Francona: The Red Sox Years (26 page)

“He was quiet, and he wouldn’t let you get close to him, but he loved to pitch,” said Francona. “He was unflappable. He had that changeup, so even if he didn’t have his great stuff, he could get the job done, and that’s what he did in ’04. What happened after that was disappointing. He got bitter, and he didn’t handle things real well. He got a little stubborn. He was kind of a smart-ass. That was his way of dealing with things, but he’d take the ball every day, and as a manager, you love that. He’d never turn the ball down.”

Francona had fallen in love with rookie Papelbon’s talent and attitude in the spring of 2005 when the big kid knocked down Sammy Sosa in a spring training game after Jay Payton had been hit by an Oriole pitcher. Papelbon was obviously the next closer. Forced into the bullpen in September 2005, he pitched 17 and a third innings, allowing just two earned runs, striking out 15 and walking only four.

Papelbon was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and drafted in the fourth round in 2003. He pitched only a few games at Bishop Kenny High School in Jacksonville, Florida, and was playing first base at Mississippi State when coaches noticed that his throws across the infield to third were pretty impressive. Epstein liked him as a starter. Francona saw the perfect closer. The kid could throw 100 miles per hour and certainly had a closer’s mentality.

“When I got drafted by this team, I was part of a Nation,” Papelbon said in the spring of 2006. “I want to be part of something special here, and I want to be part of a team in a city where when you go out there, you’re expected to win. That’s the only way I know how to play. That’s how I compete. If I don’t do good, go ahead and boo me. It doesn’t really get to me.”

Papelbon worked a perfect one-two-three eighth inning in the Red Sox 2006 opening day win in Texas. After Papelbon was lifted, Foulke was hit hard in a non-save situation in the bottom of the ninth. Francona made up his mind that it was time to award the closer’s role to the big kid from Mississippi State.

Francona believed that the casual hour of late-afternoon batting practice was one of the best times to deliver important messages to players. The manager’s physical limitations made the batting practice counseling personally challenging, but it was worth the discomfort.

“It took me forever to get dressed, but I found the right mix of layers,” said Francona. “It was important to me to be out there. I needed to work, and I didn’t want to just sit around. I wanted to hit fungoes, and I wanted to try to throw batting practice. I wanted to be a working coach. I found that it was my time to visit with players when it was quiet—especially in Boston where there was so much media around.”

While the Sox were taking batting practice before the third game of the season in Texas, Francona sidled up to Foulke near a protective screen behind second base.

“Hey, Foulkie,” said the manager. “I just want you to know that if we get a save situation tonight, I’m going with Pap.”

“Okay,” said Foulke, always a man of few words.

A few hours later, with the Sox leading 2–1 in the bottom of the ninth, Francona summoned Papelbon from the bullpen. Papelbon needed just 11 pitches (two strikeouts) to retire the Rangers in order for the save. A closer was born.

When Francona met with the frothing press, they wanted to know if this meant that Papelbon was the new closer. Bumping Foulke, a World Series hero making $7.5 million, was a big story.

“This is by no means an indictment of Foulke,” said Francona. “I think he’s gonna be brilliant.”

The manager was reminded that his move made it look like Papelbon was the new closer.

“I don’t care what it looks like,” he snapped. “I just told you the truth and how I feel. We won, and that’s what we set out to do. It’s a long year. I don’t think Foulke is the guy we need yet, and I think he’s going to get there.”

The episode was a perfect demonstration of Francona’s managerial nuance and accountability. Francona, the ex-player and the son of a major leaguer, never wanted to rip or embarrass a player. There was no getting called to the woodshed when Terry Francona was in charge.

“I wasn’t a big fan of bringing guys into the office, especially a guy like Foulke,” said Francona. “He would view it as being brought into the principal’s office. I’d always stand behind the screen during batting practice and talk to guys. I got a lot done out there. This wasn’t something I’d decided in one day. Foulke deserved respect, and I owed it to him to let him know ahead of time. Of course, word travels fast. About ten minutes after I talked to Foulkie, I had Schilling in my face saying, ‘Are you crazy?’ I just felt that telling the guy was the right thing to do.”

Why say something contrary to the media?

