Francona: The Red Sox Years (25 page)

“I was really happy and honored that he gave me the shirt,” said Francona. “But I was also thinking,
This doesn’t bode well for us having him stay here.
”

Damon wound up signing with the Yankees in December. His “defection” brought the wrath of Red Sox Nation down on Damon, and it would have been the biggest story of Boston’s baseball winter had it not happened seven weeks after the Halloween night resignation of Theo Epstein.

CHAPTER 9

T
ERRY FRANCONA WAS HAVING
trouble walking by the end of the 2005 season. His right knee—the one that exploded on the warning track in St. Louis in 1982—was constantly swollen, causing him considerable pain. Attending parent-teacher conferences at Brookline High School with Jacque in early October, he had trouble making the rounds from classroom to classroom. He scheduled knee replacement surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital.

There had been a funny moment at the end of the season. On the day players were packing their belongings and getting plane tickets home—the day Johnny Damon walked into his office with a parting gift—Francona got a check for $50 from Red Sox traveling secretary Jack McCormick. Teams are obligated to pay players’ and managers’ transportation costs back home after the season, and this was the first time Francona was not driving or flying some distance after the season. His family’s new house was less than five miles from Fenway Park.

“I guess they figured $50 would cover the flight to Brookline,” he joked.

Living near Fenway had its advantages during the off-season. In order to stay on top of the ball club’s off-season activities, Francona no longer had to fly into Boston and check into the Brookline Courtyard Marriott. In the fall of 2005, he was at the ballpark enough to sense mounting tension between baseball operations (which by this time had been moved to the Fenway basement) and the CEO’s office on the third floor. The Theo Epstein–Larry Lucchino situation was at a critical mass.

The story of Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein is as old as the Bible, and by October 2005 the protégé was ready to break free of the mentor. Theo wanted to build a farm system that would make the Red Sox perennial contenders with homegrown talent. Epstein wanted “a scouting and player development machine.” He was okay if the Sox regressed for a year in order to make things better in the long run. Lucchino, meanwhile, wanted to win every year. As a franchise, the Red Sox had no tolerance for rebuilding, even for a half-season. The Sox CEO wanted to stand at the podium with the World Series trophy every year.

Some of the Epstein-Lucchino disagreements were rooted in the core of their job descriptions. The GM acted in the interests of baseball operations. The CEO had his eye on the Red Sox brand and the bottom line. Sometimes decisions had to be made that took away from the effort on the field—like playing games when it would have been better to wait and reschedule, or making an out-of-the-way spring trip to Arizona when it would have been better to send the team directly from spring training to New York for the opener.

In the fall of 2005, Epstein’s contract expired, and his salary was a point of contention. He was making $350,000, but everybody knew the Sox had offered Billy Beane $2.5 million per year back in 2002.

Trust had become a major issue between the two men. During the summer of ’05, John Henry killed a deal for Colorado outfielder Larry Bigbie. The deal was squashed by Sox ownership at the request of Epstein. He thought he had a better deal to make with Arizona. When national baseball reporters got wind of the broken trade with Colorado, Lucchino was colored as a bully CEO who overruled deals made by his general manager. When it was reported in the October 30
Sunday Boston Globe
that killing the Bigbie deal had been Theo’s idea all along, some would have seen this as a demonstration of a front office working in harmony, but the young GM saw it as a violation of trust. It was the tipping point for Epstein. After 14 years together, he believed Lucchino was using friends in the press to make himself look good . . . at Theo’s expense. Epstein decided to quit.

“Basically, I thought Larry was trying to mess with me, and Larry thought I was trying to mess with him,” Epstein said later.

Epstein resigned October 31, walking out of Fenway Park wearing a gorilla suit.

Lucchino was conspicuously absent at a press conference two days later when a befuddled John Henry said, “Maybe I’m not fit to be the owner of the Boston Red Sox. . . . Did I blow it? Yeah, I feel that way.”

Francona was not there either. He was working out his own strained relationship with Lucchino.

