Francona: The Red Sox Years (43 page)

“Prior to that time, if David was struggling, we could hang with him because the team was doing so well. But that was as tough a balancing act as I’ve ever had. It fractured my relationship with David for a while. Looking back on it now, I probably wish I didn’t do it, even though we might have won a game or two. I think it still bothers David.”

Ortiz agreed.

“We play in a town where a lot of things come into people’s heads,” said Papi. “You need to have the determination to know what’s going to be better for you in the end. I talked to Tito, I talked to Larry, I talked to everybody. I told them that my whole life has been a challenge, and you’re not going to get the best out of me making me uncomfortable.”

Four weeks after the pinch-hitting episode in Toronto, there was another uncomfortable moment with Ortiz. The Sox were still under .500 when they arrived in New York for a two-game series with the Yankees. The Yankees routed Matsuzaka with five runs in the first inning of the first game and beat the Sox, 11–9. After the loss, Francona looked at the next night’s matchup against lefty CC Sabathia and wavered on whether to use still struggling Ortiz or Lowell as his designated hitter. Right-handed-hitting Lowell was the obvious choice, but Ortiz had uncommonly good numbers against the Yankee ace and Francona was sensitive to Ortiz’s pride. The decision was made more difficult by Henry’s regular emails questioning the use of Ortiz against lefties. Francona went to assistant GM Ben Cherington. He went to Hale. Who do you play? he asked them. No one had a good answer. For the only time in his eight years in Boston, Francona allowed everybody to leave the park without knowing who would play the next night’s game.

Ultimately, Ortiz got the nod, batting sixth in the lineup against Sabathia. He rewarded the manager’s loyalty with a single in the second and a walk in the fourth. The Sox fell behind, 5–0, again, but rallied for seven runs over the final four innings and won it, 7–6, with Papelbon picking up a heart-attack save.

But there was a problem. Batting against Joba Chamberlain, with Kevin Youkilis aboard and two out in the eighth, Ortiz launched a shot to the wall in deep right-center. Youkilis scored easily, but Ortiz was caught admiring his blast and thrown out as he lumbered into second after realizing his drive did not clear the wall. It was embarrassing and unnecessary, and it happened many times while Francona managed the Red Sox.

When the game ended, Francona, as always, went out to congratulate Papelbon and join the receiving line of handshakes as the Sox starters came off the field. He found Ortiz, who had also come out of the dugout to join the conga line, put his arm around the big DH, and said, “Come see me when you get to the clubhouse.”

Ortiz never came to see his manager.

Feeling disrespected, Francona left his office, walked across the room toward Ortiz’s stall, and confronted his slugger. It wasn’t loud, but it was decidedly non-private.

“There were a lot of things going on,” said Ortiz. “I lost a little bit of trust on how he was doing things with me. I thought the situation should be the way it had always been, because I was his player and struggling is part of being a player. He misunderstood things and I misunderstood things. I was a little fired up. Things were a little bit crazy that year. In other years he would have come to me later on and said, ‘That wasn’t right,’ and I’d agree and that would be it. But that day he was calling me out in front of everybody, and I didn’t like that. He came to me again after the game, and I went off. We talked the next day and everything went back to normal. He was pressing, I was pressing, there was so much going on, but I regret it.”

“My point to David was, the loyalty thing has to go both ways,” Francona said. “It was a tough time for both of us, and we were fighting our way through it, and I needed to say something to him. He was being a little stubborn and so was I. Even though we won, I still felt it needed to be addressed. I was sticking my neck out for this guy. Come on, man.”

Francona’s relationship with Lowell also suffered.

“I had called Mikey during the winter,” said the manager. “It was the elephant in the room. Everybody knew we had traded him, but now he was coming back. I just told him, ‘Mikey, I know there’s shit going on, and I don’t have an answer for you. That’s my answer. I can’t tell you something that I don’t know.’ He wanted to know. I was trying to balance loyalty, but I didn’t want to lie to somebody.”

He never told Lowell that two years earlier, when the Sox were courting Mark Teixeira, he’d warned Teixeira that he had a loyal veteran who was probably going to be replaced. (Youkilis would have moved across to third if the Sox had signed Teixeira.) He’d been sensitive to what the signing of Teixeira would have meant to Lowell.