“I think that’s the right way to do it,” said Francona. “I don’t think you need to anoint the next guy and say he’s going to the Hall of Fame. It was pretty obvious to me how good Pap was, but I had a lot of respect for what Foulke did for us. I don’t care what it looks like—I’m going to do what I’m going to do. I’d rather have a person from the media think I’m dumb or arrogant or argumentative. This happened a lot. I would say I didn’t see something. I’d rather they think I’m stupid than put an indictment out on one of our players. In the Pap situation, I had nowhere to go but to kill Foulke, and I didn’t want to do that. I can’t tell you how many times we’d leave the interview room and Pam [Pam Ganley, then a public relations assistant] would say, ‘You just watched that,’ and I’d say, ‘What do you want me to do, kill our player?’ I can live with someone thinking I’m a little slow if it helps us. It was better. I felt like it worked.”

He was good at the media game, and the Red Sox knew it. Still, there were times when he could be testy, particularly with non-baseball reporters. Francona had a couple of media pet peeves. He hated it when someone’s cell phone went off during an interview session. And he would get almost violent when he was addressed as “coach.”

“Coach?”

This is a baseball thing. In every other sport the head coach is “coach.” In Little League, high school, and college baseball, the head coach is the coach. But in professional baseball the top guy is the “manager,” and the coaches are the guys who work below the manager. This is why most major league managers would rather be addressed as “moron” than as “coach.” The salutation of “coach” strips them of their hard-earned stripes and also indicates that the person asking the question doesn’t know anything about baseball.

The legendary Peter Gammons, a Hall of Fame sportswriter who has covered the Red Sox since the late 1960s, would never address a manager as “coach.” In June 2006, Gammons was stricken by a brain aneurysm while driving near his home on Cape Cod. While Gammons lay unconscious after surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, his wife Gloria was surprised to see the manager of the Red Sox standing in the corridor outside his room after a home victory over the Mets. It was just a small measure of respect for someone who’d done so much for baseball and the Red Sox.

The Sox infield was in good shape for most of 2006. Youkilis proved to be a natural at first base. Lowell, coming off a horrible year at the plate in 2005, found his Fenway stroke and proved that he was more than a throw-in from the Beckett deal. Mark Loretta held down second base, and Gonzalez was sensational at short.

“Gonzo in 2006 had the best defensive shortstop year I’ve ever seen,” said the manager. “Mikey Lowell told me in spring training that I was in for a treat, and he was right. Every week we saw something we’d never seen before. That’s a nice feeling when the ball is hit to shortstop and you know it’s an out. There was no play he couldn’t make. He had a reputation as moody, but he wasn’t moody. He just didn’t talk to anybody.”

Josh Beckett was another matter. Beckett spent much of his first year in the American League trying to throw fastballs past hitters. Too often the talented sluggers of the AL East were able to track his fastball and hit it out of the ballpark. Beckett gave up 36 homers and compiled an ERA of 5.01 (“Embarrassing,” said Beckett) in his first year in the Junior Circuit.

“He was pretty much what I expected,” said Francona. “He’s stubborn, and I knew that someday we were going to like that about him. He was throwing 95, but it would be on a straight plane level. There’s things you can get away with that you can’t when you’re pitching against the Yankees. Some of those lineups are difficult to navigate through. Beckett had that personality. I always thought he was at his best when he was in the clubhouse and being a smart aleck and arrogant. When he’d get quiet, he wasn’t as good. I always liked it when he’d come into the dugout from a one-two-three first inning and start yelling. He did that just to get himself going and to get the rest of us going. He was a guy that kind of took charge of the staff, which I liked.”

Despite Beckett’s subpar performance, the Sox rolled into the All-Star break with a 53–33 record, a 100-win pace. Ortiz had 31 homers, and Papelbon had 26 saves and a 0.59 ERA at the break. They were 63–41, holding on to first place with a one-game lead over the Yankees, when Epstein stood still at the July 31 trading deadline. While the Yankees acquired slugger Bobby Abreu, the Sox did nothing and left themselves without a reliable lefty reliever for some big second-half games with the Yankees. In the final two months of the season, Abreu would bat .330 with seven homers and 42 RBI.

“I felt bad for Theo at the trading deadline,” said Francona. “He said that if we had the ability to start over, we’d be really good a year from now, but you can’t do that in Boston. I understood that. He understood it more than anybody. We were getting old in a hurry, trying to hang on. I think he wanted to go young, and it was probably time. We would have been better doing that, but he just couldn’t. We tried to string it together, but then everybody got hurt. We managed to win 87 games, but we were done.”