“It was a weird time,” remembered Francona. “Theo had resigned, and Larry called me up to his office. When I got there, our scout Dave Jauss was just leaving. I said hello to Jauss and walked into Larry’s office thinking this was going to be some kind of ‘circle the wagons’ talk. But Larry didn’t even look up from his desk. He just said, ‘I’ve been around a lot of baseball managers, but you, by far, make me the most uncomfortable.’ And I was thinking,
What the fuck?
So I just said, ‘I’ll try to do better.’ But I was stunned. That’s just Larry. If he’s got something on his mind, it just comes out. I walked back downstairs and saw Brian O’Halloran and said, ‘I don’t know if I’ve just been fired, or what. It was the weirdest meeting I’ve ever had.’ It was morbid humor. Theo leaves in the gorilla suit, and then I have this weird meeting with Larry. We were actually kind of laughing about it.

“As much of a shock as Theo leaving was, that time is a little blurry for me because I was getting ready for the knee surgery, and nobody really knew what was going on with the ball club.”

While Epstein toured the world with Pearl Jam, never losing touch with the Sox front office, the Sox were run by a committee of general managers. Jed Hoyer and Ben Cherington were named co-general managers, but there was no attempt to hide the considerable input of veteran Bill Lajoie. Another voice in the chorus was Jeremy Kapstein, a “Lucchino guy” with a reservoir of baseball experience. Sox fans know Kapstein as the man who sits directly behind home plate at every Red Sox home game. Wearing large yellow headphones and a blue windbreaker (no matter how hot it gets), Kapstein gets more television time than Katie Couric. What most fans don’t know is that he once ran the San Diego Padres, was married to the daughter of McDonald’s visionary Ray Kroc, and served as baseball’s most powerful player agent during the seismically shifting 1970s. Jeremy Kapstein, then known as Jerry Kapstein, was the man who advised Sox stars Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Rick Burleson to play hardball with Tom Yawkey after the magical season of 1975. Kapstein was the Scott Boras of his day. He has served as an adviser to Lucchino since the “new owners” bought the Red Sox in 2001.

When Francona had knee replacement surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital on November 21, 2005, one of his first visitors was Jeremy Kapstein.

“It was the strangest thing,” said Francona. “Jeremy was under the impression that he was the next general manager. I was just a day out of surgery, coming out of anesthesia, with the pain pump going, and Jeremy is sitting by my bed telling me how it’s going to be. He was telling me I’d have a special cell phone to get in touch with him. I was in kind of a haze, and the next thing I know he’s handing me a cell phone, and the guy on the other end says, ‘Hey, Terry, it’s Keith Jackson!’ It was Keith Jackson, the old football announcer. I didn’t know what that was about, but after Jeremy left, I called Jed Hoyer and said, ‘Get your ass over here! I just had Jeremy Kapstein in my room, and he thinks he’s going to be the next general manager.’”

O’Halloran and Hoyer went directly to Mass General and told Francona that, to the best of their knowledge, Kapstein was not going to take over as general manager.

The next day, on November 24, in a deal that Kapstein and Lajoie pushed over the objections of some of Epstein’s operatives, the Red Sox acquired Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, and reliever Guillermo Mota for hotshot shortstop prospect Hanley Ramirez, pitcher Anibal Sanchez, Jesus Delgado, and Harvey Garcia. The trade was announced while Theo was en route to South America to join Pearl Jam.

Theo breathed a sigh of relief when he learned that Jon Lester was not in the deal, jokingly telling a reporter that he would have “resigned” if the Sox traded Lester. Ramirez, Sanchez, and Delgado were all holdovers from the Dan Duquette regime.

“I was still in the hospital in a complete haze,” said Francona. “We knew Hanley was going to be really good, but I don’t think any of us thought he was ready to be that player yet. He got much better, quicker than we anticipated. Hanley was a little temperamental. I didn’t see him play much. He’d played in a couple of split-squad games in spring training, but I’d traveled those days and didn’t see him. I would come back and Millsie would say, ‘You got to see this guy. This guy is a man.’ I knew I was thrilled to get Beckett. I was thrilled anytime we got pitching. In my opinion, that’s how you win.”

Lowell was the supposed throw-in. In order to give up Beckett, the Marlins insisted that the Sox take Lowell and the remaining two years of his (four-year, $32 million) contract. The acquisition of Lowell meant switching Kevin Youkilis from third base to first base.