No amount of sensitivity can make things right when a veteran player is sitting on the bench while he still thinks he’s good enough to play. Lowell did not make things easy for his manager. Fans and many media members lobbied for Lowell, but there wasn’t a daily spot for him in the lineup. There were times when Lowell was physically unable to play, but he didn’t want his status publicized. The manager would take bullets for not playing a player who was physically unable to play. Francona was okay with this, but he knew playing time was going to be an issue.

“It hurt our relationship,” said Francona. “I was in a bind. There was no right decision. I was so mad about the whole situation with both guys. It wasn’t fair. We had two respected veterans, and they were both mad. It wasn’t working. All you end up doing is aggravating everybody.”

“We tried very hard to trade Lowell,” admitted Epstein. “The reality is that Mike Lowell went from being a very good everyday player, a very popular guy, and a very influential guy in the clubhouse to a more complementary-type role. I knew it was going to be a challenge for Tito to manage that situation, but that’s part of his job. I knew it would be difficult. We simply couldn’t trade Lowell. He had a no-trade, and he didn’t want to go to Toronto.”

Meanwhile, the Ellsbury situation was a mess, and the manager found himself in the middle of confusion with the Red Sox medical staff.

It all started with the April 11 collision with Beltre. The ball club initially said that Ellsbury suffered a mere contusion and would only miss a few days. By April 23, the diagnosis was downgraded to non-displaced hairline fractures in four ribs, and Ellsbury told the media that the Sox had initially balked at his request for an MRI and CT scan. Red Sox medical director Thomas Gill said, “It really is symptom-based. . . . As long as he can swing, hit, run, catch, do anything that he needs to without feeling it in any way, he’ll be cleared to play.”

Forty days after the collision, Ellsbury returned for three games, went 1–14, then said he was unable to play. He said he came back too soon. On the advice of agent Scott Boras, Ellsbury flew to Los Angeles to be examined by Dr. Lewis Yocum at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic. Yocum found a new fracture in Ellsbury’s ribs. Dr. Yocum and an embarrassed Dr. Gill issued a joint statement that read, “This fracture, which is in a different area than the initial fractures and which was not present on previous scans, is likely the result of a new injury when Jacoby dove and impacted the ground during his brief return to play.”

Rather than rehab with the team, Ellsbury went to Athletes’ Performance Institute in Arizona.

“We don’t typically send our players elsewhere,” sniffed Dr. Gill.

Dr. Gill was not alone. Youkilis openly criticized Ellsbury, telling the Boston media that the outfielder should be with his teammates. The manager tried to steer clear of the controversy, but sometimes seemed to be speaking in code when he praised disabled Sox players who stayed with the team as a show of solidarity.

On June 10, Ellsbury reported back to the Sox while they were playing in Toronto. He met with Francona before addressing the hungry Boston media.

“Jake was nervous,” said the manager. “He told me what he wanted to say, and I told him just to be himself. Then I went out to the dugout and saw him there, reading from his notes. That worried me a little.”

It was unusual. Reading from a prepared script, Ellsbury spoke for 11 minutes. He again mentioned the ball club’s reluctance to send him for thorough testing. He said it was the team’s idea for him to rehab at API.

When it was over, the wounded outfielder went back to see his manager.

Francona knew that Arizona was Boras’s idea. The Sox had not sent Ellsbury to API for rehab; rather, they had
allowed
it. The team medical staff sometimes waivered, telling Francona and Epstein that Ellsbury could play, that it was a matter of Ellsbury’s willingness to play while less than 100 percent.

Ellsbury made one final attempt to play for the Sox in early August, but reinjured his ribs in a game at Texas and was shut down for the season.

“We put him in a tough predicament,” said Francona. “There were times when he didn’t help himself, but he was a young kid going through a learning process. We wanted him to be okay so badly. It got mishandled on a lot of fronts. They wanted more testing all along, but our medical people were telling us that there was no reason he couldn’t be playing. Then Boras got involved, and it made our doctors look like shit. You can’t see inside someone’s body. If they’re not comfortable playing, you don’t know what they’re feeling.

“I told Jake, ‘I have your back. If it hasn’t seemed like that, I’m sorry.’”

Was Ellsbury ever in jeopardy of being traded?