“It’s a long-standing impediment for the Red Sox,” said Epstein. “With the Red Sox, there’s been so much focus on winning and building an uber team this year, so much focus on tomorrow’s paper, so much focus on the Yankees. Some of that had to do with the timing of the end of the Yawkey regime. There’s no doubt that we feel the only way to sustain success over a long period of time is to have a successful farm system. . . . Two years ago I said we were two years away. Finally, we’re at a point where the farm system is going to start to pay dividends at the big league level.”

Not making a deal at the deadline was another indication that Epstein was having his way with ownership. There was no more interference from Lucchino, the man who always wanted to win now, even if it meant sacrificing some people in the farm system.

The manager had some old-school techniques. Before each game, Francona assembled his own stat card. With help from advance scouts’ reports and numbers supplied by baseball operations—data that was more inventive than ever—he marked the good matchups in green and the dangerous matchups in red, keeping the standard information in black. He put stolen base numbers on the left side of the paper and scribbled miscellaneous notes on the right margin. He never shared the card with his players.

Francona valued reports from advance scouts and found matchup information particularly useful, but the mountain of information and suggestion started to overwhelm him in the summer of 2006.

“Prior to every series, Jed would have a conversation with Tito about lineups,” said O’Halloran. “It was just to talk about matchups, and Tito would eventually get to a decision on what he wanted to do. We had resources to come up with what we thought was best.”

“I don’t think they ever felt they had to push it on me,” Francona said. “They knew what I liked. I liked to get on the plane for the next series and look at the advance book on the next team and see right away how we wanted to pitch their guys. As the years went on, they started to personalize more of the stuff, putting together individual stuff for each coach. There were days when I’d see Theo and he’d be so proud of it. We all knew these guys were busting their ass putting this stuff together, and I never took it for granted. I welcomed the help. There were things that meant more to me than others, and I told them that. They tried to go deeper than Mike Lowell being four-for-six against a certain kind of pitcher and that did help. They broke it down more than just the number. But the problem was that the number would change as we played. On Thursday Mike Lowell could be a good fit to play, but on Friday he could be a bad fit because of what happened to the numbers Thursday. It was a little too fluid for me.

“I guess the only time I objected were the times they were telling me how to do something. There was a difference. Just give me the information, don’t tell me how to manage.”

Epstein’s research team extended their analyses to some outer limits.

“In those first years they had a guy who would send me lineups,” said Francona. “This guy would tell me not to hit David Ortiz against Scott Kazmir because chances are, David’s going to have a rough night. Well, I’m not sitting David. He’s got a chance to be MVP, and you want me to start Doug Mirabelli at DH because Doug has better numbers against this guy? I was like, ‘Fuck, I’m not going to do that.’ You might win a game somewhere along the way, but it’s not worth what you might lose from David overall. I told Theo, ‘I want to meet this lineup guy,’ and they were like, ‘No, you don’t.’ It was kind of a running joke. I never found out who the guy was. He was smart and had some numbers, but come on, man. I didn’t mind getting information, but it was strange not to know where it was coming from.”

“He was on the payroll as an outside consultant,” said O’Halloran. “I never met the guy. Jed met with him. I don’t know exactly how he came into the organization. He was a bit of a mad scientist, but he was one of the sources that the front office would use. He was a whacko sabermetrician type. We stopped using him.”

“There were actually two of them,” Epstein confessed in 2012, after leaving the Red Sox for the Cubs. “Eric Van and ‘Vörös’ McCracken. We were always looking for little breakthroughs that would help us in the draft, in player projections. John Henry discovered Eric on the Sons of Sam Horn website and asked us to talk to him, so he was a consultant for us for a couple of years. He had some interesting things to say and some other things that were kind of off the reservation. The other one, McCracken, I think used Vörös as a pen name. We would joke with Tito about those guys, but they were not making out the lineup card or anything of that nature. These guys were literally in the basement, on the computer. They were stats-only consultants. They would occasionally chime in with these harebrained lineup ideas. Because I had a good relationship with Tito, I would throw them at him. He would get frustrated. It was the antithesis of being in the trenches. These guys were so far removed that Tito never even saw them.”