Francona: The Red Sox Years (4 page)

“My dad rarely played that year, but I watched every game and got to make that trip. It was the best summer of my life.”

“I’ll always remember him on that trip,” said Tommy Harper, the Brewers’ best player in 1970 and later a spring training instructor with the Francona Red Sox. “Little Terry was all spiffed up at the start, but by the end of the trip he looked just as rumpled and tired as the rest of us. It was an eye-opener for a little kid like him.”

That was the final season of Tito Francona’s 15-year career. He hit .231 in 52 games with the Brewers, but the season was a great success because he finally got to spend time at the park with the boy who was born the year he hit .363 for the Cleveland Indians.

Little Tito played organized Little League in New Brighton. His teams were sponsored by Bachman’s Garage and Mill Creek Electric. Early in his baseball career, he sometimes missed part of the season when he was off to whatever city his dad was playing in, but he’d come back for the Little League playoffs and stay with his grandparents.

“I loved those visits,” he said. “It always meant I was in for a pair of red Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers. They cost something like $11, and my parents thought they were too expensive, but my grandpa would buy me a pair every summer when I went there for Little League playoffs.”

Wearing the orange-and-white Bachman’s Garage uniform, he pitched, played short, and sometimes worked behind the plate. Every couple of innings, nervous Little Tito would sneak behind the left-field fence to pee in the creek that ran alongside the outer wall. It was a nervous habit that stayed with him throughout his professional career.

“One of the greatest nights of my life was playing a Little League tournament a half-hour from home in Leetsdale,” he recalled. “They had lights, and I was so excited about playing a night game, I had to run out behind the fence and take a piss about four times because I was so nervous.

“I never once thought that I wasn’t going to play in the big leagues. That’s what I was going to do. I had a guidance counselor say, ‘Terry, you have to put down a profession.’ I’d tell them, ‘Major league baseball player.’ There was no plan B, and that used to frustrate people. Now that I’ve gone through it, I can certainly understand why. You can get derailed so easily, but I never felt for one second that anything would stop me.”

Tito, who never yelled at his son, was short on instruction. Even though he’d been a big leaguer for 15 years, he wasn’t going to push baseball on the boy. He’d hit Terry fungoes when he came home from work, but that was all. Terry could always tell when his dad was getting tired because the balls started coming at him quicker and harder. On Terry’s game days, Tito watched from a distance, sitting on a lawn chair, rarely commenting. If Little Tito was going to get anywhere in this game, he’d have to figure things out for himself.

The kid figured it out. By his sophomore season in high school, he was starting in center field, playing first base, and putting up an ERA of 0.33 for Greg Fazio’s “Fighting Lions.” Mr. Fazio was a New Brighton history teacher and baseball coach, and he made no attempt to tinker with the teenager’s perfect hitting mechanics. Terry hit .550 and threw a no-hitter in his first season of varsity baseball. In his junior season, he hit .769, making only nine outs all season. The competition wasn’t the best, and there weren’t many games. Western Pennsylvania weather kept the boys indoors for most of the spring. There were seasons when the first outdoor baseball was the day of the first game. The Lions never worried about sunblock, and there weren’t a lot of college scouts in the stands, but word got around about the young slugger from New Brighton. He was selected by the Cubs in the second round of the amateur draft in his senior season of 1977, even though he’d batted only ten times his senior year because of a shoulder injury. (Though Francona went 7–10 for the Lions in ’77, he fretted about his drooping batting average.)

Like every high school athlete, he was anxious to play professional ball, but the family decided that he would go to college unless the Cubs offered $40,000. When the Cubs came in at $18,000, Francona packed his bags for Tucson. He was off to play for University of Arizona coach Jerry Kindall, who had played with Tito Francona in Cleveland.

Kindall ran an excellent program, long on instruction. Four-hour practices were the norm. Francona loved the weather and the baseball-centric college experience. Away from the field, he was somewhat ill prepared for college life. He wasn’t much of a student and spent a lot of time on the dormitory pay phone, calling the folks back in New Brighton. Tito and Birdie worried that their son might not last at Arizona. When Terry learned that Tito was at a work conference in Las Vegas, the homesick freshman “borrowed” a friend’s orange El Camino car and drove eight hours for a visit.