“Never,” said Francona. “Theo’s the smartest guy in town. You don’t trade a stock when it’s at $1. You trade at $100. We didn’t know we had a 30–home run guy, but we knew we had a good player. If you get mad and trade a player out of frustration, that’s a bad move. Theo would never do that.”

Two years later, Youkilis expressed regret at calling out Ellsbury.

“I made a mistake by saying something,” said Youkilis after he was traded to the White Sox in 2012. “I was frustrated. You’ve got to be with the team. But I went about it the wrong way.”

In the middle of the slump and turmoil, the Sox owners called for a meeting with their manager. The meeting was scheduled for noontime on the day of a weeknight game at Fenway. Epstein came to get Francona to take him upstairs to meet with Henry, Werner, and Lucchino.

Francona had been at the park for about an hour and was already in uniform when Theo came to his office to get him for the meeting.

“Because I was in uniform, I was probably in a little more of an aggressive mood,” he remembered.

They took the elevator to the third (EMC) level of Fenway Park and walked toward Henry’s in-game suite. Werner and Lucchino were waiting when Epstein and Francona arrived, but Henry was not there yet. The owner was invariably late for meetings, a habit that annoyed the always-prompt manager.

I’ve got stuff to do too,
Francona thought to himself while the executives made small talk.

Henry arrived. Sandwiches were served. And one by one, the bosses told Francona what was wrong with the Red Sox. Henry talked about Ortiz batting against left-handed pitching. Lucchino, as always, found fault in multiple places. Werner talked about slumping television ratings and whined, “We need to start winning in more exciting fashion.”

That did it. Francona started to get up out of his chair, but Epstein grabbed his knee to keep him in the seat.

“A good move by Theo,” Francona said later. “When Tom started talking about ratings, Theo knew I was getting ready to flare on somebody.

“They all gave me their versions of how things should go. And they were all different. When they were done, I said, ‘Guys, I just listened to three different opinions. All I can tell you is that the best thing I can do is to be consistent down there. We’re going to go through ups and downs. Right now is a down period. We’ll figure it out.’ I remember later that night David hit a home run off a left-hander and John sent me a funny email telling me he’d changed his opinion. I said, ‘John, I know you’re laughing, but if I managed like this, do you know what would happen here? This place would explode.’ All that stuff was starting to bother me. It wasn’t that I need autonomy, but goddamn, let me do my job. We needed to circle the wagons, and we can’t do that if I start being inconsistent.”

Werner was constantly trying to assert his importance. When the Henry group first purchased the Red Sox, Werner hired a public relations firm to get his name in the local newspapers. When stories were written about Henry or the Red Sox, he was known to call writers and ask, “Why didn’t you mention me in your story?” The Sox press guide described him as a member of the Television Academy Hall of Fame “for his extraordinary achievements as a creator and producer of many groundbreaking series.” Werner’s bio also credited him with shows that “launched” the careers of Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, and Danny DeVito. His television company won 24 Emmy Awards, and in 2009 he was appointed to the board of the brand-new Major League Baseball Network. He owned two World Series rings with the Red Sox, but his contributions to the success of the ball club were always difficult to measure. Henry owned controlling interest in the ball club and had the deciding vote on everything. Lucchino, according to Henry, was in charge of the day-to-day operation of the team. Epstein was the boy wonder genius/architect, and Francona was the two-time World Series–winning manager. That left Werner, the “Red Sox chairman.”

This much was certain: Werner was in charge of NESN. The Sox network’s ratings drove the ball club’s revenue, and ratings were free-falling in 2010. According to Street & Smith’s
SportsBusiness Journal,
the Sox in 2010 plummeted from first to fifth in Major League Baseball’s local television ratings. From 2009 to 2010, NESN’s Red Sox ratings dropped 36 percent. It was the first time in six years that the Red Sox did not have the best local ratings among all 30 big league teams. Meanwhile, ratings for Sox games on radio flagship WEEI-AM were down 16.5 percent.

During Henry’s ownership, NESN’s Red Sox ratings peaked at 13.57 (each point representing 40,000 households) in September of the championship season of 2007. By the end of 2009, the season average number was down to 9.38. In the middle of 2010, it dipped to 6.25. The Sox were also losing their drawing power nationally. According to NESN’s own data, Boston’s appearances on Fox and ESPN were down 32 and 33 percent, respectively, from 2009 to 2010.