innings of three-hit shutout baseball in a 4–1 victory. The key play was a baserunning gaffe by Cardinals starting pitcher Jeff Suppan. Manny hit a homer and gunned down Larry Walker at home plate in the first inning.

Manny was on his way to World Series MVP honors, but not without providing another memorable “Manny being Manny” moment.

With the Red Sox leading, 3–0, in the fourth inning of the fourth and final game, Manny stepped to the plate with two out and nobody aboard and got into an argument with St. Louis rookie catcher Yadier Molina. Cardinal starter Jason Marquis stepped off the rubber, and play was halted as Ramirez and Molina got into one another’s face. Spanish swears were flying. Home plate umpire Chuck Meriwether motioned for Francona to come out of the dugout. When the manager arrived at the scene, Meriwether explained that he didn’t speak Spanish and couldn’t understand the core of the argument.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Francona first asked Meriwether. “I don’t speak Spanish either.”

Turning to his slugger, Francona asked, “Manny, what’s this about?”

Ramirez pointed toward Molina and said, “He thinks I’m stealing their signs.”

Francona chuckled, looked at Meriwether, and said, “Chuck, Manny doesn’t even know
our
signs!”

The manager looked at Manny for verification. “You don’t know our signs, do you, Manny?”

“No,” Ramirez said, grinning sheepishly.

Case closed. Play ball.

It was probably gamesmanship by the Cardinals, but it didn’t work. At the end of October in 2004, nothing worked against the Boston Red Sox. It felt like they could play every day until Christmas and never trail.

Game 4 was a perfect example. Even when the Sox made a mistake, it worked to their advantage. Batting with the bases loaded and two out in the third, Trot Nixon worked the count to 3–0 and didn’t notice when third-base coach Dale Sveum flashed the “take” sign. It was not a complex signal system. Francona’s take sign was Sveum holding up his right index finger.

“With the group we had, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible,” said the manager. “I always worry that you’re going to outsmart your own self. Sometimes simple is better. If you’re outsmarting the other team and yourself, it doesn’t work.”

Nixon, one of the few disciplined, short-haired members of the ’04 Sox, missed the sign.

“Trot didn’t even look down at Dale,” said Francona. “He was all locked in, probably had 12 Red Bulls going. So when he swung right through I went, ‘Holy shit.’ He hit a bullet off the wall in center.”

A two-run triple.

“When he came into the dugout, I said, ‘Nice swing. You know you swung through the take,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ I said, ‘Well, you hit the ball off the wall, and that’s great. Let’s just have one story here. You had the 3–0 green light, right?”

“Right.”

An hour later, Nixon, unable to remember the story they’d concocted, told the world that he missed the take sign.

The final out was a one-hopper back to the mound by Edgar Renteria. Foulke gloved the bouncing ball, trotted a few steps toward first, then made an underhand toss to Doug Mientkiewicz and the party was on.

Francona did not charge the field with the rest of the Red Sox bench contingent. He raised both arms triumphantly, turned to his left, and embraced Mills. The manager avoided the chaos on the field. It was the players’ moment.

Francona’s family was sitting in the lower stands on the third-base side; his dad, his stepmom, Jacque, Nick, Leah, and Jamie. (Alyssa was on her college recruiting tour.) A Red Sox official rushed to their side and escorted them past Sox fans who’d gathered behind the dugout and onto the field. One of the Francona kids got ahold of a bottle of champagne and sprayed Jacque. They never got to Terry. They were led down the dugout steps and into the clubhouse, where Tito looked into his son’s tear-filled eyes and said, “Your mother was looking down on you tonight.”

The manager went into his office and closed the door and had a moment.

“I was tired,” Francona said. “I enjoyed watching everybody celebrating, but I wasn’t in much of it. I was a little sticky from the champagne, so I took a shower. When Schilling made that toast in the clubhouse, I wasn’t even around. The first time I saw it was on TV. We had to make a decision about whether we were going to stay the night or go home. After the celebration went on for a little while, I said to Jack, ‘Let’s go home tonight. We’ll let these guys blow off steam a little longer, then go back to the hotel and pack up.’ But I had no idea what it was going to be like.”