Damon signed a four-year deal ($52 million) with the Yankees the week before Christmas. To replace Damon, the Sox traded for Cleveland center fielder Coco Crisp. Admitting they failed on Edgar Renteria, they traded the shortstop to the Braves (eating a big chunk of Renteria’s salary) and acquired slick-fielding Alex Gonzalez.

On January 20, 2006, Theo officially returned as general manager. The degree to which he actually left has always been in doubt. He never lost touch with temporary co-general managers Cherington and Hoyer, and there was a sense that he never really went away.

Henry lobbied hard for Epstein’s return, and future Sox problems would be rooted in concessions made at that time. When Theo returned from his self-imposed sabbatical, he had more power and independence. He isolated baseball operations from the rest of the organization. Moving forward, there would be far less “interference” from Lucchino. Baseball operations became its own country in the basement offices of Fenway.

During spring training, Epstein sent Bronson Arroyo to the Reds for Wily Mo Pena, a deal that would fail badly for Boston. Arroyo went on to pitch the next seven seasons in Cincinnati without missing a single turn in the rotation, a streak of more than 320 consecutive starts. Pena clubbed 16 homers for the Red Sox over parts of two seasons and was playing for the independent league Bridgeport Bluefish by 2010.

“Theo really struggled with that on a lot of different fronts,” said the manager. “Bronson was everybody’s favorite guy, and he had signed his new contract when Theo wasn’t here. It wasn’t a talent-for-talent deal. He thought Wily Mo could be the guy. I knew how hard this one was for him. It was really tough. I just didn’t know if Wily Mo could play or not. I don’t think anyone knew if he could do it. He’ll tease you because of what he can do, but there’s a lot of swing-and-miss in there. And Bronson, for me, was a perfect guy to have. Like when the Yankees had Ramiro Mendoza. A guy who can throw 90 to 100 innings out of the bullpen. I thought that’s what Bronson was for us. But he was making too much money to do that anymore.

“I think we both knew it might end up how it did, but I knew Theo really wanted to do it. I just told him, ‘Theo, if you make the deal, I’ll back you.’”

In mid-March the Sox announced a new three-year contract for their manager. Francona was bumped to $1.5 million per season, still a long way from the $5.5 million Torre was making in New York.

Toward the end of spring training, Francona called 22-year-old Jon Lester into his office and told the kid he’d be starting the season at Triple A Pawtucket. A standout southpaw at Bellarmine Prep in Tacoma, Washington, Lester was the second-round Sox pick in the 2002 draft, and he moved steadily, if not that quickly, through the system. The organization’s top concern was that Lester tended to be a five-inning starter because he threw too many pitches in the early innings. He made 26 starts at Double A in 2005.

“Like a lot of young kids, I had those unreal expectations that I was going to make the team,” said Lester. “Tito sat me down and told me to soak it in and be realistic with myself and make the most of my time in the big league camp. It’s not something you want to hear, but I think it helped me. It relaxed the tensions I had going in. He made sure I knew there was nothing to prove. I wanted him to know the type of person I am and when the time comes, you can call me up.”

There was a big decision to make at the start of the season. It was clear to everyone, including the manager, that it was time to pass the closer torch to Papelbon. Francona knew he had to talk with Foulke.

Foulke was one of the more unusual personalities in Boston sports. He had as much to do with the championship of 2004 as any player. Schilling went into the books as the personification of guts and glory. Damon, Millar, Ortiz, and Ramirez served well in their role as Idiots. But the presence of Foulke was the biggest difference between the 2003 near-miss team and the 2004 champs. Foulke was the difference between heartbreak and history. He saved 32 games in the 2004 season, then made 11 postseason appearances, compiling an ERA of 0.64 and allowing a single run over 14 innings. He pitched in all four World Series games. He easily could have been named World Series MVP instead of Manny.

For all of that, he was never embraced. Foulke was a quiet man and not much fun. Francona had seen him up close when the two were in Oakland in 2003. He knew what the Sox were getting. When Francona was in managerial limbo in the autumn of 2003, working in the Sox offices though he had not yet been named skipper, the Sox asked him about acquiring Foulke, and he said, “If I’m going to be manager, I want you to sign him. If I’m not, I don’t want you to sign him.”

Knee trouble diminished Foulke’s effectiveness in 2005. He saved only 15 games, spent 50 games on the disabled list, and went through a second arthroscopic procedure after the Sox were swept out of the playoffs.