Francona: The Red Sox Years (27 page)

(In 2011 Vörös McCracken was an
ESPN Insider
blogger. In a 2007 blogpost on vorosmccracken.com, he wrote, “I won a World Series while working with the Boston Red Sox. And now live in abject poverty and anonymity somewhere in the Phoenix metropolitan area.” According to a
Boston Globe
feature story written by Mark Shanahan, Eric Van was a Harvard graduate with an IQ of 143.)

Tom Tippett and Zack Scott were nothing like Van and McCracken. Tippett and Scott were stat men who wound up with offices at Fenway Park.

Scott was a math major from the University of Vermont who worked for Tippett at Diamond Mind from 2000 to 2003. Scott introduced himself to Epstein backstage at a “Hot Stove Cool Music” fund-raiser (where Epstein played guitar alongside Gammons to raise funds for the Foundation to Be Named Later). Epstein hired Scott as an intern with baseball operations in 2004.

Toronto native Tippett was a Bill James lieutenant who’d been the owner and creator of Diamond Mind Baseball. John Henry loved Tippett’s computer simulation baseball game, which allowed Henry to play out entire long-forgotten seasons on his computer. In the summer of 2006, Henry put Babe Ruth on the 1929 Red Sox roster to see how the moribund Sox of ’29 (58–96 in real life) would have done if the great Bambino had still been on the Boston roster. Francona had played Diamond Mind games against the best and brightest of Theo’s subordinates when he was auditioning for the Red Sox job in 2003. Tippettt was hired by Epstein in 2003 and assisted on a variety of technology and baseball research projects. Francona enjoyed Tippett’s company and called upon the young software savant whenever he needed help with his NCAA pool picks.

In 2006 Epstein commissioned Tippett to create a proprietary software program that would provide Boston’s baseball operations staff with easy access to a mountain of baseball data, analysis, and history. Eschewing unreliable one-year samples, the software made valuations combining offense, defense, and baserunning metrics. There were projections for every player in professional baseball, and the software stored interviews from each player’s high school and college coaches and trainers, plus observations from opposing coaches. The numbers were updated daily.

“We had a contest to name it,” said Epstein. “I nominated ‘Carmine’ because it was a play on Carmine Hose (an ancient Red Sox nickname) and it sounded like a tough guy and a hot woman, just what we want from our software. ‘Carmine’ won not only because it was the best nomination, but also because I was the judge.”

Henry, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars through the application of proprietary formulas, loved Carmine and all of its powers.

“Carmine took on a life of its own with the media,” said Francona. “It made it easy for the radio pundits to make smart-aleck remarks, but it was a tool in our system that dumb-asses like me could go to, to get information right now. And it was good. It had everything in one place. It’s a really concise way of looking up information. It had eight different clicks. One would be a guy’s birthday, weight, and height. One would be all the reports on him. One would be his stats. It just made it so easy. I always went to it at the beginning of camp, just to look at who was coming into camp. I’d go on Carmine and I’d know everybody. I’d know what their minor league manager thought of them. But Carmine didn’t tell you when to play a guy.”

“Carmine did not make all our decisions,” said Epstein. “It was just one club in our bag.”

In the hours before the first game of a five-game series against the Yankees—the day game of a day-night doubleheader at Fenway on August 18—young Zack Scott sent a report to the manager explaining that Eric Hinske should start at third base instead of Lowell in the first game of the series. Hinske, Scott reasoned, had better numbers against Yankee starter Chien-Ming Wang, who was 13–4 going into the game.

This wasn’t what the manager needed on the cusp of the big series. He called Scott to his office.

“Zack was a nice, smart guy, but he didn’t have a good feel for the clubhouse,” said Francona. “They were trying to get him more on the baseball side of things, but everything he did was by the numbers. It was information when he started out, but then it got to the point where it was starting to get a little too assertive. When he told me we should play Hinske in that game instead of Lowell, I said, ‘Why don’t you go up to Mikey Lowell and tell him he’s not playing in this game against the Yankees?’ We got a five-game series with them, and I’ve got better things to do than call Mikey Lowell in here and tell him he’s not playing.