“I told my friend I was going to Phoenix, but wound up going to Vegas, and I lost his gas cap and he wanted to kill me,” said Francona.

He developed a crush on one of the girls in his mathematics class, but was too bashful to ask her out.

Baseball saved him—that and the emotional support from his new best friend, Brad Mills. Mills was a junior college transfer, a neat freak, and a workout warrior.

“I remember meeting Terry for the first time, and he was not impressive,” said Mills. “Jerry Kindall had told me all about us getting one of the best players in the country, and I was excited about that. Then I went to a team event and started meeting everybody, and here’s this guy laying on the couch. He was wearing ragged Levis, cut just below the knee, and red high-top Chuck Taylors. He had hair down to his shoulders and a ragged T-shirt. As I came over, I stuck out my hand and said, ‘Brad Mills.’ He didn’t sit up or anything, he just put out his hand and said, ‘Terry Francona.’ I said, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ That was all I said. The next day Jerry Kindall called him in and talked to him, and by our team meeting that afternoon he was cleaned up and his hair was cut.”

It was the beginning of a long, strong friendship. After their days as college roommates, Francona and Mills went on to become big league teammates with the Montreal Expos in the early 1980s. Their wives and children became friends. Mills would serve as Francona’s first-base coach when Francona managed the Phillies from 1997 to 2000 and as Francona’s bench coach in Boston for the glory years. They would win two World Series together.

“I could tell him anything,” Francona said later. “When I became a manager and he was a coach, I used to ride him so hard. But every now and then, if I was teasing, he’d give me a look and I’d know that was it. I’d leave. It was like he was saying, ‘Enough.’ I always knew. That’s how close we were.”

Playing college baseball thousands of miles from home, Francona remained tethered to New Brighton. Every time he hit a home run for the Wildcats, he’d get a $10 bill in the mail from his grandfather. In his third season, he used some of Carmen’s reward money to take Jacque Lang on a date. She was the knockout girl from freshman math, and by junior year Francona had worked up the nerve to ask her out. Their first date was at the Lunt Avenue Marble Club. They were engaged a little over a year later, and patriarch Carmen Francona performed the wedding ceremony.

By the end of his junior season, Francona was America’s top amateur baseball player, winner of the 1980 Golden Spikes Award. He hit .401 and was named College Player of the Year by
The Sporting News.
In the College World Series at Omaha, Nebraska, he hit .458 and was named MVP. The Expos drafted him with the 22nd pick of the first round, immediately before the New York Mets used their top selection on high school sensation Billy Beane.

Baseball lives intersected in the days after the draft when Montreal general manager John McHale called to sign the Expos’ first-round pick. It was an exciting moment for proud father Tito Francona. In 1958 McHale had been general manager of the Detroit Tigers and refused a request for a raise from spare outfielder Tito Francona.

“I hadn’t played much with the Tigers that year, and I was only making about $7,500,” recalled Terry’s dad. “I called John McHale to tell him my wife was pregnant and to ask for a $1,000 raise. I first called collect, and he wouldn’t accept my call. When I called back and asked for the $1,000, he said, ‘No way!’ Then all that time went by, and there we are in 1980 and the Expos draft Terry and John McHale is calling to get him signed. I said, ‘John, how good is your memory? Remember when my wife was pregnant and you wouldn’t give me the extra $1,000? Well, you’re going to have to pay now. This is the baby.’”

Francona signed for $100,000, more than five times what the Cubs had offered him three years earlier.

Sending their son off to a life in professional baseball, the Francona parents had sound advice.

Sounding a little like Manny Ramirez, Tito told his son, “See the ball and hit the ball.”

“You are now a piece of meat,” said Birdie.

They were both right.

Francona’s first encounter with Red Sox legend Dick Williams was underwhelming for both. Williams was the manager of the Montreal Expos, and Terry Francona’s status as a first-round pick qualified him for spring training with the big league club in West Palm Beach. The young outfielder gained considerable weight after his first summer in pro ball and made a poor impression when he showed up in Florida.

