Francona: The Red Sox Years (20 page)

Busch Stadium was only a few blocks from the Adams Mark Hotel, where the team was staying. Papa Tito and the rest of the Francona family took a Sox charter bus back to the hotel. Terry grabbed 14-year-old Leah and walked out of the ballpark through a loading dock, avoiding hundreds of Sox fans who had made the pilgrimage to St. Louis.

St. Louis fans could not have been more accommodating to the Boston road-trippers. In the late innings of Game 4, Busch Stadium gate officers opened up the ballpark for ticketless Sox fans hovering on the streets. Given the green light, hundreds of New Englanders poured into the National League ballpark to be with their team for the long-awaited moment. It was an uncommon gesture of grace and sportsmanship, and the generosity of the hosts carried out into the streets of St. Louis when Terry and Leah Francona made their way back to the Sox hotel.

“I love St. Louis fans,” said the manager. “They all look like they just showered. If they ask you for an autograph and you say, ‘No,’ they say, ‘Thank you,’ anyway.”

The scene was more chaotic once the father and daughter walked into the lobby of the Adams Mark.

“The hotel was a mob scene,” said the manager. “You couldn’t get through the lobby to pay your incidentals. Everybody was running late. When I made it to the bus, I sat for a long time, and there were fans outside almost rocking the bus a little. Everybody was happy, but it was late. I finally got off the bus and signed a few autographs. But I was out of gas.”

The Red Sox Delta charter lifted off the ground in St. Louis at 3:22
AM
and landed at Logan Airport at 6:30 AM—“by dawn’s early light,” in the words of team publicist and choreographer Dr. Charles Steinberg.

Hundreds of airport employees and police officers greeted the champs at Logan. Players and their families boarded buses, and the caravan made tracks for the Ted Williams tunnel. When they emerged from underground, helicopters hovered above the caravan and tracked them through the streets of Boston. Francona looked out his window and saw a truck driver standing on his rig, removing his cap and repeatedly bending at the waist while the bus passed. The image stayed with him forever. Nobody in Philadelphia ever bowed to make way for the Phillies.

“It was when we landed that I realized what we had done and what it meant,” said the manager. “We couldn’t believe it. I got emotional. There were people coming out of everywhere. How the hell did they know we were coming? First, at the airport, there were the people who come out on the tarmac and pump the gas. Then we got out to the streets, and they stopped traffic for us, and I was feeling guilty, but the traffic wasn’t going anywhere anyway. When we went under bridges, there were people on the overpasses holding signs. It really started to hit me then. It woke me up a little bit.”

Mike Timlin kept his hand-held camera rolling for the whole ride. When Epstein saw Timlin’s finished product, the GM said it reminded him of REM’s video for “Everybody Hurts.”

The parade—and the missing sweatshirts—came two days later.

“I was on the same Duckboat as Terry,” recalled Sox COO Mike Dee. “As we were going from the street to the water, fans were congratulating him and telling him how great he was, and he told them, ‘If not for one stolen base, I’d probably have been fired!’”

“It was cold when we were out there on the river in those boats,” Francona said. “I remember turning to Jack and saying, ‘Man, it’s cold, and I’ve got to take a piss. I wish we’d lost.’”

That was a lie, of course. Francona and his players had just done something nobody’d done in Boston in 86 years.

Talk show bookers called as Idiot Nation shifted into full fury. Francona went on
Conan O’Brien,
seated alongside Eva Longoria. Damon went on
Saturday Night Live
with Eminem and was named one of
People
’s “Sexiest Men Alive.” He told the magazine he did naked pull-ups at home. Ortiz appeared on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Schilling campaigned with President Bush and helped deliver Ohio for the Republicans. Quincy held Derek Lowe Day. Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey read a Red Sox poem into the
Congressional Record.
Senator Ted Kennedy sponsored a resolution that “the Curse of the Bambino” was lifted. The 2004 Red Sox were named
Sports Illustrated
’s “Sportsmen of the Year,” the first time the magazine made the award to an entire team.

Francona signed a $75,000 contract with Metamucil and appeared in a full-page newspaper ad under the headline, “Congratulations Boston on your World Championship. Let’s hope it becomes a regular thing.”

In the middle of the post-Series euphoria, Francona’s phone rang, and a reporter asked about Kevin Millar saying the Sox had been drinking shots in the clubhouse during the playoffs.

“I got to enjoy our victory celebration for about a half-hour,” said the manager. “All of a sudden my phone’s blowing up, and I’m getting messages about Millar talking about guys drinking Jack Daniels. I called Millar and said, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? We win the World Series, and I can’t even enjoy it. Clean it up and keep me the fuck out of it.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s where we have a little problem, because I told everybody you were right in the middle of it.’ Then I hear from Johnny Damon, and he says, ‘Hey, Tito, I’m going on
Letterman
tonight. I’ll fix it.’ I was thinking I’d be the only guy to win a World Series, then get fired during the off-season.”

In one of the few quiet moments as he ran around the country doubling his salary with speaking engagements, Francona paused and thought about how things perhaps needed to change.

“There was a lot that went on that made me uncomfortable,” he said. “You don’t want a Boy Scout troop. When those guys got out on the field, they played and they picked each other up, but I was always making adjustments because we had so much going on all the time. I told Theo, ‘We can do this better, and still win.’”