“That’s when I said, ‘Enough, Theo. We’re into August and we’re wearing thin, and all this is doing is aggravating me.’ So we stopped doing that. It’s well intentioned, but there is more that goes into lineups than numbers. There’s personalities and egos. You’re trying to instill some confidence. That’s why you have managers. That’s what I would tell John Henry. I’d say, ‘John, we all know what the numbers are. So you could do this. But you need somebody with strong opinions, or you don’t need a manager.’”

Torre said the same thing in his autobiography with Tom Verducci (
The Yankee Years
) when he told Yankee GM Brian Cashman, “The numbers are good. But don’t you ever forget the heartbeat.”

“It’s not that these people were not smart,” said Francona. “But when you have somebody watching video and telling me how they are attacking the hitter, you’d better have a degree in baseball. Tell me something that’s going to help me, but don’t manage the team.”

After dealing with Scott, Francona put Lowell at third base and Hinske in right field in the first game of the day-night doubleheader. Lowell went 0–3 against Wang. Hinske hit three doubles in three at-bats against Wang.

Somewhere near a silo in Lawrence, Kansas, poker-faced Bill James was probably thinking,
Up yours, Tito!

But the Red Sox lost, 12–4.

“We kind of stopped the lineup program at that time,” said O’Halloran. “It became clear that Tito was getting annoyed by it and it was kind of counterproductive.”

“The lineup was always the manager’s decision,” said Epstein. “I always said, ‘We always want to give you as much information as we can. You don’t have to follow it.’ In this case, we were doing a lot of deeper-level lineup stuff, swing path and all that. Hinske could really hit right-handed sinkerballers. He had a swing path that was down in the zone and away from him. Guys like Wang he owned. Mikey Lowell at that point wasn’t handling those types of guys. This was an area where Tito and I butted heads at times. Tito usually erred on the side of showing players he had faith in them. I felt like at times he went too far. If you’re not going to play Mike Lowell from time to time, do it against the guys he can’t handle.”

Jon Lester, who’d been called to the big leagues on June 10, was involved in a minor car accident on Storrow Drive en route to Fenway while Scott was sitting in Francona’s office. Lester shook off his back pain and started the nightcap. He gave up seven runs on eight hits and was pulled with one out in the fourth. The Yankees beat the Red Sox, 14–11. Lester could barely walk when he woke up the next morning.

That car going under my truck must have messed me up,
Lester thought to himself as he struggled to get to the ballpark.

It turned out to be something far more serious.

The Yankees beat the Red Sox for a third straight time on Saturday, this time by a score of 13–5. After the matinee beat-down, friends of Theo Epstein’s gathered at Rowes Wharf behind the Boston Harbor Hotel for a cruise aboard John Henry’s 164-foot yacht, the
Iroquois,
to celebrate Theo’s engagement. Epstein was Boston’s most eligible bachelor, and news of his engagement to Marie Whitney had dominated the “Inside Track” gossip page of the
Boston Herald.
No one could have guessed there were storm clouds over Fenway on the night of their engagement celebration.

“The timing sucked,” said Epstein. “The baseball gods always get you. Anytime you schedule anything, even if it’s giving a speech to a charity function, or heaven forbid you have a dinner party, it’s a guaranteed four-game losing streak. The baseball gods would have it no other way. I would have given anything to not have to go. It completely ruined the whole thing. I don’t think I was medicated, but I should have been. We were all in a morbid trance at that time. It was one of the nicest things anyone ever did for me, but it did feel like, John, Tom, and Larry, with their looks, were throwing us overboard. We felt like they were going to make us walk the plank. And I was looking for ways to throw myself overboard. I was looking for ways to knock myself unconscious.”

“I was tired, we were going down, it was all I could do to go to that thing,” said Francona. “We were all teasing Theo about it. I had never been on John’s boat before, so I didn’t know I’d have to take my shoes off until I was walking on board. I looked up and saw Theo and said, ‘I hope nobody is here taking my picture in the middle of all this,’ and he said, ‘How do you think I feel?’ Anyway, we got out there on the water, and I told my wife I was getting seasick, and she said, ‘We’re in the harbor!’ I guarantee you, I was the first one to leave when we got back. It was actually very nice, but that was a tough weekend, and the timing of the cruise was everybody’s worst nightmare, including Theo.”

Epstein stood before the media the next day and said, “We’re not going to change our approach and all of a sudden try to build an uber team and all of a sudden win now at the expense of the future.”

The Sox lost again Sunday, 8–5, with the bullpen blowing another lead for Schilling.