“In 1980 I played from January to Thanksgiving, playing every day, and I was worn out,” said Francona. “I didn’t have much power, and at the end of the year they told me to go home and get away from baseball. I did that. I must have gained 25 pounds. I showed up at spring training, and I was all excited being in the major league camp, but I was so fat my shirt wouldn’t stay tucked in. I knew a lot of the guys—Tim Wallach and Brad Mills were there. I was probably more comfortable than I should have been. Bob Gebhard was running the minor leagues then, and he saw me and called me over and started in on me, saying, ‘You fat fuck!’ Everybody in the dugout was laughing. They killed me. That was Dick Williams’s first impression of me. I wasn’t around for a lot of spring training, but he never talked to me while I was there—not until my last day. I got into one of the early spring games and took a called third strike on a curveball. I walked into the dugout, put my bat in the rack.”

Williams finally spoke.

“That’s it, kid,” said the terrifying manager.

“Does that mean I’m done for the day?” Francona asked.

“No, you’re going to Daytona,” snapped Williams.

Five months later, Little Tito was in the big leagues. And Dick Williams was waiting for him in the visitors’ dugout in the Houston Astrodome.

Many Red Sox fans born before 1960 contend that Williams was the best manager in franchise history. Like numerous dugout geniuses, Williams was a marginal major league ballplayer. He cut his teeth in the vaunted Brooklyn Dodger farm system and played with five teams from 1951 to 1964. Williams was hired by Red Sox GM Dick O’Connell after a second-straight ninth-place finish in 1966. The Sox had lost 100 games in 1965 and hadn’t been over .500 in eight seasons, but O’Connell knew he had a lot of young talent and needed a taskmaster to change the country club atmosphere at Fenway. Thirty-eight-year-old Williams was the perfect candidate for the seismic shift. He wore his hair in a Marine flattop and made it clear that he was the boss when he arrived at spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, in 1967. The rookie manager’s first move was to strip young Carl Yastrzemski of his captaincy. There would be only one chief to command 25 Indians. Yaz was secretly relieved to forfeit the captaincy, but Williams’s gruff style made it look like an insult. Williams didn’t worry about hurting ballplayers’ feelings. He told the media that talking to George Scott was like talking to cement. He made the lethargic Red Sox do calisthenics and run laps. He benched Yaz for not running out a ground ball. He went months without speaking to players who fell out of favor.

“He had everybody doing everything,” Yaz recalled. “There was no downtime. He had been a utility player, and I think that was one of the things that made him such a great manager. He had the extra men go above and beyond what they would normally do. He had them out there for two hours instead of just 20 minutes a day.”

Boston fans and media members thought Williams sounded a little crazy when he predicted, “We’ll win more than we lose.”

The 1967 Red Sox permanently changed the culture of Boston baseball. The Sox went from losers to winners overnight. They captured the town like no team before them, or since. They were the Cardiac Kids, and they won the greatest pennant race of all time (four teams separated by only a game and a half going into the final weekend) on the final day of the season before losing the World Series to the Cardinals in seven games. Years after he was fired by the Red Sox, Williams won two World Championships as manager of the Oakland A’s and took the San Diego Padres to their first World Series in 1984. He won 1,571 games over 21 big league seasons. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in the summer of 2008, and his name was still gold at Fenway when he died in the summer of 2011.

On August 19, 1981, Francona and Williams—the two best managers in the long history of the Boston Red Sox—intersected in the dugout of the Houston Astrodome.

Francona shredded Triple A pitching at Denver in the summer of ’81, and the Expos called him up to see how he’d do against major league pitching. Because of an air traffic controllers’ strike (which ended when President Ronald Reagan fired all the striking controllers), American air travel was chaotic in August 1981. Getting from Denver to Houston was not easy. Francona had to make a pair of connecting flights and didn’t land in Houston until after the game had started. His cab didn’t pull up at the Astrodome until the fifth inning.

“The driver left me off outside the center-field entrance,” Francona recalled. “I had my bats, my clothes, all my stuff. I talked my way in, and I was lugging stuff all around the ballpark. Nolan Ryan had a no-hitter going, and I thought maybe I should get some popcorn and watch the game. I worked my way around to the clubhouse with all my stuff. I was sweating like a pig, and they told me to get my uniform on real quick. I got myself through the maze and into the dugout, and there was Dick Williams, barking, ‘Get your bat!’ I was thinking,
Damn, give me a break, let me enjoy this for a minute.
I was glad that Nolan was taken out by the time I got in.”