Boston lost the Monday finale, 2–1 (“Both teams were too tired to hit anymore,” said Francona). Wells pitched seven stellar innings, then watched Foulke allow the winning run to score on a wild pitch. Naturally, Wells gestured madly from the dugout.

The image of Wells showing up his teammate wasn’t the only sign that the Sox were unraveling on and off the field. Timlin had offended teammates by telling reporters that the pitching staff was not to blame for Boston’s woes. Youkilis joined the chorus of players ripping Fenway’s official scorers, saying: “We have no home-field advantage.” There was disgruntlement in the clubhouse over Epstein’s non-moves at the trading deadline, a strategy that looked ridiculous when contrasted with Abreu’s impact on the Yankees.

“Who fucking loses five in a row in a series?” Epstein said. “There are no five-game series. The odds of that happening. The wheels were completely falling off the wagon.”

And then there was Manny. Ramirez tore into the Yankees during the lost weekend. He hit homers Friday and Saturday and went 8–11 with nine walks over the five-game disaster. He became only the fifth major leaguer in history to record nine consecutive 30-homer, 100-RBI seasons. But he was upset with a scoring decision regarding a ball he hit to Jeter Friday night and had to be coaxed into the lineup Saturday. He came out of the games early Friday and again Saturday. He went the distance Sunday. On Monday, Manny decided he’d had enough . . . for the season. Noticing that Torre had given Jorge Posada, Jason Giambi, and Johnny Damon a day off (Jeter was allowed to DH), Manny took himself out of the game after getting forced at second base in the bottom of the fourth inning.

“I’ll never forget that,” said Francona. “He came off the field, walked down the dugout steps, yelled over and said, ‘Hamstring!’ and I said, ‘Manny, which one?’ and he pointed with both hands to both hamstrings. It was like, ‘You pick. Fuck, I’m coming out.’ It was funny later, but it wasn’t funny at the time.

“I had had it with Manny at that point. David came to me after that night and said, ‘Give me a chance. I’m going to see Manny tonight.’ When I saw David the next day, he said, ‘Fuck it. Whatever you want to do.’”

That was it. In essence, Ramirez had quit for the season.

The Sox had been two games out of first place when the series started. They were unofficially out of the race when it was over. Over the five games, New York pounded Boston’s pitching for 49 runs, an average of almost 10 per game. Abreu went 10–20 in the series with seven walks. Yankee lefty batters Jason Giambi, Melky Cabrera, and Johnny Damon feasted on Boston’s right-handed pitching. Damon was booed every time he came to the plate. Sox fans wore T-shirts with Damon’s image and the words:
LOOKS LIKE JESUS, THROWS LIKE MARY, ACTS LIKE JUDAS
. He managed ten hits, including two homers and eight RBI, in the five-game set.

The reeling Red Sox flew to southern California immediately after the fifth Yankee loss. It was the start of a nine-game West Coast trip. They had lost five in a row and fallen ten and a half games in the standings since July 4. They were playing .500 ball (53–53) against the American League. When they arrived at Angels Stadium, Francona decided it was time for a meeting.

“Typically, that’s when a manager will stand up in front of everybody and scream,” he said later. “Well, there wasn’t any reason to scream. I just told them, ‘Hey look, if we’re gonna go down, I’ll go down with you. We’ll do this together.’ I felt good about it. Some of the seeds were set for next year for some of those guys. I liked our team. It was part of the whole idea of ‘doing it better,’ which we thought after we won in 2004. Except for Manny, guys were still playing hard. What we went through the rest of that year built some loyalty for the guys who were coming back.”

Dustin Pedroia was called to the big leagues for the start of the trip and joined the team for the first time in Anaheim.

“I had been playing in Ottawa,” remembered Pedroia. “They told me to take a 6:00
AM
flight to Anaheim the next day, and I got in at two in the afternoon. I was all excited, but it was kind of a bad time to get called up. Everyone was kind of dragging, it was such a tough time. There was a lot of shit going on. I met with Tito, and he said, ‘Just have fun. You’re not here to save the team.’ Then he had the meeting. I just sat back and was trying to figure out what this was all about. I was out of the loop and just happy to be there.”

“Poor kid,” said Francona. “He said it looked like guys were going to start crying. Nice first day in the big leagues.”